Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception 9780748641765

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes Writing in the State of Exception Sascha Bru

Edinburgh University Press

© Sascha Bru, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3925 0 (hardback) The right of Sascha Bru to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Taking Writing to Exception: By Way of Introduction

1

1

9

The Trauma of Literature: A Promenade through the Archive on the Avant-Garde and Politics 2 The Party and the Book: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism and Amateur Democracy 3 The Paper State: Paul van Ostaijen, Expressionism and Constitutional Heterotopia 4 The Secret Politician: Richard Huelsenbeck, Dadaism and the Redemption of Literature

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87

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The Law of Literature: By Way of Conclusion

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgements

My greatest scholarly debt is to Bart Keunen and Jürgen Pieters for letting me experience what a true intellectual gift economy amounts to. I trust that they, along with Karlheinz Barck, Günter Berghaus, Astradur Eysteinsson, Peter Nicholls, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Bürger, Klaus Beekman, John Neubauer, Tania Ørum, Michel Delville, Geert Buelens, Hubert van den Berg, Kris Humbeeck, Gunther Martens, Marysa Demoor, Gert Buelens, Freddy Decreus and the old yang gang, will recognise themselves in my words as they read this book. Accompanied by a whole crowd of people who came to Ghent University in recent years, they made this book into what it is. Thanks, too, to the people at the Getty Research Institute for their help, and hats off to Jackie Jones and her wonderful team. I owe a particular debt of thanks to those who cannot read at this point. To the late and great Koen Geldof. To my mother, Maria Tocanov, who died before this book saw completion, and to my children Victor and Renée, who were born in the process of writing it. I dedicate this book to Renée and Victor, and to my partner Goedele. My gratitude goes to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for permission to quote from F. T. Marinetti’s Critical Writings (2006), translated by Doug Thompson, and from Marinetti’s Selected Writings (1971), translated by R. W. Flint. Copyright © Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (New York). I am able to reproduce the anonymous surrealist drawing of the world map from a special issue of the magazine Variétés courtesy of Mechthild Albert. Luigi Bompardi’s drawing La lotta elettorale a Milano from the Illustrazione Italiana of 14 March 1910 is reproduced here courtesy of Günter Berghaus. The photographs of the drawings by Georg Grosz illustrating Huelsenbeck’s Doctor Billig am Ende (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1922) appear with permission of the International Dada Archive, University of Iowa Libraries. Copyright © Estate of Georg Grosz/SABAM.

Acknowledgements

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Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, yet if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Taking Writing to Exception: By Way of Introduction

In 1942 Lionel Feuchtwanger, German émigré writer and friend of Bertolt Brecht, complained to the New York Times. American officials would not let him visit Brecht as they both intended to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Nazi book burnings. Assuring American readers that Brecht and he had fled fascism with nothing but praise for America’s democracy since their arrival in the US, Feuchtwanger could not see why they were not allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes, to speak in public, or to go out after 8 p.m. Had American readers misinterpreted their work that drastically?1 Few anecdotes from the modernist archive so forcibly illustrate that passage between Anglo-American and European modernism has never been easy. Linguistic and cultural hurdles have always made certain patches of European modernism rather exotic to non-continental readers.2 One such exotic patch are the so-called ‘historical avantgardes’ of futurism, expressionism, Dada and surrealism, among others,3 which had no clear equivalents in the US and Britain during the 1910s and 1920s. Common sense dictates that this absence of a concurrent pendant to the European avant-gardes in part can be led back to differences in politics. European avant-gardists operated in a far less stable political context than modernists in the US and Britain. Indeed, the crisis of civilisation, the passing of an old order and the coming of a new announced in the European fin de siècle soon made room for an unprecedented ‘age of extremes’ in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the ‘short century’ that went before our own.4 Europe in the early twentieth century not only saw a politics that put social institutions to the test. Its highly unstable political history also left a clear stamp on the cultural realm of letters as the historical avant-garde began to test the institutional limits of literature, too. By contrast, within the more stable and longstanding democracies of the US and Britain, politics interfered far less with writers’ and artists’ business. As a result, so critics of British

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

and American modernism have often argued,5 a less revolutionary and less innovative literature was produced alongside the European avantgardes – a handful of exceptions, including Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticism and the itinerant Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, proving the rule. To highlight the peculiarity of the continental political scene it has become a custom to refer to the cultural politics of totalitarianism. With this book I argue against this custom because it fails to locate the Western European avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s within the political system that actually made it thrive: democracy. It is no coincidence, for example, that Paris, the locus of the French Revolution and launching spot of one of Europe’s first democracies, functioned as the main cultural centre to the avant-gardes well into the 1910s. Nor is it a coincidence that after the Great War, in the 1920s, a lot of weight shifted to the city of Berlin. Berlin became a new nodal point on the avant-garde’s cultural map not just because living there after German defeat was very cheap. Equally important was Germany’s change of political climate after the war brought about by the installation of the country’s first parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic. Admittedly, much is still to be gained from following through Brecht’s suggestion in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that fascist aesthetics and histrionics were inspired by (experimental) art and literature.6 While many avant-garde writers and artists openly opposed the rise of fascism, their vanguard aesthetic often harboured basic tenets of totalitarian cultural politics. It is, moreover, hard to deny that stale fascist and communist cultural doctrine throughout Europe gradually muzzled the avant-garde to the point of suffocation. However, the events of the 1930s (the 1920s in Italy) postdate the most experimental or ‘heroic’ hey-day of that avant-garde in most parts of Europe.7 It was, furthermore, only after that short-lived heroic phase, concurrent with the rise of totalitarian states, that the thorough left- and right-wing polarisation of the avant-garde came about.8 Hence, as far as Western Europe is concerned, the main issue at stake may not be the connection between the avant-garde and dictatorship, but its ties to the spectacular and far less stale or stable crises in democracy beforehand. If the historical avant-garde and Georges Bataille’s later Sovereignty (1950) remind us of anything it is that the totalitarian is inherent to (or is at least a possible outcome of) democracy. Obviously, I am not the first to foreground the relationship between the modernist avant-gardes and democracy in Western Europe. Since the 1970s this relationship has often been touched upon, especially in discussions about postmodernism and postmodernity. With the postmodern

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condition, famously characterised by Jean-François Lyotard as a fracturing of social discourses in an archipelago of language games, the immanent eclipse of master-narratives in both politics and culture seemed near. As in prior crises in modern representational democracy this led to questions about how to legitimate authority in politics. Lyotard believed that the modernist avant-gardes could play a guiding role here. A truly ante-modern avant-garde, he argued, it had been a form of ‘pagan’ experimentation in which oppositions and conflicts in philosophical and political debate had been played off against one another rather than brought to closure in figures, tropes or discourse. Lyotard thus read in the modernist avant-garde an endless play of différance that pushed social oppositions into the Kantian sublime, hinting at a conceivable yet unrepresentable alternative to concrete political debate.9 Around the same time, a renewed interest in self-conscious avant-garde groupings pre-dating the modernist avant-garde arose as well. For example, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Literary Absolute (1978) discussed the Jena Romantics, and in later works dealing with European modernism no longer restricted their scope to Europe’s totalitarian politics, but also held the avant-garde against the backdrop of (totalitarian aspects of) democratic politics. These and other studies since have evoked not only radical ideological aspects of the (modernist) avant-gardes but general problems in democratic representational politics too. Perhaps the first scholar to really consider the relationship between the European modernist avant-garde and democracy was Renato Poggioli. In his classic The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968) Poggioli averred that the European avant-garde had always required a democratic constellation to flower ‘even if it often assumes a hostile pose toward . . . democratic society’.10 In a simple and yet powerful formula Poggioli thus upheld that there never was an avant-garde in the West outside modern representational, liberal democracy. His formula might sound somewhat tautological today, because it involves the claim that with the totalitarian and the liberal democratic state the options have run out. It further suggests that ‘democracy’ has a universally constant tenor.11 Yet, these theoretical objections do not diminish the power of Poggioli’s observation about the history of the avant-garde. Democracy can indeed take on various practical political as well as ideological shapes. Nonetheless in Western Europe democracy most regularly came in the form of liberal democracy – with ‘liberalism’ understood not just, in the European sense, as ‘capitalism’ but also, in the Anglo-American sense, as ‘pluralism’. Poggioli thus drew attention to the more positive, democratic moment upon which the polyphonous voice of avant-garde

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

dissent, regardless of its occasionally mandarin and even proto-fascist stance, was heard. He also foreshadowed more recent findings, in that he clearly saw liberal democracy as a system driven by lively and energetic debate, requiring conflict and dissent.12 But above all, with his stress on democracy Poggioli drew closer together Anglo-American and Western European modernism, suggesting that some of their basic differences could perhaps also be led back to their shared situatedness within democracy. He nevertheless failed to take this suggestion to the limit. The point to make here is not so much that Anglo-American and European liberal democracies were organised differently. Rather, Poggioli left the question of whether there was any relation between the unstable democratic moment of the avant-gardes in Western Europe on the one hand and their highly experimental writings and critical practice on the other. For the latter seem to have been less prominent in the more stable Anglo-American democratic context. Critics since Poggioli have failed to raise and respond to that question. In the opening chapter I try to explain why Poggioli’s challenge has managed to escape from attention, along the way unpacking my own method of reading which, of necessity, ranges broadly across disciplinary lines. In the opening chapter I further give a selective survey of the ways in which modernist avant-garde literature has so far been related to (democratic) politics. In so doing I also hope to open this book’s pages to all readers with a general knowledge of the modernist avant-garde and a particular interest in its political dimensions. For, as subsequent chapters uncover, there was indeed a noticeable, perhaps even unequivocal, homology between experimentation in avant-garde literature and unstable, experimental phases in European democratic politics of the 1910s and 1920s. And the closer we look at this homology, the more it fundamentally revises our common understanding of the relationship between the modernist avant-gardes and politics. Key to this is the notion of the state of exception, which has attracted a lot of attention in recent years through the work of Giorgio Agamben and a renewed interest in Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings about the topic.13 States of exception are declared when political officials face crises and aporia threatening democracy as they are irresolvable through normal democratic procedure or consensus. In response to the Great War, for instance, most European warring countries declared the state of emergency or martial law. Yet, on a massive scale throughout Western Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, states of exception were also declared in response to internationally less ominous threats. A good example, which figures in this book as well, is the November Revolution that broke loose in Germany when in late 1918 it became

Taking Writing to Exception

5

clear that the country had lost the war. During the Revolution Germany faced aporia in politics: was it to take the shape of a mass parliamentary democracy or of a proletarian Bolshevist state? This impossible choice left no German untouched and was eventually made through the use of violence, when a state of exception repressed a civil war and the Weimar Republic was subsequently installed. Of significance to this book are two aspects of states of exception. First, such states are exceptional because they temporarily suspend normal democratic procedure. In a state of emergency, for example, politicians can momentarily stop to represent the people. Schmitt, whose thought influenced Benjamin’s famous Trauerspiel book, believed that during a state of exception politicians come to experience true sovereignty as leaders, because such states usually also bracket (part of) constitutional and civil law. Violent repression and the suspension of civil rights, for instance, are commonly associated with states of exception. (Hence Agamben’s claim that in a state of exception subjects are stripped bare of legal protection and, in front of the law, cease to exist.)14 Thus, without any strict law guiding their practice, and much like feudal kings, political officials are called upon to improvise and experiment in the daily management of society, the realm of literature included. Indeed, secondly, states of exception in Europe led to an unprecedented degree of politicisation within the literary institution. It, too, was often stripped bare to the bone. Extreme censorship and imprisonment of writers without charges being brought against them were but a few means employed by politicians throughout Western Europe in a practice that can only be described as a veritable attack on the relative autonomy modern literature had been acquiring for itself since Romanticism – largely unhindered during what Roger Shattuck has called the late nineteenth-century ‘banquet years’.15 German Dadaism, for example, which is commonly labelled an ‘anti-art,’ is demonstrated in Chapter 4 to have been one of the staunchest defences of modern art as writers sought to redeem literature when politics seemed to fully smother it. Against leading experts, therefore, I nuance the idea that the avant-garde in its early heroic phase desired to transgress or destroy the confines of the literary institution. Instead, I highlight how unstable democratic constellations lifted those confines for the avant-garde and redefined the function of modern literature by making it (or at least trying to make it) subservient to an arbitrary political rule as had been the case in premodern times. It is this trauma of literature in the 1910s and 1920s that is put centre-stage in this book. The story I bring is a gloomy one, because daily life for both writers and ordinary civilians frequently amounted to a frightening experience.

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

However, by looking more closely at a number of exponents of the European avant-garde in Chapters 2 to 4, I also wish to demonstrate that the modernist avant-garde was not left totally powerless in (crises leading to) states of exception. Many of the avant-garde’s experimental literary texts can be shown to carry marks of the often exceptional site of production from which they emanated. The opening chapter will bring this out by drawing on cognates of futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism and surrealism. The bulk of this study, however, is devoted to three cases: the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, and the Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. Perhaps with the exception of Paul van Ostaijen, these authors hardly require introduction. The names of Huelsenbeck and Marinetti resemble procrustean beds to the canonised avant-garde movements of (Berlin) Dada and (Italian) futurism. In the 1910s few Italians had not heard of Marinetti. The ‘caffeine of Europe’, this energetic young millionaire was known throughout the European continent in artistic and literary circles by the 1920s. Huelsenbeck’s international renown was more modest. Involved in the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, he brought the ‘portable’ word ‘Dada’ to Berlin a year later. As a result, the popular press in Germany came to regard him as the leader of German Dada. In the 1930s Huelsenbeck moved to the US where he helped shape the popular (and highly selective) Anglo-American view of European Dada through various lectures and by aiding Robert Motherwell in compiling the influential anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951). Finally, in Belgium, close to Flanders Fields, Van Ostaijen was almost singlehandedly responsible for the break-through of expressionism. Over time, his work came to embody the formal concerns of early German expressionism as well as its more voluntarist O-Mensch and Activist characteristics. This far from made him an epigone of German expressionism, however. Like Huelsenbeck’s and Marinetti’s oeuvre, Van Ostaijen’s work is charmingly idiosyncratic, versatile and complex. His name circulated internationally far less than those of the other writers discussed here, but he was not unknown abroad. Marinetti, for instance, knew of his promising career,16 and during a period of exile in Berlin in the late 1910s and early 1920s Van Ostaijen met several Dadaists, possibly even Huelsenbeck.17 I pay attention to Van Ostaijen here so as not to limit myself to internationally canonised exponents of the modernist avant-garde and to enrich our understanding of it. For, Van Ostaijen can also be considered representative of experimental modernists in other European minority cultures. Working from within the periphery and moved by local geopolitical stakes, his poetry and prose cast a different light on more dominant trends in modernism’s cultural centres.

Taking Writing to Exception

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Van Ostaijen, Marinetti and Huelsenbeck worked during some of the most daunting phases of democracy’s history in Europe. Naturally, they cannot be held representative of the entire modernist avant-garde. I do not claim to be exhaustive. Nor, for that matter, do I argue that democratic instability or states of exception were the overall cause of the avant-garde’s rise in Western Europe. The complex aesthetic pre-history of European modernism simply does not allow such wholesale statements. Moreover, democracy at this point was not a universal system, and the shift from pre-democratic to representational, liberal democratic systems proper occurred rather suddenly in many parts of Europe, the Weimar Republic being one of the best known instances. In sum, others will have to determine to what extent my claims about the modernist avant-garde in Western Europe are synecdochal. As a trio Van Ostaijen, Marinetti and Huelsenbeck nevertheless form a cas limite to scholars interested in modernist literature from a variety of angles. Their work presents a sample sheet of the richness and diversity of avant-garde writing, and these authors further operated within very different contexts that come with divergent yet fascinating petites histoires. Above all, despite leaning toward various positions on the political spectrum, their writings and practices also display a number of remarkable regularities in dispersion. Most importantly, traces of their exceptional democratic moment are abundant in their prose and poetry, in both form and content. To enforce their autonomy in the ways that were still available to them in states of exception, all three revised their poetic and modes of writing so as to get their message across. One particular revision I focus on in this book is the turn to law as an object of aesthetic play, in Van Ostaijen’s eminently narrative poetry volume Bezette Stad (Occupied City, 1921), Huelsenbeck’s Dada novel Doctor Billig am Ende (The Downfall of Doctor Billig, 1921) and Marinetti’s Futurist narrative Gli Indomabili (The Untamables, 1922). Like the solicitors in Kafka’s The Castle, who study a law no longer put in practice, these avant-garde texts, often regardless of authorial intent, can be shown to have reflected on the constitutional and civil laws that were briefly put on hold by states of exception. In so doing, those texts fleshed out memorable alternatives to democracy’s practical organisation, ranging from other states to different parties. Reading these alternatives alongside legal documents, I illustrate that they often were legally viable and politically applicable, that they can in fact be read as informed responses to aporia and crises politicians were unable to deal with democratically prior to their declaration of the state of exception. These literary alternatives were at times highly idiosyncratic and potentially dangerous, and were (luckily) never

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acted on. Yet they remain among us as traces of possibility dormant in semiologically experimental texts. A further feature Marinetti, Van Ostaijen and Huelsenbeck shared was that they each took up a role in practical politics during a phase of crisis, often unwittingly deriving benefit from the highly unstable and improvised political climate to push through their views. This illustrates that states of exception, as they lifted the confines of the literary institution, failed to colonise literature to the full. Yet they did give way to an ill-defined ‘merger-institution’ of politics and literature in which authors came to function as writerspoliticians – or as politicanti (amateur politicians) to put it with a term from one of Benito Mussolini’s many speeches.18 Reinserting the modernist avant-gardes into their exceptional democratic context makes them strange and unfamiliar again. Many literary historians today agree that we have come to terms with the modernist avant-gardes, not least because the formal innovations advocated by the avant-gardes inform many writings at present and as such have come to form a tradition in their own right. With this book I intend to show that we have not yet caught up entirely with the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, because they still challenge what we find acceptable as literature and invite us to stop and reconsider the potential function of literature today. For, Van Ostaijen’s Occupied City, Huelsenbeck’s The Downfall of Doctor Billig, and Marinetti’s The Untamables come with the promise of practical knowledge applicable in the technical language game of the socially differentiated institution of politics and law. This promise is not commonly associated with literature. To date, the rich and substantial law and literature movement, for example, tends to look at either the presence of law in literature (Kafka’s reflection on the moral, social and ethical discourse surrounding law in The Trial, for example), or at law as literature, that is, at legal documents as forming a narrative genre in their own right.19 The modernist avant-garde texts figuring in this book do not quite fall under these categories. They present literature as law, since they produced legally viable (though at times idiosyncratic) alternatives to democracy’s organisation and juridical circumscription. The modernist avant-garde thereby particularly challenges the epistemic status of modern literature (what does it know?). In a way, the European avant-garde invites us to read its textual exploits as ready-made politics. They recall Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, which introduced in art objects that before had no place there. Turning to law as an object of aesthetic play, the texts we will be reading also introduce a quaint object into literature, thereby questioning what art and literature once were, and, today still perhaps, can be.

Chapter 1

The Trauma of Literature: A Promenade through the Archive on the Avant-Garde and Politics

Parfois il faut reculer pour mieux sauter. Whenever we use the words ‘avant-garde’ and ‘politics’, or ‘democracy’ for that matter, in a single sentence, there follows a rustle, a murmur, the sense of a problem. Few aspects of the modernist avant-garde have not, after all, been called political, and with good reason apparently. Intellectual debate during the first decades of the foregoing century in Europe often exemplifies uneasiness over marking the boundaries between literature and politics, the latter then understood as a distinct social realm with a form of behaviour and concern of its own. As a result ‘politics’ is frequently defined as a process of making claims and decisions within (human and textual) groups, handing us down a vast library of volumes and essays entitled ‘The Politics and Poetics of Such-and-Such’, which often manage to avoid discussing the link to practical politics altogether. It is precisely with practical democratic politics that I am concerned, however. So a call for critical distance is in order. Or, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend, there is in the end little to be gained from adopting ‘the “everything is political” which near enough universally dominates today’. This makes ‘the political unapparent (it has the obviousness of an “it goes without saying”). Thus understood nowhere do even the least of specifically political questions (corresponding to transformations of the world) have the chance to emerge.’1 One such ‘specifically political question’ was raised yet left unanswered in Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968). When Poggioli claimed that the modernist avant-gardes in Western Europe required democracy to flower, he failed to investigate whether there was any relation between that avant-garde’s experimentalism and critical practice on the one hand, and its unstable, perhaps even exceptional, democratic moment on the other.2 In the most general terms the exception is that which escapes from the law, norm or rule. Hence, it is useful to enquire first how the modernist avant-garde and politics interrelate

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

under normal circumstances, and, to this aim, to pencil out some basic points of agreement in modernist studies – some well rehearsed in Anglo-American research, others perhaps better known in continental scholarly traditions. For, indeed, looked at from a distance, positions about the interfaces between avant-garde literature and politics are less heterogeneous than they seem from up close. Studies dealing with the ties between the avant-garde and (democratic) politics are often selective and subject to rarefaction. Drawing on just a portion of utterances and statements by the avant-garde, critics tend to reiterate certain claims, ever deepening our understanding of the already familiar yet always remaining within its boundaries. Discussion of the avant-garde’s politics has thereby come to form a Foucauldian archive of sorts, setting out the mechanisms for what can be said, in what form, and what is counted as worth remembering and knowing.3 Ever since Marinetti first used the term ‘avant-garde’ in 1906 critics have put the avant-garde to rest in the same conceptual casings, their collective effort resembling the production of a huge Chinese box in which modernity, in its philosophical sense, has come to form the box of boxes into which culture and then the institution of literature go. Subsequent paragraphs each unpack one of these three boxes and browse through them, highlighting a number of important insights and notions that also inform later chapters. The deeper we move into the archive the clearer it will also become how, within the boundaries the archive spells out, a veritable trauma sustained by avant-garde literature in Western European democracies has so far been repressed. By stressing the norm and rule so often we have lost sight of conspicuous exceptions. The present chapter, in short, is concerned first and foremost with theory, with the aim of returning to history with fresh eyes. Into the archive’s box of boxes it is then. According to Le Corbusier:4

Left blank for a work expressing modern feeling

The Trauma of Literature

11

Modernity Was the avant-garde for or against democracy? This question overlooks how the avant-garde was always already in democracy in several respects. The most obvious feature that unites democracy and the avantgarde is their joint stress on the sanctity and freedom of the subject. Tristan Tzara’s famous assemblage recipe ‘How to Make a Poem’ (1918), Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and even Vladimir Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) have frequently been drawn on to read the modernist avant-garde as ‘the continuation by other means of the democratic revolution and its work to destroy heteronomous formations’.5 As Gilles Lipovetsky asserts here, the avant-garde installed ‘an art detached from the past, sovereign, master of itself; it was a figure of equality, the first manifestation of a democratisation of culture, even though it appeared to set itself off from the masses.’ Modern democracy indeed had long put the rights and freedoms of citizens up front. Reiterating Romanticism’s stress on writers’ independence and freedom of expression, the historical avant-garde in turn helped to diminish the writer’s determination within the aesthetic realm. Read against the background of aesthetic modernity, which is generally said to take off when art entered the public space in the late eighteenth century and an interest arose ‘in what is common to the experiences one has . . . while reading books’,6 the historical avant-garde often came close to elevating itself to an equal of salon and exhibition juries, of big-boss publishers and financially gifted Maecenas. Regardless of their often implicit allegiance to Aestheticist views of the role and place of the writer, their work thereby also poked fun at previous ivory-tower conceptions of authority within the realm of aesthetics, on the side of production as well as reception. As a result their aesthetic production was left ‘definitively unfinished’, as Thierry de Duve so poignantly phrased it.7 Their poetic exploits were turned into an open forum questioning the very identity of literature, and of writers’ and readers’ relationship to it. Today this democratisation of literature shows itself as one of many effects of the avant-garde’s strikingly consistent stress on the subject’s singularity, if not sovereignty. Huelsenbeck, for instance, quite overtly aligned Dadaist identity with freedom. On occasion he expressed this freedom in exalted terms: ‘The Dadaist is the freest man on earth.’8 Yet he also phrased his love for freedom in terms of sovereignty: the Dadaist ‘calls on his sovereignty’.9 Subjective sovereignty was not a theme exclusive to the freedom-loving Dadaist however. In fact, although cultural connotations differed at times in the Centre and the East of Europe, here too avant-gardists foregrounded the subject’s sovereignty. When

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Hungarian activist Lajos Kassák in 1915 launched his controversial journal A Tett (The Action, prequel to Ma, Today), his work began to make clear that Hungarian avant-garde literature was not going to ‘serve racial or national ends’. The ‘glorified idea of the new literature’ would be ‘Man, enlightening into infinity!’10 Or listen to André Breton: ‘The mere word “freedom” is the only one that still excites me . . . To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery . . . is to betray all sense of absolute justice.’11 Both Kassák and Breton desired to liberate the whole of mankind, presupposing that all men are equal as sovereign and singular beings – an assertion that evidently needs qualification when we look at the degree of gender bias and even misogyny common among the prevalently male avant-garde groups. That many Italian futurists overtly pushed aside the supposed equality of men should not distract us here: they, too, departed from the idea that at least they were sovereign beings, trusting no one’s judgement but their own. Testifying to the modernist avant-garde’s self-determination is the strange collection of authorial personae that emanate from its semiologically experimental texts. The Krakow constructivist Julian Przybos´ once said that ‘the new poetry pronounces integral values without having canons on its mouth. It subjugates by beauty, which is more lasting than the most sonorous word. In the context of the republic of things, by equal efforts, new poetry hammers a new man out of the marble of this creative essence.’12 Przybos´ alluded to a line of thought that cut across the entire modernist avant-garde. In various ways it recognised that the modern self had been crushed by ‘canons’ in the course of modernity. The subject had been estranged from itself by the language use others imposed on it. Looking for the self, the avant-garde aspired to desubjectivise, to undo the subject of given and imposed identities within (and outside) literature, and, though not always intentionally, to ‘resubjectivise’ by means of other languages. In so doing it hoped that man as a textual being could again come to stand as a thing among things, as a natural sign among signs. The Ukrainian futurist Mykhail Semenko wrote: ‘the great synthesis of objectivity and ego- / centrism causes the apogees of East and / West to flow with an incandescent jump / into the intuitive unit / the natura naturata and the natura naturans.’13 Semenko’s ‘intuitive unit’ articulated an idea fundamental to the avant-garde as a whole. Improvising, experimenting, the one ‘unit’ avant-garde poetics always fell back on was the writerly subject’s intuition. Whether trying to imagine a new fate of man in a distant future, whether looking backward and drawing on primitivist, occult, folkloric or mythic elements, or whether simply looking around itself, borrowing elements from everyday language, from what

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the Czech surrealist Vítêzlav Nezval called the ‘dictionary for the creation of poetry’,14 the historical avant-gardist always attempted to flesh out his singular presence through writing. Logocentric, perhaps – and certainly gender-biased in most cases – even less experimental escapades such as Marinetti’s work with onomatopoeia make it difficult to suppress the effect of a singular subject asserting itself through language. It could be argued that the phrases ‘patapum-pluff’ and ‘fraaaaaah’ from Marinetti’s Zang tumb tumb (1914) quite unimaginatively evoke the bombardment they describe. But, then again, who on earth used these phrases? Common sense dictates that we should distinguish a- or anti-political writers from politically engaged avant-gardists. The avant-garde’s selfacclaimed sovereignty, however, permits us to bracket this occasionally contrived distinction. Of course not all avant-gardists took an interest in practical politics. Many of them found politics as outmoded or alien to their work as the dominant poetics of their time. Others were not uninterested in politics but always made sure to draw a clear line between literary experimentation and politics. Yet at the centre of their collective endeavour stood the idea that the subject should construct society, and not the other way round. This accounts for the fact that the avant-garde often implicitly claimed to rally against the political status quo merely by renewing literature and assaulting the literary establishment. It considered literary and political opposition as homologous, because in both cases it opposed given forms of organised power. Even this assumed homology, then, suggests that for the avant-garde both literature and politics converged in the individual. To immediately point out here that the modernist avant-garde was politically naive or that as a rule it committed itself to an irrational, gnostic politics would be to oversimplify the situation. The historical avant-garde in the West is regularly associated with (a sense of) anarchism, for example, and this is mainly because anarchism is but one expression of a sedimented tradition in modern thought in which the avant-garde, as well as other groups, participated. Ever since Matei Calinescu’s Faces of Modernity (1977), ‘two modernities’ have been commonly distinguished, one including practical politics and endorsing dominant norms and practices, and one resisting these, ‘which was to bring into being the avant-gardes’.15 As such, the modernist avantgarde can also be situated within modern thought with some precision, because modernity here should be understood not as uniform and homogeneous, but rather as constituted by at least two distinct and conflicting traditions. The first tradition is that initiated by the revolution of Renaissance humanism, from Duns Scotus to Spinoza, with the discovery of the place of immanence and the

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celebration of singularity and difference. The second tradition, the Thermidor of the Renaissance revolution, seeks to control the utopian forces of the first through the construction and mediation of dualisms, and arrives finally at the concept of modern sovereignty as a provisional solution.16

These words are from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000), the second part of which opens with setting apart ‘two Europes’, two divided currents in modern European thought that both concern the relationship between individual and society, self and world. First, there is the historical tendency towards fragmentation and the almost anarchic liberation of thought. The notion of subjective (immanent) sovereignty is pivotal here. It is a Nietzschean or Bataillian sovereignty that foregrounds the subject’s (bodily) self-ownership and the power of individual will (in freedom of speech and association, for example). Secondly, there is the opposite tendency towards totalisation and exclusion. Here, collective (transcendental) sovereignty and adaptation to forms of rational order (the state, public morality, ideological belief systems, technocratic or bureaucratic rationality and authority per se) dominate. This inescapable tension in modern thought – which surfaces in the avant-garde from its most communitarian constructivist exploits to its most adventurous undertakings in futurist architecture, where Antonio Sant’Ellia among others tried to construct emancipating new structures, thus inevitably imposing another physical shape on the community of others – makes it hard to dismiss the avant-garde as politically wide-eyed. The avant-garde in Western Europe clearly took part in a modern philosophical tradition at least as old as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which in subsequent centuries was galvanised in the work of Marx and Nietzsche, in Bergsonian vitalism, anarchism and Sorellian syndicalism. Ripping a title of an essay by Franz Marc out of context, the avant-garde is to be located in modernity within a ‘secret Europe’, an occupied region that always had to settle with its other.17 Even in language, where closure and signification, however temporal, are unavoidable. That the avant-garde at intervals approached practical democratic politics with such a subject-centred project in part explains why it was consistently received with suspicion by political leaders. Liberal democracy and the avant-garde may well have converged in their joint stress on the sanctity of individual rights, but the constellations into which these rights were inscribed also diverged. Democracy’s concern with the ‘common good’ always inevitably necessitates a practical demarcation of freedom’s limits. In order to avoid chaos in the public space, crime needs definition, subjective sovereignty delimitation. Subjective sovereignty in democratic politics and art are thus two different things. A notion that

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brings out this difference aptly, and that will play a vital role in chapters to come, is that of the citizen-subject. Political citizenship is not just constituted for the subject by politics (in its legal conscription), it is also constructed by the subject. In modern democratic politics, the citizen-subject is always seen as both part of a sovereign body (the electorate or public body), and as a sovereign subject in its own right. As Étienne Balibar has observed, modern politics in general is constituted by and constitutive of the ‘citizen-subject’. ‘The citizen’, he writes, ‘can be simultaneously considered as the constitutive element of the State and the actor of a revolution. Not only the actor of a founding revolution, a tabula rasa whence a state emerges, but the actor of a permanent revolution.’18 In the first sense Balibar distinguishes here the subject is constitutive of the state, because, as any democratic constitution stipulates, the rights of the citizen-subject are sacrosanct, as long as that citizen respects the law and rights of others. The citizen in this sense is an entity thoroughly subjectivised and politicised, first and foremost by civil laws and penal codes.19 This shows how ambivalent the second sense of the term citizen-subject is, because here the citizen is foregrounded as an agent endowed with a voice and a vote who can at all times stand up and demand change, thus leading to a permanent revolution or ongoing mutation of the political agenda. Subjectivity in art, by contrast, is less formalised. Although writers’ and artists’ identities are of course determined by various cultural and institutional factors, as we will presently see, they can, in their creative work, experiment far more freely with alternative conceptions of subjectivity and agency than politicians. The clutch of laws constituting collective sovereignty is, in short, less strong in literature than in politics – although, like other civilians, writers too are of course citizens-subjects. Consequently, with few exceptions (including Joseph Goebbels until the 1930s)20 politicians always responded to the avant-garde’s subjectcentred programme with incomprehension. Certainly, within the private space, subjects’ freedom could be tolerated (and always obliterated), but to ground public policy in the singularity of subjects? Lenin reminds us of the fact that this question in the case of the modernist avant-garde needs further specification: to ground a public politics in literature? In 1905 Lenin wrote in response: ‘Literature must not be a matter of the individual. It cannot be independent of the activities of the proletariat as a whole. Down with non-partisan writers!’21 Or as Zygmunt Bauman puts it in less inflated terms: ‘the substance of modern politics’ is ‘to exterminate ambivalence, and . . . fill the blank spots in the compleat mappa mundi.’22 Quite. When the avant-garde turned to redrawing the Mappa Mundi it tried exactly the opposite, that is, it reintroduced blank spots on the

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Figure 1.1 Anonymous surrealist drawing of world map in ‘Le surréalisme en 1929’, a special issue of Variétés. Revue mensuelle illustrée de l’esprit contemporain (Brussels, June 1929).

map (of Europe) to be populated by free individuals once again. In 1917, for example, Fernando Pessoa’s alter ego Alvaro de Campos published a futurist-inspired manifesto entitled Ultimatum. Like Marinetti’s manifestoes, this Portugese text showed the door to all representatives of European tradition. Unlike Marinetti, however, who welcomed the outbreak of the Great War as a heavenly gift, de Campos lamented the war and blamed representatives of European tradition for it. Their collective, subjectivising discourses had completely blinded people to the immanence of subjectivity. Thus, desemanticising the signifier ‘Europe’ first, undoing it of complacent associations and inscriptions, the manifesto’s final section has the poet create another Europe. At the end of the text we find him ‘abstractly saluting (its) infinity’, foreseeing a space in which the one could again come to stand among the many.23 Acting on Pessoa’s instigation, in 1929 French surrealists took to literally redrawing the map of the entire planet for the Belgian magazine Variétés (see Figure 1.1). Their infamous Mappa Mundi depicted a globe populated by surrealists only, and as such reduced Europe’s democratic countries (along with the entire West) to meaningless dots pitted against the gigantism of Alaska, Russia and China. As the surrealist world map shows, avant-gardists who flirted overtly with given political programmes were particularly drawn to oppositional political forces, regardless of where they stood on the political spectrum.

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Such oppositional forces held the promise of turning aside ruling forms of collective sovereignty. Maurice Blanchot, evoking the mindset of the generation of avant-gardists of which he thought himself a part, shows that this political promise, rather than an actual understanding of its practical ramifications, most often sufficed. Why this appeal from or to ‘community’? I’ll outline in no particular order the elements of what was our history. The groups (of which the Surrealist group, loved or execrated, is the prototype); the many gatherings around ideas which did not yet exist and around dominant persons whose existence was larger than life: above all, the memory of the Soviets, the foreboding of what was already Fascism, but of which the sense, like the development, failed to fit the available concepts.24

As Blanchot saw it, Western avant-gardists were regularly drawn to Eastern communism since it did not ‘fit the available concepts’. The same could be argued for still other (Western) writers’ identification with Nazi and fascist rhetoric before the actual instalment of totalitarian states, since this rhetoric, too, promised to explode the political status quo. Yet, the (idiosyncratic) community to which the avant-garde appealed (and once again this point emerges from Blanchot’s words) was as a rule conceived as a collective of sovereign subjects.25 The tension between the singular and the plural that results from this appeal elucidates why the avant-garde often articulated itself to the masses so ambiguously, despite its (c)overt desultory championing of popular culture. To (urge others to) be against authority is inevitably to be authoritarian: the avant-garde frequently ‘desired to conquer and subjugate those masses, to bend them to the artist’s will, to dictate their response to art.’26 As will be clear by now, the avant-garde had various reasons to oppose the practical dénouement of democratic politics, most of which can be traced back to its uncompromising stress on subjective sovereignty. Key to sovereignty in legal discourse is the exclusivity of jurisdiction. Sovereign entities cannot be overruled by a higher authority, and in law their rule is not just legal but also actual (de jure and de facto). Once we chart the actual traces the avant-garde left us testifying to its de facto rule, its record of course is left wanting. The politically ineffectual nature of the avant-garde stands out time and again. Breton’s visits to the offices of the French Communist Party (PCF) need but be recalled here. Offering the PCF a surrealist art that meant to spiritually liberate and revolutionise the proletariat, PCF officials only saw the disingenuous signs of bourgeois decadence. The avant-garde also predictably failed to reach consensus within its own ranks on how to progress practically. And the few cases where it did manage to realise its project of an alternative community rooted in aesthetics, such as the futurist

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‘colony’ in Fiume between December 1919 and December 1920,27 came about under very specific circumstances that shielded it from political issues elsewhere. However, many have argued that it is not so much the factual outcome that counts, but rather the rules and laws to which the avant-garde adhered. For it is precisely these laws that make it such a puzzling political moment in modern literature. De jure the modernist avant-garde was equipped with and even endowed with sovereignty by others, because as a group of writers it did exactly what was expected by its readership. On the one hand, the avant-garde clearly drew on the special symbolic function literature had been given in modernity. As Wolfgang Iser has argued, it extended modern readers’ desire to encounter in literature forms and modes of communal life for contemplation and the experience of sensual pleasure that exceeded the limits of other discourses.28 Even the German Idealist notion of Bildung, the idea that literature can enlighten and change its readership was not absent from its exploits. Dada, whose appeal to ‘nothingness’ has had the unfortunate fate of being read as a bold shock-tactic proclaiming the bankruptcy of modern literature, is a punctilious case in point. ‘Nothingness’ in Dada was assigned a positive and constructive poetic role: it was a discursive, literary nexus from which antagonisms and aporia in non-literary discourses and rationality were meant to be overstepped.29 Thus taking in a position from which it allegedly looked down upon the rest of society and exposed the ‘paucity of reality’ (Breton),30 the avant-garde (text) always tried to show how things could be different. Indeed, as Charles Altieri sums it up, by making claims to the imagination the avant-garde allowed readers ‘to explore how their own activity might take on representative force as a model for what individuals might bring to the remaking of the social space.’31 That the avant-garde was, on the other hand, not out to affirm given (aesthetic) communal forms reveals its indebtedness to Romanticism, which had put forth not just the specificity of literature as a privileged textual vehicle for communal experience, but the sovereignty of the writer as well. Hence, the avant-garde reproduced the function of literature and the role writers had been given since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, testing literature’s ground and bearing. If literature was one of the few sites in society where readers were willing to contemplate other forms of communal life and experience, why, then, could it not also become constitutive of politics? What kept readers from identifying with the avantgarde’s suggestion of political alternatives and acting on them? We all have posed these seemingly naive questions at one point or another, and for this reason they are also very central within the archive on the avant-garde and politics. For here, in response to these queries,

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we reach a point upon which our archive folds in two. Modernity being the box of boxes, two smaller box files show themselves here: culture, and the institution of literature. Two respectable contingents of studies indeed can be discerned, each with their own tack trying to deal with the avant-garde’s political misadventure. To our left: the work of scholars who draw on sociology and go on to argue that the ‘failure’ of the avant-garde was due to its entrenchment in a literary institution. This institution, in the course of modernity, had become the locus of a secular aesthetic religion responding to religion’s demise elsewhere in the public space. This literary or artistic institution was the product of the modern force the avant-garde tried to attack: modernity’s penchant for exclusion and order, and its concurrent rationalisation of civil society. From this institution the avant-garde could do little more than allude to practical politics, since contemplation and not action rules supreme in literature. To our right: scholars who take their cue from political philosophy and cultural history when they read the avant-garde against the backdrop of a more encompassing cultural exchange of ideas and affects hovering above or cutting through various institutions. Here we are shown that in spite (or precisely because) of the avant-garde’s social marginalisation it was constitutive of politics, among other things by defining the ‘centre’ of power contingently and by exposing the flaws of democratic representation. Rather than stressing the avant-garde’s political inefficiency, this cultural fold highlights the possibilities of change the avant-garde harboured. In between both sections of the archive stands a modest shelf of books, where the present volume should be situated as well. Some of the books on this shelf thematise the impossibility of even talking about how the modernist avant-garde related to politics. Paul de Man’s posthumous Aesthetic Ideology (1996) is worth mentioning here. For de Man the post-Romantic world we inhabit is one where there is either literature or ideology. Literature is linguistic material, irreducible to anything but itself. Ideology ‘is the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.’32 For de Man, to suppose that literature can ‘build’ politics is little more than to invest in modern literature a desire interlocking with textual performatives and abundant rhetorical strategies producing that same desire.33 This is quite numbing, but reference of course does happen, modern culture proving its very success.

Culture Few futurist novels are still read in Italian high schools today. An exception is Aldo Palazzeschi’s Man of Smoke (1911).34 This book describes

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how a man of smoke called Perela enters a city where he is appointed to write the law and save mankind only to get killed at the end of his venture. Palazzeschi’s tragicomic hero, as an allegorical figure, reiterates a conception of the historical avant-gardist, with which we are all too familiar. He is the figure we remember, and how we remember him: a somewhat naive ‘new legislator’, a Barthesian logothete35 who rearticulated historical identities into alternative visions of communal life that attacked hegemonic discourses head-on, only to find that his logomachist wager made ‘nothing happen’, as W. H. Auden did in Another Time (1940). For three decades, it seems, writers throughout Europe produced designs of other worlds, which remained coterminous to the culture surrounding them without ever coinciding with it. Men of smoke or ghosts, their critical endeavour went up in smoke with them – almost as if they were never there. Almost, because once we start aligning hero and city, writer and democratic polis in cultural history, we come to understand that the avant-garde’s logothetic texts and discursive practices did make quite a few things happen. This phantom league clearly participated in culture, in the symbolic flow of ideas, sentiments and values circulating in the public space across or above separately organised institutions such as politics and literature. A realm producing hegemonic representations of society that need the symbolic support of the majority in civil society, politics is always a selection of conflicting claims criss-crossing culture and the public space. Through this public cultural flow, and through political culture36 in particular, avant-garde texts and discursive practices interacted with ideas and identities also present in the democratic political institution, and did so in two directions. Whereas it clearly took over dominant parti-pris from political culture, it also ‘wrote back’ – that is, produced (at times admittedly ephemeral) political alternatives momentarily voicing (communities of) subjective sovereigns. Recombining political claims and identities into political myths, that is, into counter-hegemonic discourses designed to offer an alternative to ruling social imaginaries,37 the avant-garde was in part determined by dominant views in political culture. The firm hold of misogyny on many a writer need but be mentioned here. It underlines how in spite of the avant-garde’s politics of subjective sovereignty, writers frequently reproduced (oppositional) communal forms that already existed in domestic (low and high) or international politics. The often paradoxical bound between the cosmopolitan and international on the one hand and the avant-garde’s acute concern with local and national cultures on the other is apposite here, too. Marinetti’s projected renovation of Italian culture is one instance of this paradox and will be treated in the next

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chapter. Croat avant-gardist Ljubomir Micic´ provides another example – reminding us of the fact that this paradox was of course by no means restricted to Western European avant-gardes. Soon after Micic´ and his brother launched their journal Zenit in 1921 – to date a rich source charting many episodes of the avant-garde’s history in Europe – Micic´ came to voice his ideology of ‘barbarogenius’, calling for a Balkanisation of Europe. His strong dislike for the Austrian monarchy, eventually crystallised in Antievropa (1926), a bellicose, typographically exciting poetic diatribe against nearly everything that Western democratic civilisation stood for.38 It is an obvious point that Micic´’s ambivalently internationalist ‘imagined community’ thereby drew near to political views circulating elsewhere in Balkan political culture. Yet it is also the case that by citing these views within alternate, poetic contexts, Micic´’s and others’ work gave these views a ‘differantial’ edge. Home to such universal value-systems as Christianity and the Enlightenment, the self-acclaimed cradle of humanity, beauty, tolerance and philosophy, Europe had by the dawn of the twentieth century also become interchangeable with the very notion of democracy since Antiquity. Europe’s demise as a political empire in this sense already loomed large before the Great War in Arthur Schnitzler’s allegoric evocation of Vienna’s Ring as a gigantic prison whose contours resembled those of the continent.39 Before the outbreak of the war, in 1913, Miguel de Unamuno in Spain, too, had already wondered ‘Who can say today (at least in Spain) what Europe is?’40 With the advent of the First World War, however, Europe, the cultural and political entity rooted in Athens and Rome, shaped by St Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe, received a near lethal blow. After the war, countless stories, essays, literary magazines and writers’ correspondence on the continent suddenly turned Europe into a topos in aesthetic debate.41 Paul Valéry captured the sense of desolation well in his famous essay ‘The Crisis of the Spirit’ (1919). Europe, he claimed, had finally stood face to face with its own mortality, making it enter into a Narcissist phase of consciousness.42 Politicians, high and low, met the limitations of all discourses previously associated with their alleged superior national (local) culture, with European-ness, and with democracy. This limit on experience not only led to countless variations on the Spenglerian Decline-of-the-West theme in the course and in the wake of the First World War. It also coincided with one of the most drastic changes in democracy in most parts of Europe as the close of the war led to an opening up of the political arena to the masses through suffrage reforms massively expanding the active body politic. It is a commonplace that mass democracy, too, soon became anathema to several

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avant-gardists. Many of them began to regard modern representational democracy as the ventriloquist’s dummy of economically powerful groups and classes incapable of endorsing revolutionary change. Others felt directly threatened by it, fearing, like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill before them, the rule of the mob.43 Fear of mass politics in many cases incited the modernist avant-garde’s dislike for conventional, mimetic art. To many avant-gardists the masses formed a passive imitation of themselves, an imitation they tried to escape from through semiotic experiment.44 These suffrage reforms figured within a series of changes and rifts in politics on the continent marking decades of unprecedented cultural instability and heightened states of contingency. Representing society so as to please the majority proved no simple task as nineteenth-century emancipatory struggles were brought to a head, European colonial empires expanded and imploded, and, perhaps most importantly, the continent became dislocated geopolitically by uprisings, revolutions and the Great War. In this nebulous interregnum a number of choices were offered to writers to relate their work to political discourse as it reached the public space from the political institution. These options are in a way mirrored in the kinds of texts commonly found eligible for political analysis in modernist studies. At least three partially overlapping types of works can be isolated here, each highlighting a different dimension of democratic political discourse.45 First, there are works which through radical formal experimentation single out the inherently formal-aesthetic dimension of political representation. Secondly, there are works which deal either allegorically or thematically with political issues, showing how political discourse and culture also have a narrative and ethical dimension. Thirdly, there are works that overtly align themselves with given political programmes. This third type thereby evokes politics as a rationalised and highly specialised affair, accentuating its organisational dimension. A strict boundary between these types cannot be upheld. At best they differ gradually. To this day it is difficult to counter Julia Kristeva’s claim in The Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) that the semiotic subversion of (literary) form always entails a political critique of some sort, since we speak, think and perceive in socially symbolic forms. Taking conventions in language as decorum for experimentation, deformation and transgression, the historical avant-garde bent and often violated codified forms and genres. A mode of activity that throughout the foregoing century has been labelled political. It drew attention to the fact that politics is a linguistically mediated affair producing figurations and figures to which the formal-aesthetic is an inherent aspect; and, vice

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versa, that (experimental) literature as a rule houses a political facet.46 Negation and negativity are often accentuated with this first type.47 Against the tendency to bring social conflicts to rhetorical closure in political speech, avant-garde texts often underline the ever open-ended possibility of changing political representation. The informe in surrealism as described by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss,48 and various other textual-visual collages, assemblages, déchirages, photograms and papiers-collés could be referred to here. They all eradicated symbolic conventions, foregrounded the semiotic, and thus refused to subscribe to the formal-aesthetic closure in political representation. A second type discusses political matters either allegorically or thematically without necessarily displaying the radical experimentalism of the first category. As to works dealing with politics allegorically, we can think of German expressionists Jakob van Hoddis and Georg Heym, or the perhaps more overtly redemptive work of Ernst Stadler. Their texts provide ample illustrations of dystopian views on a crisis in the social fabric through an evocation of apocalyptic cityscapes and angst-ridden subjects, that locate a moment of redemption in Apocalypse.49 Likewise, the avant-garde counts numerous examples of more positive or utopian allegorical renderings of the public space that rarely mention partypolitical views, key political events or figures. Works that do mention these views and figures, thereby dealing with politics thematically, are also legion. Whether politically allegorical or referring to given political opinions thematically, texts of this second type draw our attention not just to democratic politics’ form or formal representation. They also mark politics’ representation of the ‘common good’ in (balanced) narratives articulating identities conflicting within civil society. These political narratives, which for example the Judeo-Christian allegorical exploits of German expressionism hint at, generally take the shape of a transcendental or ‘eschatological’ horizon in discourse, be it in the class-essentialist conflict of Marxism, the perennial struggle between the individual and the public at large, between states and their colonies, between gender groups or other identities. As in St Augustine’s The City of God, politics here emerges as being about governing and trying to resolve antagonisms and struggles in a final instance: Apocalypse. Defining the common good, the portrayal of the good society as the core of politics, finally, is evoking its ethical dimension, that is, politics’ task of making (at times impossible) decisions affecting all. Polish futurist Anatole Stern’s aggressive poetry volume Europa (1925) is instructive in this context. Pregnant with condemnations of the decadence of Western culture and politics, full of oppositions and antagonisms in the public space, Stern’s Europa leaves readers wondering what its gaze toward

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Russia and the near-sublime utopian vision toward its close exactly proposes in practical political terms: ‘I can’t / I don’t / want to express it / in words’.50 Even when works of this second type refuse to spell out a final choice for their readership, in other words, the ethical dimension of politics is always incipient. This brings me to the third and final type of political art frequently circumscribed: works that make no secret about their political goals by explicitly putting their experimental poetic at the service of given ideologies within the political sphere. Such works reproduce political choices already made within the political realm. They often openly oppose the first type, raising the question of who its political message is intended for. Or as Terry Eagleton once put it shamelessly: ‘How can a stoutly fashioned Constructivist rocking-chair act as critique?’51 Setting themselves off from this first type and wishing to transcend the ‘vagueness’ of the second category, works belonging to the third type clearly give way to the day-to-day organisational dimension of politics, which through a set of specialised discursive practices gathers knowledge and expertise. Texts of the third type highlight that this dimension is largely alien to literature by succumbing to the technicality of everyday political jargon and logic. Contemporaries of the avant-garde nonetheless saw a revolutionary readiness in the first two types of avant-garde texts as well, taking their political overtones seriously. First generation Critical Theorists and their sympathisers, such as Theodor Adorno and Benjamin for instance, did not coincidentally thematise how throughout the period ‘conflation of the literary, the religious, the theatrical, and the political’ dominated both literature and ruling politics.52 For, of course it was not only what was said in politics that had significance, it was also how things were said, an idea that was apparent long before the rise of fascism. Like Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia (1929), many further believed that classics-educated intellectuals (as were most vanguardists) were free from the constraints of ideology, since they were aware of the transient character of all values. In spite of their frequent anti-intellectualist pose avant-gardists indeed often referred to themselves as a chosen, nearmessianic class – German expressionists might again come to mind here. With the benefit of hindsight we can raise serious doubts about such Romantic self-portrayal. But it is also important to read it as evidence of a highly unstable political moment, in which writers were allocated (if not, endowed themselves) authority when it came to politics. The idiosyncratic myths presented by the avant-garde clearly evince how its autotelic, experimental texts reflected on politics. Read against the backdrop of political culture, it makes little difference that the

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Palazzeschian phantom league of avant-gardists failed to influence official political decision-making. There were many inarticulate or vague political projects propagated by politicians at this stage that never got realised either, and this mainly illustrates how the alternatives put forth by the avant-garde, like so many other countercultural options voiced at this point, simply were not given the time to develop. As such, within the discursive realm of political culture, avant-garde texts, however modestly, criticised and thereby helped to shape a historical moment marked by an unprecedented degree of contingency and political instability. Contingency and some degree of instability of course always form part and parcel of democracy. Claude Lefort’s notion of the political is worth recalling in this context. Lefort distinguished between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le politique). ‘Politics’ denotes the material and institutional side of democracy (including parliaments and parties). ‘The political’ describes the original founding moment that constitutes the social space of a society, informing its political culture. The founding moment of modern democracy lies in the eclipse of ‘a power that was embodied in the person of the prince and tied to a transcendental authority’.53 With no such prince or Hobbesian Leviathan present any longer in political modernity, politics lost its markers of certainty and timelessness. Nothing is ever certain in democratic politics. What is on the agenda today may be yesteryear’s news tomorrow. Modern democracy, as the political sphere representing society, therefore is an empty space of power. Power in modern democracy is ‘set free from the arbitrariness of personal rule’ (such as the feudal king’s), belonging ‘to no one, except to the people in the abstract’.54 When a demagogue or autocratic party stand up and pretend to represent the People-As-One, the political is smothered, leaving only politics. The political, in short, goes to the difficulty if not impossibility of legitimating any democratic representation of society. Lefort’s work thereby forcefully exposes how, in the abstract, power in modern democracy is always subject to struggle taking place in the discursive realm of political culture. When located within this struggle, when held against the ‘empty’ centre or ontological void defining democracy’s core, the avant-garde’s alternative communal myths come to mark that centre contiguously. As a cultural force that met with opposition while trying to access politics’ practical centre, the avant-garde can be said to have been constitutive of democratic politics in still other ways. As Jacques Rancière has repeatedly argued, for instance, democratic politics should be understood neither as the exercise of governmental authority nor as the organisation of political power, but in a more narrow sense, as that moment upon which those who have no right to speak come together.55

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It is at such moments that the rather ineffective nature of democracy’s assumed organisational rationality and technicality comes to the fore. Here, not so much the avant-garde’s politic but political decision-making’s inherently imperfect nature is foregrounded, since the democratic representation of society always leads to the exclusion of some group. As a result the ‘common good’ at work in the political sphere cannot be considered a social given. Rather, it is a discursive construct frequently covering up social facts and irresolvable conflicts. As a selective rendering of political culture excluding the avant-garde’s polyphonous voice, in brief, practical politics was also complemented by the avant-garde. Next to the avant-garde’s texts its discursive practices can also be shown to have had political significance. Surrealism’s dream-séances, its various clandestine meetings during which writers tried to define a common political goal were not particularly successful attempts at constructing or fashioning another community based on subjects’ sovereignty. Nevertheless, these discursive practices are interesting to follow through as experiments in cultural political thought which did not have to bother with practical consequences. By giving way to different temporal communities (Gemeinschafts), the avant-garde exposed how society (Gesellschaft) is ruled by arbitrary or site-specific contracts. Thematising the ethical significance of failure, of experimenting for the sake of experiment, avant-garde practice too thereby reflected on the ethical dimension of politics. Hannah Arendt’s description of a ‘space of appearance’, of that moment when a group sets out an object or common goal, seems apt here: The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates all formal constitutions of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organised. Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance or arrest of activities themselves.56

As a collective attempt to ground another political community in the singularity of subjects the avant-garde can be seen exactly as such a temporal space of appearance: once there, now gone, only to be re-activated by or through its texts. Studying the role of the avant-garde within political culture thus frequently amounts to putting the stress on agency and difference, to favouring margins and fringes. Avant-garde texts and discursive practices here are read as traces of possibility that show how politics, and cultural history with it, could have taken different turns. Above all,

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reading the avant-garde against the backdrop of political culture grants the meaning and value of democratic politics importance over its organisational or institutional facets. The latter are brought out by scholars filling the third and final box of our archive.57 Putting a rather different accent on their analyses critics here turn to sociology rather than political philosophy and cultural history. They zoom in on social structures such as the political and literary institutions from which political utterances arose. In so doing they often imply a move to reduce the Palazzeschian phantom league of avant-gardists to its proper proportions. Basically agreeing with cultural studies that the avant-garde is a valuable source in political history, assessments in our final box remind us of the obvious: that it was all but literature, and that modern literature simply is not considered to be practical politics. Together, cultural and institutional readings of the avant-garde thus leave us with a Janus-faced portrait of the avant-garde, grotesquely laughing at us from the past: fuelled with possibility, it found itself at the right time in the wrong place, that is, not in the realm of practical politics but captive in a literary institution. This might appear to be a truism. Yet the closer we look at this box’s contents the harder it gets to see why at all this argument is taken for granted, and how the box of ‘literature’ (its institution) has come to fit into the ‘culture’ cabinet of our archive.

Institution In 1933 Paul Valéry wrote a brief response to a survey on the relation between literature and politics. Under normal (read: democratically stable) circumstances, Valéry noted in his ever detached post-Symbolist mode, literature amounts to ‘writing so as to make think or imagine’, whereas politics produces ‘writing so as to make act’.58 This perhaps too formulaic distinction evinces that in times of democratic stability modern writers and politicians are generally perceived as taking up different social functions, which allocate their words authority in different domains – even if it were just for the fact that politicians are elected by the public and writers are not. This split is traditionally explained by drawing to the fore the functional differentiation of labour in Modern Times. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe there are still clear indications of radical political groups and experimental artists joining forces, both labelling themselves ‘avant-gardes’.59 In the course of the nineteenth century these two avant-gardes drifted apart to become occasional and generally unsuccessful allies. This illustrates that as modernity unfolded the process of rationalisation accelerated as well, steadily fracturing society in different

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social realms each producing specialised goods, knowledge and discourses whose sum in the course of history began to escape the comprehension and control of the modern self. Writing up laws, managing state budgets, organising civil services: these are indeed highly specialised practices at times inaccessible to laymen, which give a rather mundane ring to modernist alienation from day-to-day politics. These practices demonstrate how the organisation of power in democratic politics unfolds according to a rationale of its own. In spite of its representational shortcomings, this makes practical democratic politics a predominantly legalistic and rationalistic affair designed to manage social facts and antagonisms so as to write up laws to the benefit of the common good. As such, democratic politics can also be set apart from literature in clear spatial terms: both take place within the confines of institutions or spheres60 occupying different spaces in civil society populated by their own agents and products/texts. In times of social stability, these spaces, agents and products are inscribed into chains of discursive practices or language games61 giving them meaning and coherence, and making them primarily subject to power struggles between agents within their respective spheres (between authors, or between writers and publishers in literature, between politicians or parties in politics). While writers, for instance, do not fall outside society and the politico-cultural and economical assumptions and expectations circulating in the public space, in times of stability they are left with some agency to control and regulate how they meet those expectations and assumptions. Similarly, as Walter Lippmann observed in the 1920s, democratic politicians, too, are normally left to conduct their work if day-to-day business and everyday life can grind on without substantial hindrance. It is only when they face crises they are unable to cope with that the electorate or ‘phantom public’, as Lippmann called it, is addressed as judge.62 Within a healthy democracy, in sum, politics produces laws regulating public and private matters, whereas literature produces, well yes, literature. Most of these self-explanatory observations already surfaced in the work of Adorno and Benjamin who among others displayed an early yet developed awareness of economic rationalisation and functional differentiation when they turned to the avant-garde. Impressed by Georg Lukács’ remarks on Max Weber in History and Class Consciousness (1922), they read the avant-garde against the backdrop of an ideologically (which to them meant: seemingly) disintegrating and fragmenting public space. Herbert Marcuse, by advocating a marriage between surrealism and Marxism to overcome social fragmentation and alienation,63 Peter Bürger, by pointing to the bourgeois insulation of art as an

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institution, and Jürgen Habermas, by suggesting that art, on the level of the public space’s practical or ‘systemic’ organisation, had gained an irreversible, relative autonomy:64 all have, albeit in different ways, drawn attention to the fact that the avant-garde operated within a specialised realm of literature, driven by an immanent logic and a series of discursive practices of its own. Sitting on the fence between the nineteenth and twentieth century in The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996), Pierre Bourdieu as well occasionally glanced at the avant-garde. Bringing out how throughout the nineteenth century the middle class managed to reproduce its symbolic dominance over political economy, Bourdieu depicted the avant-garde’s aesthetic experimentation and (political) engagement as an artistic posture adopted by writers with a bourgeois background. To Bourdieu the avant-garde was out to position and distinguish itself in an aesthetic ‘field’ governed by a language game largely alien to other social fields in the public space. Its revolutionary political claims signalled a witty yet snobbish means to discard mainstream values in literature, underscoring the cumulative thirst for distinction in modern literature at large. And much is to be argued for this. The plethora of manifestoes launching avant-garde -isms reminds us of how the avant-garde incessantly entered into rivalry within and outside its own ranks. Circumscribing the seemingly naturalised (that is, discursively reiterated and perpetuated) sphere of literature – or as the scholars mentioned here have called it: the expressivist (Bürgerian) ‘institution,’ the genetic structuralist (Bourdian) ‘field’, or an autopoietically conceived ‘system’ – has led to a better understanding of the modernist avant-gardists as producers of cultural goods. Above all, it has made us aware of the fact that the avant-garde’s literary production, in socially mediated and at times overdetermined ways, translated or filtered social events and shifts elsewhere in the public space, where it found itself boxed in by various state apparatuses65 extending and imposing the symbolic power of the political sphere. For the modernist avant-garde was often received as a band of insurgents out to bring down beauty and the ethical as well as communicative value of art66 – in brief, the very function said to mark the relative autonomy of modern literature. It seems to have made little difference that on closer inspection the avant-garde had anything but the destruction of art or the ‘ugly’ per se in mind, even in the negative or negating instance of Dada. Rather, it geared itself towards expanding the categories of beauty (and the sublime) to include the ugly and the everyday. Political officials primarily defied the idea of an art tearing down the accomplishments of civilisation and (national) culture – a concern which again was shared, be it in dubio, by many avant-garde

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writers. The avant-garde apparently triggered either popular condemnation (at best fascination) or the projection of culturally dominant fears of rapid technological and industrial changes that marked the age – a fear that notably has been highlighted in the avant-garde as well, even in the Italian futurist champions of ‘machinism’.67 Trying to respond aptly to the avant-garde, politics regularly permeated literature by taking practical decisions concerning state patronage, publishing policy and aesthetic education. This illustrates how thoroughly politicised the avant-garde was, even in instances where it was intentionally apolitical – although, as this section in the archive would have it, the degree of politicisation in democracy never went as far as to put a complete halt to literature’s relative autonomy. Quite the opposite, in fact: marking the boundaries of the literary institution has also made us more sensitive to how the avant-garde often reinforced its social autonomy, for instance through its response to mass culture, which quantitatively multiplied and considerably diversified the production of cultural goods.68 This challenged the modernist avantgarde to launch tactics and outlets within its financial reach that made it visible. An important role here was played by specialised magazines, of which Der Sturm in Germany and Esprit Nouveau in France were perhaps the ones best-known throughout the continent. As professional writers, avant-gardists were also confronted with a rapidly developing literary market, and therefore were under extreme pressure. To withstand this pressure, public performances proved successful instruments. Although many avant-garde texts were printed in tiny numbers, the exploits of Marinetti and Huelsenbeck show that the occasionally heated public response to the avant-garde in part also tied in with the rather substantial audiences reached. Marinetti was a prolific impresario of futurism, having at his disposal the quickly expended but initially vast inheritance of his father to publish and publicise futurist literature. Like Marinetti in the 1910s, moreover, Huelsenbeck in the early 1920s (during the infamous ‘Dada-Tournee’) managed to pack auditoria with audience numbers often exceeding 2,000.69 This shows that in some cases the European avant-garde, at least in quantitative terms, represented a cultural force to be reckoned with, reading to its audience texts that more often than not could not be bought on the market. Finally, situating the avant-gardes within their professional sphere has made us see how, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, they located themselves primarily in urban-bohemian constellations. As a rule, and sporadically disregarding national and stately frontiers, the avant-garde championed the local appropriation of techniques in the cultural capitals of Paris and (after the Great War) Berlin.70 Many avant-gardists in

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these and other metropolises were pushed into bohemia, as they formed part of a new class of intellectual labourers that had gained strength from the later nineteenth century onward.71 Most avant-gardists came from middle-class families, and received (though often did not finish) a university education. Marinetti wrote a doctorate in law. Huelsenbeck was a certified physician by the time he bid Berlin Dada farewell in the early 1920s. Van Ostaijen was the odd man out in that he did not finish secondary school, though his dense writings on literary aesthetics portray him as an intellectual (desiring) to be reckoned with. The expansion of this intellectual class, before and after the Great War, led to social marginalisation, unemployment and even pauperism in many European regions.72 Most avant-gardists as a result also held jobs alongside their practice as writers. To make ends meet, Breton worked for years as an advisor to art collectors, for instance, and even as an editor for Gallimard, correcting the typescripts of, and regularly meeting up with, Proust no less.73 Against the odds, this intellectual force did succeed in changing the ‘rules of art’. Experimental, it considerably widened the definition of what was regarded as acceptable as literature, above all by putting the materiality of language (and other media) centre-stage. Yet in so doing, it simultaneously took over the function of publishers and financially gifted Maecenas to signal to its audience and readership that it was dealing with a ‘literary’ object. For, only then, it is often claimed, do readers also adopt the ‘sovereign’ outlook on literature. The ‘antinomy’ (as Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory calls it)74 between the writer’s sovereignty and literature’s autonomy thus precludes a positive practical political moment. Viewed from within the limits of the literary sphere, the avant-garde can be shown to have divided itself in itself: it set itself up as a sovereign community and suspected itself as autonomous. In this suspicion it only reinstated its autonomy. As Andrew Hewitt writes: If capitalism provides the material preconditions for autonomous art, then it is the philosophical tradition of German Idealism that provides its ideological legitimation. At the end of the eighteenth century the emerging literature is assigned a place within a discursive hierarchy regulated by the philosophy of Idealism. Thus, while art might be said to resist at the level of content capitalism’s tendency toward economic rationalisation, it can do so only within a prerationalised set of philosophical relationships.75

Hewitt’s observation hints at the importance of charting politicisation, both to assess the textual traces of the avant-garde’s situatedness in the sphere of literature, and so as not to double the avant-garde’s often naive voluntarism. Hewitt’s words can further be read as a partial refutation of the somewhat abstract political philosophical claim of Lefort

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and others that the centre of power in democracy is essentially empty. In practice, liberal democracy is of course always in part determined by the political economy, regardless of the perils democracy faces as a system. It may well be that (during elections) nothing is certain in democracy, and that the centre of political power is as such always ‘empty’. Yet economic concerns and power structures always fill this centre in advance to some extent. By the same token, however, Hewitt’s words can also be taken as emblematic of a deterministic critical tradition, which often tends to narrow down politics as a whole to political economy. It is not denied here that the avant-garde ‘wrote back’ to politics. But since its responses, lacking the concrete organisational dimension so crucial to the language game of practical politics, obviously were not followed up, looking at communication between politics and literature as progressing in two directions is somewhat redundant. Claiming to be Realpolitisch and reducing politics to its organisational dimension, this approach leaves us the task of doxographically charting the diverse political opinions which the avant-garde took over from ideologies and discourses already in circulation within the political sphere. As a result, avant-garde texts’ cultural role is downplayed and the avant-garde itself is made into a politicised ‘dupe’, a mirror held up to the sphere of liberal-democratic politics.76

The Cracks in the Archive In his unfinished Arcades-Project Walter Benjamin rhetorically asked whether there was any ‘object for which the nineteenth century did not invent a case or a holder? It had them for watches, slippers, egg-cups, thermometers, playing cards. And if not cases and holders, it invented envelopes, housings, loose covers, dust sheets.’77 If a penchant for casing, enveloping and wrapping objects is a defining feature of nineteenthcentury culture, then modernist studies’ archive about politics and literature may well amount to the ironic apex of that culture. The archive as well appears to have neatly catalogued its object of study, putting it to rest in the three, ever smaller conceptual containers of modernity, culture and the institution of literature. On the surface, everyone in the archive is in agreement, merely differing on where to put the accent. Few cultural analysts, for example, would contradict the idea that the avant-garde should be located within its own professional community in a literary sphere or institution (although they will add that writers’ identities cannot be reduced to their position on the economic ladder of production). Yet whilst the marginalisation of the avant-garde resulting

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from its institutional entrenchment, in culture, points to its being political, that same entrenchment is taken as a sign of its being politicised in institutional analyses. The work of both strands in our archive therefore adds up to a powerful vision of a seemingly total system or logic covering all aspects of the relation between the avant-garde and politics. This vision leaves a reader somewhat powerless to introduce a novel element into the matrix thus laid out. But the archive is less logical or rational than it makes itself out to be. For is it not the case that cultural analysts make the point that the avant-garde produced its work in times of instability and heightened contingency? And do the institutional models used at the same time not assume social and democratic stability? Put differently: is the exception not already to be found in the archive when it sets out the rules regulating the politics of the modernist avant-gardes under normal democratic circumstances? Was literature, as a relatively autonomous sphere and site of production, not even temporarily affected by its culturally unstable moment, as clearly was the case in the realm of politics? At the heart of the archive resides contradiction. Whereas studies in the ‘culture’ box stress the period’s political and cultural heightened state of contingency, instability and rupture, the ‘institution’ box appears to adopt institutional-structural models that are typical of social and democratic stability. One of the main causes of this contradiction seems to be a simple anachronism: we appear to presuppose that the twentieth-century European modernist avant-garde, throughout its dénouement, operated in a structured institution commensurable to that of the socially relatively stable (late) nineteenth-century. It is a truism to argue that in the course of the nineteenth century, literature in the West became institutionalised as a distinct site of production, acquiring an overdetermined yet specific function in the public space, as well as a set of rules and practices of its own. One of the first studies to couple the institutionalisation of literature to the avant-garde was Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Bürger read the historical avant-garde as a response to the autonomy of literature advocated through the Aestheticist adage ‘art-for-art’s-sake’. He maintained that in its attempt to overcome literature’s social and material insulation, among other things by seeking contact with forces in the political institution, the avant-garde had failed. Research in recent years has complicated, if not made impossible, claims such as Bürger’s about the avant-garde’s overall authorial or political agenda, above all historicising the avant-garde’s manifestations. Yet, despite the marked tendency in recent decades to put the avant-garde’s historicity and complexity back in place, one of Bürger’s basic and rather anachronistic presuppositions has managed to

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slip through largely unnoticed: Bürger, along with Pierre Bourdieu and many other analysts of a culturally materialist bent, presupposes that the modernist avant-garde operated in a structured institution comparable to that of the socially relatively stable late nineteenth century. This assumption still informs many studies of the continental avant-garde today, and this is quite puzzling. To anyone familiar with the deep social and political crises throughout European democracies before, during and after the Great War, it is common knowledge that the avant-garde emerged in times of instability and heightened contingency. Naturally, the twentieth century did not all of a sudden give way to instability. The passing from one century into the next happened gradually. During the fin de siècle in France, for example, the democratic optimism of the 1870s had already made room for a scattering of artists to the four political winds – to anarchism and nationalism, to suffragism and Catholic reaction. And, of course, modernist avantgardes from Italian futurism onward also set themselves off against late nineteenth-century predecessors, as all modern writers had done before with previous generations – this is, after all, one of the basic rules stipulated by the literary language game in modernity. But the modernist avant-gardes did so within an institution that at least on occasion may have been very different from that in the late nineteenth century when looked at from a materialist point of view. In subsequent chapters we will see famous pieces of writing and books being censored or banned in times of upheaval. We will encounter editors of little magazines and publishers desperately trying to avoid political retaliations by going underground. We will meet authors spending time in prison without official charges being brought against them, and others being supported (even financially) by political officials and military regimes because they happen to share the same ideological views. Within one city, the garrison town of Berlin during World War One, we can witness the dreadful circumstances in which many Dadaists had to work, while key figures in expressionism, such as Herwarth Walden, editor of Der Sturm, were sponsored by wartime officials and allowed to travel and promote expressionism throughout Europe, provided they worked as German spies and advocated the (aesthetic) tolerance of Germany.78 Facts like these, which hint at an unprecedented and preposterous degree of politicisation of literature’s site of production throughout the West of Europe, have so far been treated as anecdotal, it seems. The work of Gisèle Sapiro and Michael Einfalt,79 both Bourdian scholars, can be recorded here. Both have looked at the field of literature in which French modernists operated during the World Wars. Both have shown how despite censorship, shortage of paper, police retaliations and lack

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of a market, authors gave shape to a clandestine literary sphere which, despite the restrictions mentioned above, can easily be compared to that in times of peace. And both have stressed what happened after rather than during the war, thus when authors ‘cashed in’ on their political stances during the war, accumulating symbolic capital to distinguish themselves from others in the post-war sphere of letters. Reading their work, we get the impression that the war was but an anecdotal prelude to something more meaningful later on. Rather than stressing what made the sphere of literature so different here from its character in times of democratic stability, they present us once again with the familiar. Even so, Sapiro and Einfalt clearly demonstrate that events like the Great War in continental democracies, which no doubt should be considered an exception to the rule of democratic stability, dislocated and ‘traumatised’ writers’ daily modes of production. Yet they fail to look for traces of these exceptions in literary texts. Was the disturbance of stability and the politicisation of literature’s structural and material facets indirectly not also made the subject of discussion in the literary language game and in literary texts, giving way to a veritable psychological trauma shared by various avant-gardists, symptoms of which may have taken on various forms and shapes in different oeuvres? Making World War One, one of the most devastating passages in European political history, resemble no more than an accidental hiccup, the archive leaves us wondering what other exceptional moments in the avant-garde’s literary production during the 1910s and 1920s might have escaped from its totalising gaze. The archive thereby forces us to return to the many petites histoires of the European avant-garde, which almost a century later are finally becoming more visible under a clearer sky, and which add up to a somewhat different, kaleidoscopic outlook on the cultural and political site in which the avant-garde produced its work. A descent, with fresh eyes, into the modernist archive itself, into history, is thus called for. Before making that descent, however, let us determine whether there were rules, too, to exceptional democratic moments such as the Great War.

History, or Exception In Brave New World Aldous Huxley has the Controller say: ‘Stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.’80 If ‘stability’ is the term most suitable for the rule or norm of democracy, then ‘state of exception’ appears to be the name most appropriate for exceptions to that rule. The state of exception is declared when

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a country is unable to safeguard its social and functional organisation against the onslaught of warring adversaries, or whenever it faces crises, such as the German economic inflation of the late 1920s, that cannot be countered adequately or in a timely way by given political legislation. In democratic countries, then, states of exception are called into life in the name of democracy. They exist as exceptions to protect the rule or norm of democracy. As Agamben observes, ‘World War One coincided with a permanent state of exception in the majority of the warring . . . European democracies.’81 Frequently used interchangeably with ‘martial law’, ‘state of emergency’, and, in French legislation, often called the ‘fictitious or political state of siege’, the state of exception is characterised by a cancelling of (part of) the constitutional state. In most warring European countries this entailed the anomic cancelling of constitutional (parliamentary) democracy. In response to the war, the state was temporarily put hors la constitution, democratic sovereignty suspended and power put in the hands of the sovereign (king or president) heading the military police. Chapters to come will focus in detail on five states of exception: those declared after the Great War in Italy and Germany, and the wartime regimes of Italy, Belgium and Germany. States of exception were at this point also declared in Britain and the US, and were later on often called into life again here too. The impact of these events has been scrutinised, albeit indirectly, in Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003). Although Sherry never refers to such states, he compellingly illustrates how the advent of war dislocated the discourse of liberal democracy, adding to the scepsis in Anglo-American modernism of common and rational forms of language use.82 The plight of avant-garde writers in martial regimes on the continent was nonetheless quite different from that of Anglo-American modernists for at least two reasons. First, many European countries at the turn of the century still had a very weak representative body, and the ‘norm’ of democracy, the values and practices of liberal democracy found their way into politics in various states at a much later date than in Britain and the US – Germany being apposite here. The fact that democracy was, as it were, still being tested and discovered in many European countries also made the ‘norm’ that states of exception were meant to protect less clear or evident. This in turn made officials less equipped to avert the potentially dangerous side-effects of such states. Secondly, and perhaps most obviously, writing in an occupied state, as Van Ostaijen did in Belgium, is not quite the same as working in a warring country remaining free from foreign occupation. These two admittedly gradual differences explain why on the continent, literature, in both institutional and cultural terms, was far more politicised than in the Anglo-American context.

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The state of exception is an anachronism in political modernity, a remnant of a pre-modern era that suddenly re-emerges in a modern constellation. It is the sovereign (king or president) who declares the state of emergency, with or without consent of parliament, depending on constitutional law. The role of the sovereign here illustrates how modern representational democracy falls back on pre-modern feudal politics when the state of exception is declared. The sovereign’s (in)decision, thematised in the well studied exchange of ideas between Walter Benjamin and political theorist Carl Schmitt, shows how a state of exception smothers the Lefortian political, filling the ontological void at democracy’s centre by putting forth a Leviathan representing the People-as-One and recalling pre-modern (Baroque) politics. In many respects, therefore, states of exception form the negative cliché of their democratic counterpart. Soldiers and not democratically elected politicians rule the state of emergency, without representing anyone and without any strict law guiding their conduct. Democratic citizenship within a state of exception stops to exist. In such a state citizen-subjects are reduced to subjects, left at the mercy of officials. Under martial law people can be forced to enlist in the army or to work in factories and camps. Or they can, simply, be made to disappear. When public as well as private laws are indefinitely put aside, so is the body politic which political officials are supposed to protect and represent. As a result officials fall back on their intuition in order to move beyond indecision. They improvise and act as the blind leading the blind, as in Peter Breugel the Elder’s famous parable. Benjamin’s still somewhat bizarre fascination with the Catholic conservative Schmitt, who would soon become a conspicuous member of the Nazi party, is relevant here in several respects. First of all, Benjamin’s timely analysis of sovereignty in seventeenth-century tragedies (in his The Origin of the German Mourning Play, 1928) can be read as an allegory of events in the West during the 1910s and 1920s. (In fact, not just Benjamin but Dadaist Hugo Ball, too, would soon take stock of Schmitt’s work.)83 For, strictly speaking, in a state of exception functionally differentiated spheres such as those of politics and literature or art cease to exist as well in front of the (or in the absence of) law and democratic representation. Under martial law there is no rule dictating any longer that officials should respect these spheres’ institutional confines and specific functions known in times of normal democratic rule. This is precisely what explains the over-politicisation of literature already hinted at, and thus also what makes the literary sphere here so different from that in times of democratic stability. In a state of emergency, political officials (can) take hold of literature’s otherwise relatively autonomous means and modes of production. In so doing, they as it were push back

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or inward the spatial confines of the literary sphere, to the point where the political sphere almost coincides with that of literature. In practice the relative autonomy of modern literature, along with its function to devise aesthetic modes for contemplating society is cast back into a premodern state in which literature and art are subjugated to political (and religious) demands. In short, the very function of modern literature is momentarily redefined in the state of exception by politics, giving way to a politicised merger-institution of politics and literature. In 1930 Benjamin wrote to Schmitt that he found confirmation of his ‘modes of research in the philosophy of art from his (Schmitt’s) in the philosophy of the state’.84 Part of this confirmation derived from a recognition of certain similarities and differences between the role of the writer and that of the pre-modern sovereign. The sovereign heading a state of exception is forced to experiment, but is confined by a friend-foe logic. His decisions instantly yield concrete results and directly affect the lives of his subjects. The writer in the state of exception, and not least the modernist avant-gardist with his stress on subjective sovereignty, too, came close to experiencing a unique form of sovereignty. For, like the political sovereign, they were forced to improvise and experiment in their daily practices, as politics colonised their realm. In chapters to come we will stumble upon ample evidence of this, seeing how writers’ literary counter-hegemonic myths, modes of writing and poetics constantly shifted in response to political challenges. However, in contrast to the state of emergency in politics, the state of exception in aesthetics led to different forms of creation and creativity that did not directly affect the public. Or at least not necessarily. For, overpoliticised, caught in the merger-institution of literature and politics, many avant-gardists further saw their aesthetic sovereignty extended into the domain of practical politics as well. With the bracketing of their sphere’s autonomy, their role as literary agents, too, was redefined. Working in a sphere that was the extension of the political realm, their role was made eminently political. In fact, in subsequent chapters we will see how Marinetti, Van Ostaijen and Huelsenbeck all took up a role as political agents during (a crisis leading to) a state of exception as well. This was mainly due to the fact that the actual dividing lines between the spheres of literature and politics became blurred. Significantly, this also gave an eminently practical political ring to their literary writings, inextricably intertwining the language games of politics and literature. Indeed, in times of democratic stability, the structural and material spaces, agents and products/texts occupied by literature’s realm of production in the public space are inscribed and made to cohere in literature’s own language game. Under democratic stability, this language

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game reproduces presumptions about writers’ and literary agents’ place and function in civil society. One of the main tasks of modern literature, we saw, is to produce texts and discourses representing society and exceeding the confines of other language games – a task that draws politics and literature together on a cultural plane even in times of democratic stability. Now in times of exception and instability, during periods in which politics takes hold of literature’s structural and material space, agents and texts, the language game of literature too was affected and challenged. Nonetheless, writers like Marinetti and Van Ostaijen, we will observe, were not always fully aware of the exceptional context in which they had been thrown, and they continued to act and write according to the rules stipulated by the language game of literature in times of stability. This illustrates that the relation between language games and their material conditions is always contingent and never purely rational. Consider the language game of democratic politics. It defines politics as a complex amalgam of the earlier discussed political (formal, narrative or ethical, and organisational) dimensions. It sees practical politics as both a technical and technocratic affair, and an (essentially impossible) attempt at representing society in a reasonable, fair way. Between these two aspects of democratic politics no ‘natural’ or evidently rational relation exists: practical politics in democracy can always be conducted and organised differently, while one representative strategy can coincide with a variety of organisational forms or modes of politics. In sum, between the institutional tools democracy has to arrive at knowledge about society so as to represent it on the one hand, and democracy’s actual representation of society on the other there resides a gap. Precisely, this gap shows itself in a state of exception as well as in avant-garde texts written in them. For, in such states, the avant-garde’s work and their alternative social imaginaries or myths not only put forth other, possible ways to represent society; thus, in accordance to the normal language game of literature. As states of exception redefined the function of literature for the avant-garde, the latter’s texts on occasion also proposed other, practical ways of organising the political sphere. States of exception are not called into life spuriously. They are responses to deeply felt and irresolvable crises in democracy. One such crisis was the November Revolution in Germany in 1918, which figures in my analyses of both Van Ostaijen and Huelsenbeck, both chapters thereby adding up to a sort of phenomenological study of that Revolution. When at the end of the Great War it became clear that the country had lost the war, the Emperor fled and left his country, his state of exception, unattended. For a few days the German Reichstag or parliament too was vacated, literally exposing what Lefort calls

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the political. No one was representing the country any longer, and the people, artists included, spontaneously began to enter the Reichstag, devising plans for the future of their country. When they failed to reach consensus on how to progress and civil war seemed near, the state of exception was again declared to restore order. This example illustrates that democratic instability and crises leading to states of exception as well often led to a questioning of society’s functional organisation and differentiation. Here, again in the absence of elected officials and democratic representation, nothing stopped the people in the Reichstag from experimenting with different ways of organising the public space or the political sphere. However, diametrically opposed to the overpoliticised state of affairs in the state of exception itself, literature and art, along with other spheres, were temporarily depoliticised upon such revolutionary moments. The grasp of politics briefly evaporated in such instances, thereby leading to a depoliticised merger-institution of literature and politics. Unlike in the state of emergency, the confines of the literary sphere here were briefly pushed outward, if not simply smashed, and the language game of literature ‘spilled over’ its institutional confines. Such events as well clearly set the sphere of literature off against its character in times of democratic stability. And here, too, in the words of Marinetti’s Beyond Communism (1920), ‘History, life itself, the world, belong(ed) to the Improvisers.’85 Pushed back and forth by politics, at times working in a sphere of literature reminiscent of a premodern era, the avant-garde, like their political counterparts, were forced to experiment in ways unprecedented as the complex trauma sustained by literature called into question all constants and invariables. This deeply affected the avantgarde’s textual production, too. ‘The great book of Futurism’, generally considered the founding event of Europe’s modernist avant-gardes, for example, rather quickly began to advise readers to ‘improvise everything, even God’.86 Marinetti’s hallucinatory universe, therefore, is a good place to begin our exploration of the archive of history.

Chapter 2

The Party and the Book: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism and Amateur Democracy

More than a century after Marinetti published his justly famous founding manifesto of Italian futurism in Le Figaro, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s claim that ‘Marinetti is an enigma’ still holds true.1 Whereas many would agree with Gottfried Benn that Marinetti’s first futurist manifesto was also ‘the founding event of modern art in Europe’,2 the (ever-shifting) counterhegemonic myth subsequently put forth by the Italian writer, performer and impresario of futurism was at times so disturbing and all-embracing that even today it leaves readers wondering about Marinetti’s motives, if not intelligence and sense of reality.3 One of the most discomforting aspects of his work is that it welcomed the Great War as a heavenly gift that would finally liberate Italy from the shackles of the past to give way to a new culture in which a truly innovative art could finally abide. Admittedly, it was not uncommon among modernists to regard the outbreak of the First World War as a moment that could lead to a new beginning in European history, to an inevitable cultural and political catharsis. However, Marinetti’s texts published under the wartime state of exception suggest that he wanted the war to continue indefinitely – with the near total lack of irony in his oeuvre only adding to the scandal: ‘Irony! What irony! The old Italian Irony! . . . This is our enemy, which we must destroy’ (CW: 71). Marinetti, therefore, takes us to the darker contingent of avant-gardists working in states of exception. Yet that does not make his case less interesting, because with Marinetti the question always seems to be: is this literature or politics? Or, as he put it himself in 1910: ‘Do you maybe think we are incapable of politics because of our excessive imagination?’ (CW: 62). Indeed, while Marinetti’s literary work does not always vouch for a pleasurable reading experience, he went much further than any other Western European avant-gardist in making alliances with politics. Here, it is worth recalling that Marinetti was a certified lawyer, who had even written a doctoral thesis on the role of the crown in democracy.4 When he subsequently paid his literary dues

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alongside the crop of the Parisian post-symbolist scene (including Gustave Kahn, Paul Adam, Laurent Tailhade, Alfred Jarry and Belgian writer Émile Verhaeren), it appears he had fully turned his back on law. But then he (re) turned to Italian literature to launch futurism and change politics and law; this time, however, through literature. That politics and literature were in no way separate matters to Marinetti the futurist is well known. Practical political and cultural as well as literary reform went hand in glove for Marinetti from the very start. Just months after the founding manifesto of futurism was published, during the Italian general elections of December 1909, he distributed a small flyer, reprinted on large posters (see Figure 2.1), addressing ‘futurist voters’. Futurism’s sole ‘political programme,’ it read, was ‘one of national pride, energy and expansion’ and it denounced ‘before the whole country the irrevocable shame which a possible clerical victory would bring upon us’, calling ‘on all the talented young people of Italy to engage in a struggle to the bitter end’ against traditionalists and priests (CW: 50). From futurism’s very inception, then, Marinetti suggested that he would one day stand in elections, and that futurism would represent not just the modern città nuova but a different, bellicose Italy as well. And indeed, shortly after the Great War, he performed what was perhaps the penultimate test of literature’s grounds and bearing in democracy. He entered Italy’s elections, sided by Mussolini, after having erected, to my knowledge, the only political party ever to emerge from a modernist literary movement, the Partito Politico Futurista. It is the trajectory of this party-political project that I wish to chart here, focusing mainly on the last years of futurism’s ‘first’ or heroic phase, that is, the years before the post-1922 period of conformism, which, according to many, sharply contrasted with the highly experimental first phase of the movement.5 What I intend to highlight is that in the final years of first futurism, a different form of experimentation, in part continuing Marinetti’s pre-war programme, took root in his ‘literary’ oeuvre as Marinetti turned to law as an object of aesthetic play. That the Great War’s state of exception marked the turning point in this respect is no coincidence. Looking back, everything suggests that first futurism took off in a sphere of literature that was in transition. Literature had not yet fully matured into a distinct social realm in Italy. There were various causes for this. One is the so-called ‘question of language’, the fact that Italy at the turn of the century lacked a standard language spoken by all. Another is that industrialisation and modernisation came somewhat later in Italy than in many other Western European countries. Equally important, however, were the unclear barriers between literature, the press and politics. A look at secret police files is quite illuminating here. In February 1911 a file on Marinetti was opened by the Prefect of Milan

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and sent to the Ministry of Interior, Office of Public Security. It contained this telling profile: ‘The named Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso . . . doctor of law, poet and novelist, futurist, is a gifted and highly esteemed person, of good moral conduct, but with a restless and impetuous personality.’ The report further stated that Marinetti had no ‘pronounced political tendency’, but that he was ‘sometimes driven to extremes, . . . especially . . . this can give more prominence to the futurist ideas he propagates.’6 From this character portrait it transpires that officials within the political sphere were not all that certain about where exactly the boundaries of Marinetti’s literary futurism lay. Nor did they exclude the possibility of it gaining wider support in political culture. More than anecdotal, this report signals that the aesthetic sphere was still acquiring a relative autonomy for itself when Marinetti launched futurism. Literature was still rationalising itself within Italy’s public space. Like other (political) oppositional intellectuals, Marinetti firmly believed that Italian culture lacked a present-day identity. This was well noted in many respects. Contemporary literature and art, for example, only became a topic in Italian newspapers in 1902, when the Giornale d’Italia, as the first large newspaper, introduced its ‘terza pagina’ or cultural page, and Benedetto Croce began to fill its columns shaping a unified ‘national’ taste.7 Opposing the liberal humanist or ‘lay Pope’ Croce, who mainly contemplated the greatness of Italy’s cultural past and disseminated German Idealist views, Marinetti’s declamations of anti-passatismo and calls for a modern, youthful Italy – ‘Against . . . Benedetto Croce, we pit the worldly-wise Italian’ (CW: 237) – can and perhaps should be read in this context. True, his admittedly tiring and hyperbolic stabs at Italy’s cultural past and institutions often have a silly ring to them today. Already in 1909 they on occasion provided comic relief in the more developed Parisian and Berlin artistic spheres.8 Yet when we recall that the aesthetic sphere in Italy only gained widespread visibility in the public space through the press in 1902, his diatribes gain a different ring. Looked at from this perspective, Marinetti began his career as a futurist forging an Italian taste and cultural sensibility more or less at the same time as these very issues became a matter of public debate. Tracing Marinetti’s steps throughout this intermediate phase will take us through a series of most exceptional and unstable democratic moments. It will further lead to a somewhat different interpretation of Marinetti’s allegorical novel Gli Indomabili (The Untamables, 1922), in which the author himself looked back on his remarkable passage or voyage. Consensus stipulates that The Untamables ‘reflects Marinetti’s political disappointment’ with his Party’s defeat during elections and the return to order subsequently brought about by Mussolini.9 Marzia Rocca,

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Figure 2.1 Drawing by Luigi Bompardi entitled La lotta elettorale a Milano from Illustrazione Italiana, 36:11, 14 March, p. 252. One of the posters in the background reads ‘Elettori Futuristi’.

for example, argues that the book signals the recognition of the failure of the utopian dream that art can change society for the better.10 To Eduardo Sanguinetti, it marks a turning point in Marinetti’s work, balancing out his over-ambitious project of first futurism.11 The novel, many have claimed, wallows in political pessimism and its aesthetic of writing also marks a clear return to the early, pre-futurist or post-symbolist writing tactics of Marinetti.12 Because of that, the book should, allegedly, be read as part of second futurism. Whereas I agree with the observation that Marinetti finally came to terms with the ‘frontiers’ of the literary sphere in this novel, I disagree with readings that depict the book as a- or anti-political. The Untamables shows itself as anything but that when read as a reflection on prior exceptional crises in Italian democracy. Marinetti here not only underlined and remedied mistakes he had made in practical politics. He also lucidly prefigured legal mistakes others would make after him.

1909–15: The Folly of Becoming ‘So as to give you some idea of what we represent, I’ll tell you straightaway what we think of you’ (CW: 89). With these antagonising words,

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Marinetti in 1910 addressed an audience of English women, many of whom were suffragettes, during one of his many visits abroad intended to spread the word about futurism’s glorious project. These words’ tactic of self-definition through negation of the other can be encountered throughout Marinetti’s writings. Yet they should not make us overlook that before the war he also proposed what is perhaps best termed a ‘presentist’ alternative to everything futurism was said to denounce in both art and politics. Turning his back to the past and refusing to bring the future to discursive closure, Marinetti drew attention to the possibilities dormant in the present, conceived as a continuous process of becoming; a process, too, that was hidden and shackled by conventional modes of representation. Marinetti’s aesthetic of writing, as it gained maturity from 1912 onward with the publication of his ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912), aimed at the desubjectivisation of readers, and implicitly also de-aestheticised literature. Loosely drawing on Henri Bergson,13 Marinetti came to believe that the material or phenomenal world as conventionally perceived hid a natural world that was already in motion, lacking any sense of purpose or teleology beyond the perpetual movement of matter and the venting of bodily desire. To describe this other nature shaped by an élan vital, Euclidean conceptions of space and conventional representations of time were outdated, because they masked how, for example, the dividing lines between human agents and objects were in actual fact inexistent, but also that time and space interlocked in a multidirectional and multilinear continuum. Nature, defined as such, also showed how reality was amoral, indifferent to good or evil, and for that reason it also necessitated that morality was cast aside. Matter had no sense of morality or essence, Marinetti believed. It was ‘heroic’, however, in that it always desired to become part of vaster nets or conglomerations of matter. Now, futurist writing was to convey this other ‘reality’, this invisible yet universal vitalist nature. Far from an aesthetic undertaking, therefore, futurist writing was defined as a science, bordering on the occult, of matter in motion, of an eternal truth: the ‘folly of Becoming’ (la follia del Divinire, TIF: 102). This science, in Marinetti’s mind, would bring a number of aesthetic side-effects, most notably making art a form of action (understood as matter in motion), as language, too, was but matter. Moreover, recognition of nature’s true state would yield new forms of bodily pleasure and tactile experience. It would, finally, also revitalise literature’s task of leading to the contemplation of other forms of community. Yet the stress was on the (pseudo)scientific aspect of futurist writing. It was to become a serious but no less ‘pleasurable’

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affair – with ‘pleasure’ understood as the sensation of masses of matter incessantly clashing and merging with one another. To these aims, futurist writing was to convey a sense of immediacy, while at the same time attacking conventional forms of representation imposed on subjects. The most ardent opponent Marinetti singled out in this context was the subject’s intellect, as the intellect is codified by norms and practices that subjectivise readers and make them hold on to convention. Hence, subjects or readers had to be desubjectivised; their intellect was to step down while reading, and bodily instinct was to become the primal faculty guiding them. Readers were to become bodies, matter in motion, in nature; ready to cast their bodily desire outward and to articulate themselves with other bodies. Only then could they come to draw on their intuition, a faculty that in Bergson’s thought was said to bridge the faculties of instinct (which cannot reflect) and intellect. Only then, too, could readers begin to contemplate alternative, ever open-ended forms of cohabitation and community formation. Importantly, though, Marinetti’s poetics never made clear how the latter would occur. It was a project of destruction and desubjectivisation his poetic proposed first and foremost. This ambitious project led Marinetti to devise a double set of textual tactics.14 First, thematically and superficially, he addressed topics that hypotypotically referred to the élan vital. From there came his frequent reference to machines, speed and other products of industrial progress, most notably mechanised war and slaughter. All of these were tropes, and more specifically catachreses, that is, names given to that which ‘cannot be faced directly’ in language.15 Man-made machines and industrialised war doubled a world that was already in movement but invisible to the eye. They further introduced an ‘aesthetic of the ugly’ in literature as defined by Karl Rosenkranz, or a sublime ‘aesthetics of horror’, as Paolo Valesio called it more recently.16 Grotesque evocations of war, rape and death in his texts here recalled the more shocking aspects of late nineteenth-century Decadentism, illustrating how Marinetti never really managed to leave behind the repertoire of post-symbolism. However, these images did force readers to let go of moral and aesthetic convention, and to look further, to give into a different, more sensual or instinctual reading. Secondly, prescribing formal and compositional aspects of writing, too, Marinetti began to ‘materialise’ texts.17 He frequently referred to texts’ components as molecules, microbes and body parts, while at the same time individuating texts’ constitutive elements and realigning them into an alternative discursive body or machine. Here, his poetic of parole in libertá, or words-in-freedom, needs to be mentioned, as it meant to

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liberate nouns, adjectives and the infinitive from the shackles of syntax and pre-programmed logic. Thus he introduced his ‘double-nouns’ or sostantivo doppio, for example, which articulated nouns in pairs such as ‘piazza-funnel, door-tap’ (CW: 108). The semantically (never so) distant lexemes thus combined, as later in surrealism, were meant to give way to remarkable, marvellous images or referential spheres, produced during the act of reading and thence articulated into (larger nets of) analogies, invisible to the eye yet caused by the absence of a syntax thinking for the reader. Marinetti characterised images as the textual machine/body’s (invisible) blood: ‘They constitute the life-blood of poetry. Poetry must be a continuous stream of new images, without which it is nothing more than anemia and greensickness’ (CW: 108–9). Images, it was suggested here, bring a text to life when signifieds are related to each other. In the act of reading they allow for an intuitive ‘mental syntax’,18 an uninterrupted flow of relationships between individuated words which materially (invisibly) implicate the reader in the text. Readers’ intuition, ideally, would thus set a text in motion, which would in turn unchain their untrammelled imagination and lead to the contemplation of another, more ‘natural’ form of community beyond or outside the rules of convention and given forms of collective sovereignty. As others have illustrated at length, this daring, mystic and occult19 poetic was put into practice rather unsuccessfully by Marinetti’s own poetry and prose.20 The main reason for this was that his own writings (with the exceptions of his few free-word collages like Montagne + vallate + strade × joffre (1915) and of The Untamables) failed to comply with a final prerequisite his poetic set out, namely the destruction of the lyrical I or persona. Marinetti’s poetic dictated that writing was to ‘systematically destroy the literary I in order to scatter it into the universal vibration and reach the point of expressing the infinitively small and the vibrations of molecules . . . Thus the poetry of cosmic forces supplants the poetry of the human’ (SW: 98). However, his novel Mafarka le futuriste (1909), his collection of poems Le monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Monoplane, 1912), and even his most famous poetry book Zang Tumb Tumb were all predicated on a metaleptic reader-identification with a narrator whose point of view was omniscient, virile and aggressive. It was by identification with the narrator as main focaliser that his texts imposed a project of desubjectivisation on readers. Far from absent, therefore, the lyrical I, equipped with a considerable ego, was always present in his own work. And this habit, this recurrent strategy ran counter to what his poetic envisioned. On the one hand, the narrator was always represented as an entity already desubjectivised, as a subject that had already cast aside all given forms of collective sovereignty – except in gender terms – and

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had looked nature or matter into the eye. His writings thereby fully sidestepped the issue of how desubjectivisation was to come about, instead plunging the reader straightaway in an amoral and at times pretty scary universe beyond petty morality. For, on the other hand, since Marinetti favoured an aerial perspective, the narrator most often turned his gaze outward, and onto the masses below. As such his texts never portrayed other subjects as equally singular beings with whom new communities could be formed. Instead, his works time and again reiterated that if life ever were to match nature, it would amount to a permanent state of war, a Hobbesian state of nature in which a rather literal interpretation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power would dominate. Marinetti’s lyrical personae championed beaux gestes libertaires, and more often than not tended to treat others as enemies keeping characters or narrators alike from venting their bodily desire to the full. To what extent Marinetti attentively read Nietzsche, whose Œuvres Complètes had appeared in 1905, is unclear, but his poetry and prose suggest that he took it as an anthropological or ontological given that the Will to Power, desire cast outward, was the core of human existence, too.21 Curiously, though, when we turn to his political writings, and the few practical political reforms Marinetti proposed at the same time, we learn that it was the emancipation of the subject he had in mind first and foremost before the war.22 Not the Hobbesian state of nature, but a society, a democracy even, of subjective sovereigns was what he ultimately aimed for. It is interesting to note first, however, that many of Marinetti’s political pamphlets came much closer to actualising his aesthetic of writing than his own prose and poetry. Having already announced four years earlier that he would enter elections one day, on 11 October 1913, during a new election campaign, Marinetti published a ‘Programma politico futurista’ (Political Programme of Futurism). The contexts in which this pamphlet was inscribed are worth pondering. The ‘Programma’ first appeared in Lacerba, which between 1912 and 1915 became an internationally renowned organ of futurism. The ‘Programma’ was a response to an essay by Giovanni Papini entitled ‘Let’s Give a Damn about Politics!’23 that had portrayed Italian democracy as one big lie. Papini thought that since parliament was dominated by forces upholding the status quo it was not worth the effort to elect anyone into it. In an eighteen-page letter to Papini,24 Marinetti responded that Papini was too pessimistic and failed to see that the time for change was imminent. Marinetti claimed that his own tiring tournées through Europe, an attempt at ‘advancing the intellectual primacy of Italy’, had led him to believe even more in Italy’s bright yet open future. Above all, Marinetti objected, Papini denied the fact that ‘Art is tied up with politics!’. To make sure that the readers of

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Lacerba did not get the wrong impression, he enclosed in his letter a copy of his ‘Programma’, to be published in Lacerba. Marinetti was careful, however, not to limit the visibility of his text to a journal of modest circulation such as Lacerba, which mainly attracted a bourgeois audience.25 In that same week a letter went to Guglielmo Janelli, requesting him to have it printed as 1,500 flyers on paper of different colour. Janelli was then to take his car to the main streets of Messina in Sicily, and distribute the flyers.26 Near the end of October an interview with Marinetti was published in the Giornale d’Italia. The interviewer asked whether it was true what he had heard in Rome: Marinetti was going to stand in elections against the eminent socialist Leonida Bissolati. Marinetti, conspicuously, did not exclude the possibility, but he would only figure in ‘a district of real importance’.27 Rumours, so we know, are spurious discursive objects in political culture. Yet the rumour the interviewer of the Giornale d’Italia had picked up, perhaps even more so than Marinetti’s 1909 political pamphlet addressing ‘futurist voters’, made an irreversible incision in political culture. Moreover, the very title of the interview in which the rumour was epitomised is rather revealing: ‘Con Marinetti in “terza saletta”’ – the mentioned room referring to the famous third room of the Roman Caffé Aragno, a venue of the (plastic) Italian avant-garde. The ‘terza pagina’, it would appear, thus helped to loosen the partitions separating politics and literature. Picking up on events in the public space initiated by Marinetti, it repeated them for those who had not participated in them, showing how literature, or at least a writer, was being political. The ‘Programma’ itself, which was co-signed by Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Carlo Carrà, proved rather noncommittal in all but one respect: ‘Italy, absolute and sovereign’ was to become a country where ‘all freedoms must prevail’ (CW: 75). The way in which the 1913 ‘Programma’ was composed was very peculiar, however. It was asyntactical, for starters, in that it consisted of phrases and partial clauses presented in three lists of demands and political doxa: a Futurist list, a liberal-catholic one and a social-democratic one. The pamphlet closed with a double column. On the left was the ‘clerical-moderate-liberal programme’. On the right was the ‘democratic-republican-socialist programme’. And over both, we read, ‘This (futurist) Programme will triumph’ (CW: 76). When we compare Marinetti’s futurist programme to these other two lists, however, the pamphlet time and again compares apples and oranges. Thus, the republicans, obviously, supported the idea of a republic. Was futurism anti-republican, or in favour of the monarchy? Marinetti’s ‘Programma’ leaves us wondering. Many socialists were anti-clerical, so we read, but so was futurism. The liberals displayed an

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‘occasional militarism’ (CW: 76), but futurism wanted a still ‘bigger fleet and a bigger army’ (CW: 75). Futurism demanded the ‘supremacy of gymnastics over books’ (CW: 76), yet as to how those whom Marinetti opposed related to books and gymnastics not a word. Thus presenting us three lists of political doxa, Marinetti’s pamphlet was stuffed with indeterminacies. So manifest are these associative blanks, that it is tempting to state that his political writings proved more successful in actualising his poetic than his own poetry. The clever orchestration of nouns and phrases in the pamphlet triggered above all the imagination, suggesting at best that futurism was what people would make of it. The pamphlet nonetheless summarised Marinetti’s political writings before the war. These writings suggest that Marinetti did not actually envision the perpetuated state of war his own literary texts opened up onto. Instead, it was an open-ended community of singular subjects that he had in mind. Before the war, Marinetti toyed with anarchist, syndicalist, nationalist and social Darwinist ideas, but never adhered to any of these given ideological currents. Futurism from the start was announced as a practical political force in its own right. He nonetheless defined the limits of his project in clear spatial, nationalist terms. For, it was within Italy’s borders that his new futurist community would take root, to replace the old roots of ‘the social tree’ (CW: 53), as he put it in ‘La Guerra, sola igiene del mondo’ (War, the sole purgatory of the world, 1911). However, whereas many at this point defined ‘italianità’ as that which was not foreign,28 and others, like the later Mussolini, cultivated the memorial cult of ‘romanità’,29 Marinetti mainly looked to the immanent value of the subject to forge his new Italy, without, conspicuously, ever bringing it to closure in representation. ‘We . . . present the future evolution of mankind as an oscillating, irregular movement’ (CW: 66), and ‘the history of peoples is largely a question of chance, . . . These are not paradoxes, I swear to you, but a sort of groping around in the night of the future’ (CW: 58). The temporality of pre-war futurism was thus one of deferral and not of eschatological closure. Throughout his career Marinetti would stress that it was from the sovereignty of Italy’s (strongest) subjects that the Italian nation as a whole would be given a distinctly modern outlook. Hence, perfectly in line with his poetic, it was to the liberation and emancipation of the citizen-subject that his political project turned as well. And here, of course, his projects in both spheres came close to overlapping. Futurist writing implicitly de-aestheticised as a science of nature (allegedly) desubjectivising readers, Marinetti somewhat uncritically seemed to believe that his work had the potential to substitute the ruling ‘idea of representation’

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in Italy’s democracy (CW: 56). Truly ‘selfless’ (disinteressata), having already left all forms of collective sovereignty at the doorstep, he further believed that futurists like himself would one day prove it inevitable to ‘substitute artists – creative talents – for the lawyer class – whose talent is for long-windedness and obfuscation’ (CW: 63–4). Italian democracy’s representation was built on speeches exaggerating ‘beyond measure the value of eloquence’ (CW: 56). ‘Emporia of subtle ideas and polished syllogisms’ testifying to the absolute power of lawyers working the ‘malleable metal of the law’ (CW: 57), the whole idea of political representation had to be reconsidered. To little surprise the main legal reform Marinetti proposed before the war tied in with democracy’s representation of the people as well. Displeased with the way in which politics was conducted in Italy’s still maturing democracy,30 he opposed the ‘liberal’ and compromising policy of Victor Emmanuel III’s administration, endorsed through his chief minister from 1903 to 1914, the liberal Giovanni Giolitti. Giolitti’s reign is often called the ‘belle époque’ or Giolittismo. It brought stability and growth in economic terms, yet through what by a large number of intellectuals was considered a pseudo-democratic parliamentarian rule. This was true. In 1909, only about 10 per cent of adult Italians, all male and over thirty, had a right to vote. Hence, in ‘Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo’ (Against Sentimentalised Love and Parliamentarianism, 1910), Marinetti made clear that the Italian state of Giolitti lacked authority, because its parliament failed to represent the people aptly. Drawing attention to the ‘mediocre legislative instrument’ (CW: 56) of vote-buying he observed that ‘the people thus remain forever outside government. Yet . . . it is precisely to parliamentarianism that the people owe their very existence.’ To overcome this impasse, and so as to bring forth the ‘logical conclusion of the idea of democracy . . . as it was conceived by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the other harbingers of the French Revolution’ he pleaded for universal (including female) suffrage (CW: 57). Ironically, Marinetti’s plea proved a safe bet, as it was in part realised by Giolitti for him. Already during the Libyan War, in 1911, Giolitti had made the issue of suffrage part of his political agenda. To avoid protest, the soldiers fighting for Italy in its colony, most of them illiterate, could not be denied a vote upon their return to Italy. Thus, in 1912 all literate men aged twenty-one and over, and all men aged thirty and over, whether literate or not, were given the right to vote.31 By Giolitti’s reform, the electorate suddenly more than doubled, from three million in 1909 to an estimated 8.5 million, which was around 25 per cent of the total population. Mass democracy, as a result, announced itself.

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There was as yet no universal suffrage, but Italy’s democracy was clearly heading toward it. This suffrage reform rekindled the political role of the press, too. If the ‘cultural page’ had before been crucial in defining the borders of the aesthetic sphere, the booming electorate now also gave the press a more significant role in defining politics. The press throughout Europe in the nineteenth century had played a capital role in politics – leading political parties being able to fall back on their own newspapers to disseminate their ideological position. In Italy as well the oppositional Socialist Party (PSI) could count on its own press organ Avanti!, which was led, from 1912 onward, by Mussolini, while liberalist newspapers favouring the line of Giolitti, such as La Stampa and La Tribuna, endorsed official political views. The Catholic church and the Vatican, meanwhile, exerted perhaps the most widely permeating influence in the press and far beyond. However, what made the Italian press, albeit in degree, so peculiar in political terms within Europe was the impressive force of its political opposition, especially after the suffrage reform of 1912. At this point there were great national newspapers, but no big or popular national parties. Success in oppositional politics, consequently, made it almost a prerequisite for politicians to reach success in journalism first. And indeed, when we look at key political players such as the Catholic Luigi Sturzo, the communist Gramsci or the (later) fascist Mussolini, all of them built a political career in journalism first, with the pen, and not with the law, since no Catholic, communist or fascist party existed at this point. Gramsci perhaps most succinctly summed up the quintessential role of the press in Italy after 1912, underlining that it took on functions that otherwise may be expected of political parties.32 And the fact that Mussolini, later on in 1925, was quick to ratify a press law stating that only registered journalists could write in newspapers, speaks volumes as well.33 Delegitimising the national government in Italy was not so much done in parliament. It was done in print. And with the suffrage reform of 1912, the principal task of the press had been made all too clear. A race was announced, with those who would cross the finishing line first being the ones who would enter parliament backed up by the first oppositional mass party. Significantly, when Marinetti launched his own party during the war, its birth was announced in a (self-acclaimed) futurist newspaper, too, we will see. By the time the Great War broke loose, Marinetti had firmly established that he was considering entering parliament, but had put forth few salient judicial or political reforms – except for going to war, of course, wherever it be. Indeed, the only real practical political reform Marinetti proposed before the war was that Italy should enter war, wherever it

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roared. Italy was to reclaim its ‘rightful’ land from the Austro-Hungarian empire and to secure Italy’s colonies from foreign threats. Similarly, during the interventionist crisis in Italian political culture from late 1914 up to mid-1915, Marinetti sided with a minority of ‘irredentist’ intellectuals and industrialists in Italy who demanded that Italy engage in war. We have reason to believe, however, that Marinetti’s plea for war, before the war itself, was a rhetorical devise above all. He was inspired by Georges Sorel’s influential Reflections on Violence (1908), of which a first draft was published in Italian in 1906. As David Forgács puts it succinctly, Sorel displaced violence ‘from a hurting to a healing’ phenomenon, in that, for Sorel, not so much the physical act of violence, but its threat had a ‘purgatory’ function.34 A discursive moment first and foremost, Sorel argued, violence had an organising effect on the subject of violence, the proletariat. It was an ‘idea-force’, moreover, whose threat could scare off parliamentary and government officials, while revolutionary syndicalists could promise to contain it through central leadership and through ominous yet peaceful general strikes. Unifying, identityconstructing, Sorel’s so-called ‘myth of violence’ was at times compared to a military force by the author. ‘Acts of proletarian violence’, Sorel wrote, ‘are purely and simply, acts of war; they have the value of military demonstrations and serve to mark the separation between classes.’35 Militarism was also clearly present in Marinetti’s discourse. Never adhering to Marxism, however, it was the ‘proletarian’ Italy that Marinetti aimed to change through violence. As a non-essentialist, discursive force, violence, the threat of war, according to Marinetti, had the power to give shape to an intersubjective multiplicity that did not eradicate but strengthened the singularity of subjects. The more emancipated and selfaware Italians became individually, the stronger they would become as a nation. As he voiced it perhaps most clearly in ‘In quest’anno futurista’ (In This Futurist Year, 1914, reprinted in 1915, when its words gained an entirely different ring), violence and war were ‘futurism intensified and will not abolish war, like the passéists hope, but end passéism. War is the culminating and perfect synthesis of progress (aggressive velocity + violent simplification of effort towards well-being)’ (CW: 236). This quote exemplifies in yet another way that Marinetti ultimately aimed for a collective of individuated, singular subjects. He calculated that some form of collective sovereignty would time and again arise, which would in turn require the threat of violence, so that in the end it would become increasingly clear to subjects how to attain true ‘well-being’. Before the war Marinetti did not display much of his knowledge of law. Focusing on the potential of another nation, the state, the nation’s legal framework, was left almost completely untouched. However,

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in less than a decade he did manage to launch a highly contested and rather popular artistic and literary movement with many followers. Significantly, he was able to do so largely in circumstances of his own choice, having a vast inheritance from his father at his disposal to finance whatever initiative he set his mind to. Under the state of exception, these circumstances drastically changed, dislocating Marinetti’s poetic as well as political views.

1915–18: Stato di eccezione On 20 May 1915 King Emmanuel III declared the state of exception. Parliament ratified it pro forma. The electorate, the phantom public, was never consulted and it was outmanoeuvred. When the Great War set the world afire, what before had been a Sorelian trope of a vitalist energy, suddenly became a historical referent, and ‘war’ literally came to denote ‘war’. Marinetti continued his plea for war, calling his previous references to it ‘merely prophetic’ (CW: 246). This shows that his vitalist poetic (in which war was but a catachresis, a trope for the more profound élan vital) came to be overshadowed by the textual surface of his writings (the tropes of war and violence themselves). This surface, it further appears, was now taken literally; it began to signify, indexically pointing to the real war. What before had been an attitude toward war, now became commitment to it.36 Marinetti’s poetic had already (implicitly) de-aestheticised literature, ‘functionalised’ it up to the point where it could become the transmitter of a universal yet hidden material force. Now that a real-time war imposed itself, he made this de-aestheticisation explicit. ‘Futurism’, he had stated in a speech to students in 1914, ‘is an impassioned attempt at introducing life into art’ (CW: 233). It begged to differ from Aestheticism by turning art and literature into an event expanding the range of the language game of literature from within. By bringing ‘life’ into literature, however, futurism had discovered that war and violence were not merely ‘literary motifs’, and that at a deeper level ‘Life = aggression’ and ‘War = bloody and necessary trial’ (CW: 235). By consequence, it now opposed those who warned ‘against pushing futurism to its logical conclusion’ (CW: 233), that is, to stop considering literature a purely aesthetic category, and to bridge the gap with the act of real-time war itself. Why try to disturb the intellect if now a moment had come which he obviously endowed with the exact same political cultural function assigned earlier to futurism: to root out all of Italy’s ‘enemies: diplomats, professors, philosophers, archaeologists, critics, cultural obsession, Greek, Latin,

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history, senility, museums, libraries and the tourist industry’? (CW: 236). Why continue to claim that futurism was not a ‘mere’ literary phenomenon limited to the language game of that sphere, while the veritable condition for this claim’s actualisation lay in the structural dislocation of society that the war would inevitably bring about? Why bother with creating another nation, or even a state, when now the end of both seemed near? When his 1913 ‘Programma’ appeared in reprint in 1915, this sentence was added to it: ‘The futurist movement in the fields of literature, painting and music is currently suspended, owing to the poet Marinetti’s absence in the theatre of war.’37 Futurism had become war. Marinetti was right to suggest that the war would lead to both another state and a literary sphere structurally dislocated. Technically, the war indeed gave rise to another state, but that Marinetti failed to at least explicitly recognise the precise nature of it prefigured the ominous post-war shifts in his discourse, when Marinetti would try to legally formalise his own futurist state (of war). When Italy entered the Great War against the Germans and Austrians, this happened by a seemingly ‘normal’ legal manoeuvre: parliament had ratified the King’s proposal to install a state of emergency, which gave the King and the army exceptional powers to rule, and which reduced the seated government to an executive legislative organ, not of the people but of the ‘interim’ military regime. However, in the Albertine Statute of Italy’s kingdom, the state of siege was not mentioned, and as such parliament had placed power completely outside the law, giving the King extra-constitutional legislative power.38 Technically, therefore, the state of exception was a paradox in Italy: it made the executive government an extension of a force outside the law, while bracketing the democratic legal system and severing its ties to civil society. Thus the Salandra, Boselli and Orlando governments followed one after the other, because they failed to arrive at an internal consensus, fearing to meet the wrath of the electorate once the war was over. Yet the war went on, and their governments remained mere executive and no longer democratic organs. As political officials were thus given the power to reorganise and improvise with the function of socially sedimented spheres, they recast the functionality and range of their language games as well, as we will presently see, for Marinetti’s discursive practices during the war are apposite in this respect. Because legislative power came to rest outside constitutional law, the state of exception further entailed the suspension of all civil rights. Citizenship stopped to exist, and in the face of politics was reduced to ‘malleable’ material, corporeal presence left at the grace of the authority to be ‘moulded’. The state of exception thus gave way to the legal or political actualisation of Marinetti’s project,

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to a body politic in which centre-stage was given to the ‘homo sacer’ or ‘bare life’ as Agamben calls it, ‘the one who may be killed and yet not sacrified’, because he or she falls outside any frame of reference or discursive ritual.39 As horrific as it may be, then, even in legislative terms Marinetti’s literal championing of war made sense. The war forced the ‘intellect’ to step down, and left subjects only as bodies – but kept them as such. Soldiers, for example, were frequently executed if they failed to take up commands to attack. On the front, there were no war newspapers, and soldiers were forbidden to enter cinemas and bars, even when on leave. About six million Italians were thus conscripted in the army. With morale low and food in short supply the dominant anti-war sentiments in political culture before the war only gained strength. It took until December 1917 for the government to take minimal initiatives to care for the families left behind. Meanwhile, on the home front, industry was preparing a post-war economic crisis and inflation without an equal. Fiat became the largest producer of trucks and lorries in Europe. The state in the meantime bought raw materials such as steel and coal at ridiculously high prices, and, being the sole consumer of industrial goods, it ordered production at any cost. Workers at home experienced bread shortages. It was only in the last ten days of the war that Italy could reclaim Trent and Trieste.40 There was, in short, little to be exhilarated about during the war. Marinetti may not have been fully aware of the exceptional legal context of war, but he certainly was quick to enlist in the army. The price in human lives paid in the end by futurism was considerable, yet Marinetti successfully managed to stay afoot. This was mainly due to the fact that his active service at the front did not quite resemble that of common soldiers. As shown by Giovanni Antonucci’s The Futurist Spectacle in Italy (1974),41 Marinetti became an itinerant ambassador making propaganda for the war, a state employee almost. Traces of this abound. He was allowed to move in and out of the war zone as he pleased and freely travelled from the south to the north of the peninsula. He gave speeches on futurism and war, Italy and patriotism, and attended futurist ‘synthetic’ theatre evenings all over Italy, organised by futurist minions.42 The literary sphere, it transpires, became an extension of the political sphere, as agents in both defined themselves as working toward the same goal. In this wartime merger-institution Marinetti’s literary production proved rather modest.43 His relatively low number of publications had various causes, obviously, but it mainly tied in with the regular literary market’s collapse, most publications, as we will presently see, having to pass official political control. Yet Marinetti’s ‘absence in the theatre of war’ and his

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momentary suspension of futurist literature can also be traced back to his own aesthetic of writing. He had prefigured that living life to the fullest in the act of war came close to living out the futurist dream, and given that he now suggested that his words were to be taken literally, the texts he did print in this period have to be read as indicative of the real ‘work’ going on in war. From his bellicose pamphlet L’orgoglio italiano (Italian Pride, 1916), for instance, it is clear that he was exalting his creativity and believed that once the war was over, a revolution was destined to unchain.44 Such texts suggest that he was content to identify with a social imaginary that equated ‘Italy’ with a repressive military regime. Perhaps because publishing and distributing texts became increasingly difficult, but no doubt also to reach the illiterate audience fighting on the frontlines, Marinetti took refuge in oratory, in the reading aloud of texts. For he now also began to ‘functionalise’ the declamation of texts as another means to ‘communicate’ the élan vital. Thus, he published his manifesto ‘La declamazione dinamica e sinottica’ (Dynamic, Multichannelled Recitation, 1916), of which parts had already been written in 1914, and in which he explicitly put forth a number of requirements futurist orators had to meet. One way to read the essay is to consider it as a retort to symbolist declamation practices like those of Sarah Bernhardt. Yet the manifesto also made clear that a didactic if not political element informed it, since it was to advance the futurist ‘lecture-cum-recitation’ (CW: 193) and to supplant complacent political histrionics. Unlike in the practice of the ruling political-theatrical orators, which he had ridiculed before the war, futurist declamation was to avoid ‘the more populist, more or less ritual gestures’ (CW: 194). Instead, the futurist orator was to dehumanise him- or herself, to visibly and audibly reduce him- or herself to a selfless body, to ‘wear self-effacing clothes’, ‘dehumanise the voice’, ‘dehumanise the face’, and ‘gesticulate geometrically’ (CW: 195). With a stamina and stern conviction, it appears, Marinetti thus went on, spreading the desubjectivising élan vital. Drawing attention away from the performativity of texts to the (political) performance of texts, he made the subject as legally conscripted by the state of exception and the futurist selfless body come eerily close.45 The manifesto further gave evidence of his (ideal) programme to efface the text as a mere literary medium, and to turn it into sound or noise. ‘In the new futurist lyricism . . . our literary “I” is burnt up and destroys itself in the superior vibrancy of the cosmos, so that the one who recites must also disappear, in a manner of speaking, in the dynamic, multi-channelled revelation of the Words-in-Freedom’ (CW: 194, emphasis added). Politicisation of literature thus cut both ways, in that futurism developed its own experimental art of recitation during the war. It further

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launched its very own press organ, which had the ambition of becoming a newspaper next to the (admittedly larger) national dailies. Most of the texts Marinetti published during the war appeared in L’Italia Futurista, a bi-monthly journal launched with the aim of propagating futurist ideas among the soldiers. Because of this it was tolerated by the censor and political officials. As the editorial of the first issue (1 June 1916) reads, L’Italia Futurista aimed to become the ‘first dynamic Italian newspaper’ (emphasis added). A literary and aesthetic journal mainly, L’Italia Futurista was announced as opposing the bygone Lacerba. It introduced a number of futurist women artists,46 and published futurist free-word collages like Marinetti’s Montagne + vallate + stade × joffre (1915), bent on boosting bellicose sentiments. In Florence alone, where its editorial headquarters were led by Emilio Settimelli and Bruno Corra, it sold 1,500 copies by mid-1916.47 According to Settimelli, its total print run added up to 20,000 copies. This suggests that the journal could finance itself, although it is quite possible that Marinetti pitched in.48 Futurism thus once again tested the barriers of what literature could afford. It proved successful in reaching at least part of the army and the soldiers. Marinetti during the war forged rather close ties to the Arditi (or ‘daring ones’) in particular. A specially trained and dressed faction within the army in no way comparable to common soldiers, the Arditi formed the military advance guard or reparti d’assalto. Cult figures in Italian popular culture, many Arditi came to admire the futurists, and vice versa. Both excelled in violence and both did not give a rap about social convention. Their relationship has been the subject of numerous books,49 mainly because the Arditi would prove essential to Marinetti’s attempts at launching his own political party after the war. L’Italia Futurista, futurism’s own ‘newspaper’, became the (albeit purely discursive) birthplace of the Partito Politico Futurista, the Futurist Political Party (henceforth FPP). On 11 February 1918, that is, before the FPP had even materialised, Marinetti published its programme in L’Italia Futurista. A brief discussion of its main points is certainly worth the effort. 2. Italy, sovereign, united and indivisible. A revolutionary Nationalism intent on the freedom, well-being, physical and intellectual improvement, strength, progress, greatness and pride of all the Italian people. (CW: 271)

Marinetti here specified that his earlier programme for an indeterminate or overdetermined ‘Italy’ as a nation, as an ever-changing body of subjects allowed to develop their own ‘strength’ and singularity, had not changed. In stark contrast with his earlier political pieces, however, he then posited a nine-point agenda for a new state, whose authority would

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be grounded in purely formal power, on registering the élan vital and putting it into law. 4. The transformation of Parliament through the equal participation of industrialists, agrarians, engineers and businessmen in the government of the country. The lower age-limit for deputies to be reduced to twenty-two years. Reduction of the number of lawyer-deputies (who are always opportunists) and teacher-deputies (who are always ultra-conservative). A Parliament that is free of weaklings and scoundrels. Abolition of the Senate. If this rational and practical Parliament fails to yield positive results, we will abolish it altogether and bring in a technocratic government without parliament, a government composed of twenty technocrats elected by universal suffrage. We will replace the Senate with a Supervisory Assembly made up of twenty young men under the age of thirty, elected by universal suffrage. And instead of a Parliament full of incompetent orators and irrelevant academics, moderated by a Senate full of has-beens, we will have a government of twenty technocrats stimulated by an assembly of under thirty-year-olds. There would be equal participation of all Italian citizens in government. Equal and direct universal suffrage for all citizens, both men and women, on a broadly-based list system, using proportional representation. (CW: 271–2)

Marinetti could have stopped after the first paragraph, but the subsequent paragraphs suggest that he already foresaw the failure of the ‘idea of representation’. Curiously, it is only here that mention is for the first time made of universal suffrage. Abolishing Parliament and the Senate, just how universal suffrage could make any difference in choosing between selfless technocrats, between bodies, was left pending. Government, he in any case suggested, would coincide with his reformed parliament of technocrats (consisting of experienced industrialists, engineers, and so on.). No mention whatsoever was made here of poets or artists. The fact that he called for the introduction of proportional representation is important to note, too, because we will see that he thereby unwittingly cut down on the possible success of the FPP from the start. In the remains of his political agenda two important indeterminacies were inscribed. The first is within point 5, which is interrupted by the interjection ‘(censure)’ (Censura, TIF: 154) – a reminder of the fact that the state of exception was still in place, and that even Marinetti’s pro-war newspaper had to prostrate before the power of the censor. The second is between the above quoted point 4 and all other points, because in technical terms the former addressed constitutional law, while the latter addressed civil, penitentiary and other facets of legislation. Undecidable, therefore, is whether or not Marinetti’s constitutional reform was to come first, as a condition for the other points to be realised. The fact that this constitutional reform was presented chronologically early – point

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3 argued for an educational reform, for a rationalisation of Italian production and the making of a technical/technocratic Italian, literate and gymnastic – may suggest that it was a precondition. If so, then we are left wondering what the precise status of his Party was. If, purely theoretically, futurists would gain a majority, then would this Party not immediately coincide with government? As he put it himself a year later before the 1919 elections: ‘Political parties are almost always destined to become illustrious corpses’ (CW: 299). Why or how would the FPP differ in this respect? Would it not first reform the state through violence, not to slide into barbarity again, but to install once and for all a system that could ‘stimulate’ (impose?) subjective sovereignty? And of whom exactly would this Party consist besides futurist artists and writers? All of these questions went unanswered. Yet we have some reason to believe that the constitutional reform was to come before all the other proposed measures in the manifesto, many of which strike as progressive. They would be imposed through the force of a new constitution on the electorate. Voting for his party was voting for a new state. And after the war, Marinetti would make this Leninist moment rather explicit. As to the other reforms proposed in the 1918 programme of the FPP, they include the abolishment of the ‘institutions’ of marriage, the family and bureaucracy. They proposed, once the Austro-Hungarian empire had been dismantled, to down-size the army – though Italy (of course) had to be prepared for the imminent threat of war at all times. The unified ‘legal Italy’ would again have to be decentralised, land-ownership centralised, and men and women were to become equals in the work place. Much attention went to the repatriation of the ex-combatants, who would be taken care of by the state by way of taxes and ‘voluntary donations’ (CW: 274). Point 10, finally, stated that foreign ‘dangerous, unpredictable’ industries would be expelled. Promoting gender equality, and the abolishment of several institutions prohibiting emancipation, Marinetti’s programme might have come across as progressive. But it mainly abolished. On close inspection, the manifesto offered nothing but a clean-sweep: it expelled all ‘foreign’ forces, and aimed ‘to stop emigration’, thus closing Italy off, dismantling its state, centralising landownership and even education – for children would not be nurtured and educated in the family but in state institutions designed for the task. Read attentively, then, this text announced a bigger change to come: a new futurist state. Then, the following paragraphs close the manifesto: The Futurist Political Party that we are founding today, will be clearly distinct from the Futurist Art Movement. This latter will continue its work of modernization and strengthening the creative Italian genius. The Futurist

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Art Movement, the avant-garde of Italian artistic sensibility, is – this goes without saying – always ahead of the slow-moving sensibilities of the people. It remains, therefore, an avant-garde that is frequently misunderstood and opposed by the majority who are unable to appreciate its astounding discoveries, the brutal frankness of its polemical expression and the impulsive daring of its intuitions. The Futurist Political Party, on the other hand, senses our present needs and interprets precisely the consciousness of our whole race in its purgative, revolutionary urge. All Italians, men and women of all classes and ages, can belong to the Futurist Political Party, regardless of whether or not they have any artistic or literary understanding. This political program signals the birth of the Futurist Political Party, called into being by all those Italians who today are fighting for a more youthful Italy, freed from the millstones of the past and of foreigners. We will sustain this political program with the élan and courage that hitherto have characterized the Futurist Movement in the theatres and piazzas. And everyone in Italy and abroad knows what we mean by élan and courage. (CW: 275)

As the final, somewhat enigmatic sentence of the programme suggests, the FPP was by no means separated from the ‘Futurist Art Movement’, contrary to what Marinetti tries to push through. We in fact know what he meant by ‘élan’ and ‘courage,’ and we also know that already before the war he himself had come to bracket the very idea of futurism being a ‘mere’ aesthetic movement. Marinetti, rather, responded to the popular image of futurism as a bunch of rabble-rousers. Indeed, as even a report from the Prefecture of the Province of Rome to the Ministry of Interior evinced, ‘futurist activity in the political arena is still tainted too much with the extravagances which in the past were to be found in Futurist art and literature.’50 Whereas Marinetti before had been the subject of occasional secret service reports, by January 1919, the Ministry of Interior had sent out orders to Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, Ferrara and Genoa to keep a close eye on what exactly this ‘literary’ party was doing, as different fasci throughout the country’s cities began to crop up like mushrooms. And the reports coming back to the government were quite contradictory. From Ferrara news came that ‘I can assure you that this Association has only literary and artistic aims.’51 The Quaestor of Rome, however, reported that although the futurists’ ideas ‘amongst the masses . . . do not go down too well . . . it cannot be excluded that in the course of time this Party could gain considerable political force, especially by winning support of students and young people in general.’52 As these responses to the actual, post-war erection of different fasci of the FFP illustrate, an as-yet indeterminate entity had been introduced in the public space that within the sphere of politics lacked distinction. Futurism was no

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longer seen just as a literary phenomenon. Even political officials began to describe it as a ‘political-artistic-futurist movement’.53 The censor’s decision to strike certain patches from the 1918 programme during the war may have prefigured the unease. That the reports cited here were noted after the war foreshadows that then as well the role of literature would be up for negotiation. The closing paragraphs of the 1918 programme of the FPP are crucial, in that they show perhaps the most remarkable landslide in Marinetti’s discourse: the end of war, of futurism de facto, in sight, futurism would extend its de-aestheticised agenda into practical politics, introducing de jure the élan vital in society through the material reform of the state. It signalled, most importantly, that futurism was transforming itself from an engaged revolt to organised revolution. The 1918 programme was, strictly speaking, the most practical political text Marinetti would ever write. Its style – formal, playing by the rules of the political language game – suggested that it was written by a (radical) politician. That this text was produced in a sphere where politics structurally articulated itself with the literary sphere is a striking contingency. For it suggests that in the wartime merger-institution, the language game of politics also permeated Marinetti’s discourse. Marinetti was convinced that the vitalist energy and disturbance of intelligence caused by the war would inevitably extend after armistice. As he phrased it in 1919: ‘The war has simply unveiled the consciousness of four or five million Italians, now returning from the war, enriched with a political personality.’ Having lived and experienced life as bodily matter, not from books, but in the flesh, they were ‘now . . . worthy to govern’ and to be governed (CW: 302). A vitalist state of mind had been introduced into political culture by the war and a political consciousness had been awakened, which would not simply evaporate, but intervene under the guidance of the FPP. Presenting the FPP as such, Marinetti touched upon the curious status of parties in practical politics. For, within the language game of politics, parties can be called neither fully subjective nor collective. They hover between the citizen/subject – claiming to represent his or her ‘interests’ – and the state, part of whose task is to create hegemony. As Frank Ankersmit observes, in political theory the ‘political party has always remained a stepchild’, because the real question theory always sidesteps is whether the party ‘should . . . be seen as an extension of the citizen or, rather, as being to some extent part of the state?’54 In the first case, authority is grounded in subjective sovereignty; in the second, in collective sovereignty. Now, until this point Marinetti had always grounded his own politics in the former. And there are clear indications that he

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desired to keep this as such. It is interesting to observe, for example, that the noun ‘Partito’ was frequently used interchangeably with ‘Fasci’. Fascio, literally ‘bunch’, here came to mean group, and was reminiscent of pre-war politics, during which politicians of various casts in parliament had formed an interventionist fascio demanding that Italy enter the war. The same overdetermined noun, however, also referred to the Sicilian fasci founded in the 1890s by radical intellectuals who intended to be a political mouthpiece of peasants rioting against the gentry and Mafiosi exploiting them.55 The very term, in brief, gave evidence of the ‘seamless’ shift by which Futurism = War, now read Futurism = Party/ Fasci. It transmitted ‘energy’, ‘élan’ or ‘life’, the latter emanating from the body politic, and in particular its subjects who during the war had been given the chance to experience their bodily ‘singularity’. However ‘unworldly’ we may find Marinetti’s logic, it was thus in the citizensubject that his FPP grounded the authority (auctoritas) it meant to formalise in law. But here, of course, a strange step was taken. For actually going against his non-essentialism elsewhere, Marinetti thereby also shifted actual power and necessity (potestas) to the domain of law. What is more, as the 1918 manifesto implicitly announced, his Party would be but an intermediary political agency, eventually to be substituted by a new state. The issues his (somewhat wide-eyed) programme thereby triggered are rather complex. As an experiment in political thought, his manifesto was highly contradictory. How on earth do we conceive a state in which all forms of collective sovereignty are turned taboo? How would he legally impose freedom on subjects while at the same time safeguarding their rights as citizens? The silence of Marinetti’s 1918 manifesto on all these issues is telling. Still, two weeks before the armistice on 11 November 1918, L’Italia Futurista was shut down and Roma Futurista, explicitly announced as the newspaper of the FPP, took its place. Its first issues reprinted the programme of the FPP. Abbreviating the intervals of his incisions within political culture, Marinetti’s democratic moment drew nearer.

1919–21: Toward Montecitorio, and Back Marinetti was not mistaken when he suggested that the Great War would leave its mark on post-war political culture, even about a revolution nearing. Not the élan vital, however, but far more mundane issues led to social unrest. Woodrow Wilson’s redrawing of the European map at Versailles, by which Italy lost Dalmatia and Fiume, left little of the credibility of the democratic officials in government who, before 1915 in

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favour of the war, had temporarily functioned as executives during the war. Italy was close to bankruptcy, and the lira decreased in value fast. The ex-combatants returning from the front found little if no support or financial aid. Already before the war, an ‘intellectual proletariat’ had begun to form itself. Many classicists, lawyers and physicians before the war eventually found a post in government administration. Now, with an empty treasury, most graduates were destined for unemployment. Workers and agrarians began food riots, granaries were looted and shops plundered. July 1919 even saw a twenty-four-hour strike of solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The period between armistice and the national elections of November 1919 was thus anything but stable. Here, in fact, began the so-called biennio rosso or red biennium (1919–20), marked by mass strikes and an imminent civil war, leaving many members of the middle class and the industrials with nothing but fear and frustration as their businesses were looted and production was brought to a halt.56 Politicians tried to react but abysmally failed to arrive at articulating an authoritative social imaginary. Early in 1919, a large contingent of elected democrats called for a Constituent Assembly, so that a new draft of the constitution could be drawn up, with further abuse of power avoided, the electorate better represented – Marinetti was thus by no means an isolated figure. The Catholics finally launched their own mass party, the Partito Popolare Italiano, which was very hostile toward the ruling liberal-democrats. The Socialists, through their paper Avanti!, continued to preach a bolshevik revolution, as they had done during the war. In response to these irreconcilable and deeply divided oppositional mass parties grown out of the press and the war, the liberal government introduced universal male suffrage in December 1918, and proportional representation, which as we saw was one of Marinetti’s demands as well. This reform divided the country up in fifty-four constituencies, from which about 500 deputies, figuring on a party-list system, would be elected. The effects of the reform, which finally granted mass parties legal bearing, could at the time not be predicted, but it led to a thorough change in political practice. Prior to the representational list-system, an obscure and often corrupted ritual existed in which local prefects ‘bought’ single candidates with certain promises coming from Giolitti’s (and subsequent) governments, so that they would enter government or parliament and the old liberal system could perpetuate itself. (This explains why Marinetti before the war was taken seriously when he said he was considering entering parliament.) The fact that it was now mandatory to stand on a party-list to be elected made politics more transparent and brought constitutional recognition of the fact that parties as

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political agencies would henceforth mediate between the state and its citizens/subjects. Yet it also allowed for the country’s political cultural rifts to surface. It gave the electorate a means to voice its discontent with the liberal regime, which had been in power ever since Giolitti.57 In the course of just a few years, in fact, it would lead to the disintegration of the liberal regime, because neither this regime nor the new mass parties, which had always been a (growing) oppostional force outside of practical government, were equipped to deal with a mass-electorate. Given this political instability it is no understatement to regard the 1919 elections as a moment coinciding with official politics extending its hands out to the electorate and calling upon it to make clear what it desired, in what were, moreover, highly unpredictable conditions due to the suffrage reform. Italy had become a country un-representable. Marinetti had his response at the ready. On 11 July he entered Montecitorio, Italy’s parliament, disrupting proceedings ‘in the name of the Combat Groups, the Futurists and the intellectuals’ (CW: 329). Merely hinting at his own alternative, this event above all performatively endowed him with representative authority: I protest against your politics and I shout at you: Away with Nitti! I say that the ministry of saboteurs of our Victory can continue no longer, with its humiliations of our officers, this ministry which defends itself with carabineers and policemen! Your cowardice is the most grotesque mockery of the sacrifice made by our soldiers who despise you and categorically refute your right to represent them any longer. Shame on you! The young people of Italy, whose mouthpiece I am, cry out at you: You are disgusting! Disgusting! (CW: 329)

Thus denouncing parliament and the seated Nitti government – one of many during the biennio rosso – the right to represent, Marinetti was never to re-enter Montecitorio before or shortly after the elections. Practically, the reform of the voting system meant that Marinetti was, from one day to the next, faced with a near impossible task. To represent at least something in the approaching November elections, his list would have to gain a foothold in as many constituencies of Italy as possible, which explains why fasci throughout Italy emerged. Although the historical data surrounding the FPP have been well documented,58 the notso-minor detail of the suffrage reform is commonly left unmentioned. Its effects on Marinetti’s discourse and discursive practices can hardly be missed, though. For it made it necessary to augment the visibility of futurism within the public space, at any cost. Hence, he turned to his two most loyal supporters, the Arditi, and the students, not as voters, but as political campaigners. His most renowned partner was of course Mussolini, who in March 1919 established the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan. Uniting the student groups, ex-combatants and futurist fasci

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was the idea of an ‘Italian Revolution’.59 To spread this idea in political culture, Roma Futurista, ex-combatant papers such as L’Ardito and La testa di ferro, and Mussolini’s very own daily Il Popolo d’Italia were mobilised. Far less conventional ‘publicity’ tactics were employed as well. In widely reported and violent acts of proto-fascist squadrismo, these groups, including the futurists, also introduced the ‘revolution’ on the street. The Sorelian threat of violence thus continued as the act of violence, only now in times of international peace. In mid-November, a few days before the elections, the police searched Marinetti’s apartment and found large amounts of ammunition and weapons. Marinetti, together with Mussolini, was arrested and imprisoned. Mussolini was released a month before Marinetti, who only on 9 December was allowed back on the street. The elections, in which the fascists, Arditi and futurists eventually joined forces on a single list, ended in disaster. In Marinetti’s home town Milan less than 2 per cent nominated them. This meagre result shows what a marginal if not piddling political force futurism and Mussolini’s fascism were in 1919. However, to prepare ourselves for a reading of The Untamables, Marinetti’s political writings before the election also warrant scrutiny. While we will never know what Marinetti’s project would have boiled down to in practice, we do know exactly what his response was to the deeply felt and seemingly irresolvable political aporia. In a series of publications after the armistice, dislocated by the suffrage reform and by a number of new ideas gaining weight in political culture – most notably the idea of revolution, informed by the one in Russia, and the rise of bolshevism – Marinetti redrafted and expanded his 1918 political manifesto. In his revised programme, the idea of an ‘Italian Revolution’ (as opposed to a ‘Marxist Revolution’) took centre-stage, because it allowed for the identification of ex-combatants and fascists. New was that he now added that futurism, as a (momentary) party, would lead to a different state for which the name ‘Futurist Democracy’ was coined. ‘Our Political Party wishes to create a free Futurist Democracy’ (CW: 281). His views on how this was supposed to occur eventually settled in Democrazia Futurista: Dinamismo politico (1919) and Al di là del comunismo (Beyond Communism, 1920), which was written in prison.60 His so-called improvised ‘Il discorso di Firenze’, or ‘Address to the Fascist Congress of Florence’, of October 1919, left out from both volumes, deserves a quick glance as well, because it drove a clear wedge between Mussolini’s discourse and his own. Of all his political writings printed between the armistice and the November elections, ‘Vecchie idee a braccetto da separare’ (Old Ideas that Go Hand-in-Glove and Need to be Separated) deserves attention

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first. ‘Old Ideas’, first published in May 1919 in L’Ardito, then in Roma Futurista and later in Democrazia Futurista, is significant not so much for what it politically proposed, but because it displayed how Marinetti’s pre-war poetic was now also explicitly introduced in his political writings. ‘Old Ideas’ shows us the core strategy underlying all of Marinetti’s post-war political writings: desemanticisation. The essay begins by stating that political speech before futurism ‘always lived by commonplaces, or, better still, according to ideas that went stupidly hand-in-glove, ever linked by an illusory kinship which, in reality, doesn’t exist’ (CW: 297). Political language, in other words, drove on arbitrary linguistic conventions, culturally and socially reproduced. These conventions set out nets of purely arbitrary analogies between signifiers, which ‘in reality’ – a recurrent interjection in The Untamables as well – do not exist. In his poetic of parole in libertà, Marinetti had tried to convey exactly this point: the only real force grounding signification was the intuitive experience of the élan vital, which cultural convention intelligibly masked. Thus, Whenever you say ‘Monarchy,’ you immediately think of the army, of war, of the Nation and of patriotism. And this is fine. Yet it is absurd, when for example, you say the words ‘Nation,’ ‘patriotism,’ ‘war’ and ‘dedicated army’ you should necessarily associate them with a reactionary monarchy . . . Ideas that go hand-in-glove but which must be ruthlessly separated . . . Whenever you say ‘democracy,’ you immediately think of unwarlike, humanitarian, pacifist ideas, of pietism and quietism, of renunciation, anti-colonialism, humility, internationalism. (CW: 297)

This, too, Marinetti proclaimed, was utterly silly. To desemanticise, to undo key signifiers in the language game of politics of their conventional tenor and codified associations, was thus foregrounded as the main operation his political writings would perform. To this aim, his texts, albeit now by means of conventional syntax, would spin their own associative nets, resemanticising common political notions. And ‘democracy’, his essay exemplified, would be a central signifier in this context. Or, as he phrased it elsewhere: ‘Every country has its own particular concept of democracy’ (CW: 347). The new Italian democracy he put forth would be an extension of the élan vital experienced during the war. Law, grounding its authority in the body politic’s experience of nature, would thus translate nature into another state/democracy out of necessity (postestas). In the title essay of Democrazia Futurista, which first appeared in Roma Futurista, Marinetti posited that other European nations have an ‘unconscious democracy’, because there the body politic consists of ‘blind . . . masses’ (CW: 300), of citizens who had not had the fortune to live in a country with such ‘strong’ and ‘heroic’ individuals

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as Italy, and who (this is implied) had thus also not been able to experience their (bodily) singularity and presence during the war. Although the essay, tainted with eugenics and Social Darwinism, does not make this explicit, his alternative, a ‘conscious’ and true (vera) democracy, would be an eroded ‘democracy’, which in articulation with a set of other signifiers would ideally come to refer for a real-time, stately object. ‘Old Ideas’ conspicuously highlighted how Marinetti subtly injected his aesthetic of writing into the language game of politics. When we recall that Mussolini at this point opportunistically took over many of the resemanticised ‘notions’ Marinetti put forth,61 this injection cannot be cast aside spuriously. As the essay also claimed, ‘life itself creates, controls, and shapes ideologies. Every political idea is a living organism’ (CW: 299). In yet another way: law and political practice had to mirror nature/ideologies, out of necessity. If already in his 1913 ‘Programma’, he had implicitly tried out the (asyntactical) employment of parole in libertà, and if in his 1918 political manifesto of the FFP he had announced that he would re-code or formalise the élan vital in political terms, ‘Old Ideas’ now made explicit just how this was going to happen: through the folly of becoming (discursive) matter allows for. By the same token, the essay prefigured how Marinetti’s political writings from here on ran futurist ‘politics’ aground. It had been one thing for Marinetti to de-aestheticise literature because futurist texts were not simply a literary phenomenon, but a gauge for a universal élan vital – and his own writings’ lyrical personae had always tended to denounce the full potential of this (‘poetic’) ontology. The violence thus imposed on others remained symbolic, authorial authority an option, not a necessity. Now, however, by claiming to chart the ‘particular democracy’ Italy needed, and by regarding himself as a selfless conductor of the élan drawing up a democracy through the force of law, violence was bended into a practical political entity. By coupling the violence of the élan vital to the force of law, in fact, the omniscient, omnipotent lyrical persona of his literary works toppled into a figure resembling a possible dictator forcing his call to be free on the body politic. It was, in other words, only from this point onward that Marinetti began to aesthetice (if not ‘literacise’) politics by handling the ‘material’ of law as if it were literary matter left to his discretion to mould. Marinetti, the writercum-legislator, thereby defined his (ideal) structural position. Indeed, adding to that aestheticisation was that, whereas his 1918 manifesto had suggested that government would consist of technocrats, his current writings put forth futurist writers. He thereby harked back to his pre-war views, which had announced that futurists would one day make ideal ‘selfless’, heroic politicians. Before, however, Marinetti had

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talked about reforming political speech or representation. Now he was speaking the political language game (or at least trying to), and by consequence he was reforming law (or at least proposing to). Whereas before there had still been some incertitude about whose side the FPP stood on – the citizen’s or the state’s – Marinetti now left little doubt about it. The FPP’s first initiative upon electoral success would have been to perform a veritable constitutional reform which equated Party and State; futurists with Futurist Democracy. Futurism, in sum, would have become the State. Or, as he put it in Al di là del comunismo, ‘life . . . is an art form’ (CW: 341). Thus, while before he had deaestheticised literature, Marinetti now aestheticised life or nature. The shift in accent may have been subtle, but its effects were unmistakable – and terrifying, because now the nation came to be substituted by State/ Party/Democracy. ‘The nation is nothing other than a vast political party’,62 and in the best of worlds, a world that grounded authority in nature and necessity in law, the Party became the State. ‘Sì! gli artisti al potere! Il vasto proletariato dei geniali governerà!’ (TIF: 485). In ‘Il Discorso di Firenze’ Marinetti in 1919 simultaneously made clear that there was a substantial difference between fascism and futurism.63 This speech was read at the first Fascist Congress, and summed up a number of ‘grave omissions’ (CW: 331) from the fascists’ electoral programme, that is, ways in which the fascist agenda differed from the futurist one. These covered just about all proposals Marinetti put forth after the war. First, unlike fascism, futurism desired to legally impose absolute freedom. Its objective was ‘maximum freedom, maximum well-being’ (CW: 281). It is important to read this goal as an oxymoron (forced freedom), which The Untamables can be said to powerfully circumvent, as we will presently see. Directly countering Mussolini, who at this point also surreptitiously upheld contacts with Catholics, Marinetti also called for a ‘devaticanisation’ (CW: 330). As before, the only admissible religious moment was ‘Italy’, which unlike the divine entity of Catholicism would not remain out of reach for mortals. Rebuilding the ‘Italy’ of tomorrow,64 Italians had to realise that eschatological closure, now-time, lay in life, and not after death. Marinetti further noted that the fascist programme had paid attention to constitutional reform, by proposing to replace the senate by a ‘Consiglio nazionale tecnico’ (National Technocratic Council, TIF: 532). This was a term taken almost verbatim from his 1918 programme, in which Marinetti had offered to abolish the senate, and to replace it with a ‘Supervisory Assembly’, consisting of universally elected technocrats. After the war, however, Marinetti shifted ground, calling instead to substitute the senate with a ‘Board of Initiatives’ or Eccitatorio. This body, consisting of young technocrats

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replacing the current ‘senile gerontocracy’ (CW: 332), would operate as ‘a subversive, a rebel or an agitator’ (CW: 331) at the side of the government. Thus, whereas before his other senate was to ‘stimulate’, it was now to subvert and agitate. Finally, Marinetti turned to the most important ‘omission’ from the fascists’ programme, that is, its constitution of government, which, in his own 1918 FPP agenda, had coincided with a board of technocrats gathered from the industrial, scientific and other spheres. Now, however, Marinetti’s proposal to redraw the Italian constitution looked rather different. Now, ‘the artists . . . would at last turn Government into a selfless art, in place of the narrow-minded system of thievery and cowardice it is at the moment’ (CW: 337). Almost the exact same words were uttered by Marinetti before the war. He was paraphrasing himself, re-inscribing his words into an altered context. As shimmered through in the final paragraphs of his 1918 manifesto, the FPP was inseparable from futurism as a (de-aestheticised) art movement. In his introduction to Democrazia Futurista, Marinetti reiterated that the FPP would have nothing to do with ‘literary’ futurism.65 But whereas in late 1918 this assertion was still ambivalent, Marinetti’s discourse now gave evidence of it being simply untrue. Indeed, crucial here was his introduction of the notion ‘proletariato dei geniali’ or proletariat of geniuses in 1919. We have the ‘threat’ of bolshevism to thank for its introduction, since it was through a revision of historical materialism’s class-essentialism that Marinetti arrived at fleshing out this new ‘elite’ class, eventually endowing it with the prospect and power of government. Just as his pre-war discourse conceived of nations as overdetermined, non-essentialist entities, he now criticised Marxist epiphenominalists for reducing identity to economic class-positions.66 Desemanticising the Marxist repertoire, he pitted his own ‘proletariat’ of Italian geniuses against the dictatorship of the majority or working class. T/his proletariat, an oppressed body of young (potential) artists in need of liberation, was a social minority, which when projected onto the public space came close to coinciding with the ‘intellectual proletariat’, the unemployed graduates. Marinetti estimated that ‘there are, without doubt, two or three hundred thousand of them throughout the country’ (CW: 305). Their talents were kept latent or subdued, he claimed, by traditionalism and ‘institutionalised obstructionism’ (CW: 307). Marinetti therefore emphasised the need to abolish the educational system, which tells boys (no girls) what and how to think, and the family, whose father-figure as a rule ridicules his son’s urge for creativity. Extending his reform of government, in which now artists and not technocrats would come to take a seat, and possibly appealing to a specific demographic group,67 Marinetti thus suggested

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that the unemployed of today would become the politicians of tomorrow. Several of his essays and speeches before the November elections reiterated, for instance, that the young were to be stimulated (forced) to write. Great ‘Open Exhibitions of Creative Talent’ (CW: 307) had to be organised thoughout the country as well. Here, art production and thought were to become fully freed from any outside restrictions and rules – ‘no matter how absurd, idiotic, mad, or immoral’ the works read or exhibited would be (CW: 308). Thus creative talents would be prepared for rule, as their aesthetic sensibility was fostered. Here, we arrive at a juncture, because, obviously, many options still lay open. Did Marinetti in effect propose constructive practical reforms? Did he project a future for Italy? Yes, and no. There were in fact few political issues of the day that were left untouched in Marinetti’s preelection writings. Even the ‘question of language’ was dealt with – his response to this issue, as could be expected, was to let it be, to let each speak his or her own local variant of the Italian language.68 Yet Marinetti’s economic reforms, curiously, were the most concrete. To overcome the economic crisis, he not only proposed to put Italy’s art historical monuments and artefacts on sale. He also advocated the use of ‘wartime method’ (metodo di guerra, TIF: 413) in the economy, that is, to produce ad hoc. Thus, the uneducated could build parts of machines, cars or fleet ships, for instance. These parts could then in turn be assembled easily when individuals just followed the plans, supervised by a minimum of trained experts. Clearly, he thus turned to the wartime state of exception as an (economic) model. Such martial methods, Marinetti believed, were practical and pragmatic. If a need arises, just produce in response, and get whoever to do it. Once again, Marinetti refused to devise any long-term vision of how Italy would be reconstructed. ‘Humanity’, as ever, was ‘marching towards an anarchic individualism’ (CW: 339). An ever-changing public space and body politic, the state was to intervene when and as it saw fit, and to represent it, so it appears, as efficiently as possible. And who were better equipped here than the futurist free-wordists, with their selfless mode of report and recitation skills? It is difficult to make Marinetti’s vision concrete here, but it is certain that law, too, as the mirror of nature, would be improvised. ‘History, life itself, the world, belong to the Improvisers’ (CW: 339). It was, by consequence, to the politicanti, to the amateur politicians whom Mussolini addressed as well, that political power logically (and out of necessity) belonged. Futurist Democracy would be an amateur democracy, not just in political but economical terms as well. ‘Thanks to us’, he wrote in prison, ‘a time will come in which life will not be simply a matter of bread and toil, nor of idle existence, but a

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work of art’ (CW: 350). That work of art, though left fully blank, loudly resonated the state of exception and its improvised, extra-constitutional power. His work of art would remain a ‘democracy’, however, because the people would still have the universal right to vote, not for parties but artists. As one of the Arditi succinctly observed a year after the elections, ‘futurist political activity was only a passing phase of literary experimentation’.69 Indeed, Marinettismo had not been quite successful at reproducing the élan vital in literary texts. When it subsequently turned to politics and law with a similar aim, it proved about as effective. But experimentalism cannot be properly judged in terms of efficiency or practical success. Still, it would appear that Marinetti, the doctor in law, had been hoping for some form of success. The non-event of the 1919 elections coincided with the closure of Marinetti’s practical political experiment. As a letter from Giuseppe Botai to Mario Carli of early 1920 illustrates, Marinetti simply gave up on politics.70 All the more curious, therefore, is that the most political moment was yet to come: The Untamables, an allegorical novel that tried to ‘remember’ what went wrong up to this point, and beyond.

The Untamables: Allegory of the Political The Untamables was published in the summer of 1922. It was written during the latter half of 1921 and first half of 1922. Marinetti considered the novel one of his ‘most subtle and complex philosophical statements’.71 A year after its publication, Benedetta Cappa, futurist painter and Marinetti’s wife, described it as a ‘prophetic religious and social fable’.72 Marinetti himself seemed less certain on how to define it: ‘Adventure novel? symbolic poem? science fiction? fable? philosophicalsocial vision?’ (SW: 164) These words, from his introduction to the novel, ‘Lo stile parolibero’ (Free-Word Style), make clear that he had no term for the mode or genre the novel belonged to. Because it can be read as an ‘abbreviated’ or parasitic version of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comedia, however, taking us on a voyage from inferno through purgatorio to paradise (and back), allegory seems the suitable term – political allegory, to be precise, because while the novel never names (other than futurist) political positions, it certainly aspires to bring across a political message. As Marinetti put it years before in his ‘Manifesto tecnico’: ‘allegory . . . is the sequence of second terms of a number of analogies, all logically linked together’. And this is precisely what The Untamables presents: a possible, other world, built on the ‘second terms’ of politics. It dips us into a world quite different from ours but ‘logical’ in or by

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itself (like the game of Rock Paper Scissors almost) – with a few undecidabilities inscribed, of course, that will inform my reading here. In his introduction to the novel, Marinetti tries to align his book with his free-word poetic, but we can only wonder who he was trying to fool here. The introduction has some value, recapitulating briefly his pre-war poetic, too.73 Yet the text it introduces has little to do with parolibero. True, on rare occasions double-nouns can be spotted – ‘light-sound’ (luce-suono, TIF: 983) or ‘men-beasts’ (uomini-belve, TIF: 937) – but their presence is negligible. Not uncommon are larger additive word formations such as ‘note-lagrime-stelle’ (notes-tears-stars, TIF: 977) that recall the peculiar word-sentence in Zang tumb tumb’s ‘Dune’ section: ‘sei- / statuneroe’ (TIF: 789), which Franco Gisuti translates as ‘you havebeenahero’.74 Such motsfondus or fused words-in-freedom were rare in Marinetti’s writings before the war. Only in 1924 would he actually write a manifesto on them, ‘Après les mots en liberté’ (After Words-inFreedom, circa 1924), later developed in the ‘Manifesto dell’aeropoesia’ (Manifesto on Aeropoetry, 1931). 8 anima in una bomba (1919) and a number of his poems in the anthology I nuovi poeti futuristi (The New Futurist Poets, 1925), too, contain examples of these ‘motsfondus’.75 The Untamables, however, is not quite the ‘Free-Word novel’ we would expect from a writer who in the introduction claims that his words ‘split the history of thought and poetry neatly in two, from Homer to the last lyric outburst on earth’ (SW: 164). No, if this novel splits anything, it is Marinetti’s literary oeuvre. For, as I have already hinted at, it displays a rather weak ‘editorial omniscience’,76 in that its narrator on rare points intrudes into the narrative – most notably by continuously colouring the focaliseds we observe through characters with the interjection ‘in reality’ (in realtà). The narrator is still there, then, but unlike in many other texts of Marinetti, ‘Marinetti’ the ‘character’ seems to have found his questionable introduction to the novel sufficient. It appears the author had a story to tell, and for once decided to look at his words alongside the reader, not in front of him or her. It is precisely this role Marinetti grants us that I aim to exploit here, reading his novel somewhat against prevalent interpretation and against the grain. The Untamables was presented as containing great historical truths in Marinetti’s introduction, and is commonly interpreted as voicing Marinetti’s disappointment in politics, as it allegedly failed to reiterate the earlier bold claims about futurism’s politically empowering role. Although almost no word in Marinetti’s introduction holds true, consensus dictates that the introduction was correct in qualifying futurism, and thus also this novel, as ‘decorative art’ (arte decorativa, TIF: 927).77 I second that the novel tries to come to terms with Marinetti’s

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(modest) career in practical politics, but not that it would plainly voice disappointment. Nor do I agree with critics who claim that the novel marks a clear return to pre-futurist and post-symbolist writing tactics. True, unlike many of his previous works, this novel was for the most part written in traditional syntax, as nearly all of Marinetti’s post-war works were – even his 8 anima in una bomba. Romanzo esplosivo (8 Spirits in One Bomb. An Explosive Novel, 1919), in which written out dialogues and prose patches embraced parole in libertà as well as an illustrative free-word collage.78 Syntax, in other words, again imposed itself after the war, just as it did in his political writings. Yet precisely these writings, and especially the programme outlined in his ‘Old Ideas’, suggest that the return of syntax need not be read as a return to his postsymbolist work.79 Free verse, for example, remained an absent force until well after 1922. It is on the novel’s narrative surface that a set of indeterminacies first show themselves. The Untamables takes place on an island. In the opening chapters we are introduced to the bestial Untamables – recalling Jonathan Swift’s Yahoos, but also the Ardito-futurists – and their guards, in the Dune of the Camels. In a dry and hot desert-like environment, some 100 Untamables are kept in a gigantic pit by muzzled black prison guards led by one Mazzapà. The Dune in which the pit is located is the remnant of a dried-up Oasis where the maternal Moon once reigned. The virile Sun destroyed it. In the pit, the Untamables are chained to the neck. They bathe in their blood and the blood of the raw meat Mazzapà and his companions feed them. In a grotesque mode, Marinetti evokes how upon feeding them, the black guards protect themselves from the unbridled anger and death drive of the Untamables. As the latter climb up, the former pierce their flesh with bayonets. The Untamables are as fierce for their guardians as they are among themselves, and are shown to us in the depth of the pit in orgiastic tableaux. They beat and bite one another, yet they treat their peers, unlike their guards, as equals. Their violence is not fully uncontrolled in that a peculiar democratic ethos governs their practices when they are among themselves. A number of Untamables are introduced to the reader in more detail, for example: Curguss the Priest, Kurotoplac the Schoolteacher and Mirmofin the Surgeon; the latter taking on a leading role further on in the narrative. In a tell-tale contest, these three ‘men-beasts’ compete to show who had been the cruelest in his former life, after which the whole contingent of Untamables takes a vote. The game is won by former Turin surgeon Mirmofin, who recounts how during the war he ‘conducted’ an orchestra of five interns gratuitously torturing dying men on the operating table in the name of science (SW: 189–91). Mirmofin’s

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very explicit story, which recalls the repertoire of Decadentism, epitomises the ‘heroic’ instinct which the Untamables could be said to represent. It is in fact tempting to read them as the embodiment of Marinetti’s identity-politics. Mere bodies receiving blows, the Untameables were all rich, important men before their entrance into this strange desert-like environment, so we are told. In a process we never get to witness, they were thus desubjectivised, almost. For in their present state, they are still wise (sapiente), as the guard Mazzapà notes, thus possessing wisdom the guards do not have. What this wisdom entails is left unclear. Moreover, ‘they’re always talking about their past, but they can’t tell what happened last night’ (SW: 173). Suffering from short-term memory loss, then, the Untamables live in the distant past and the present – in the latter lacking any identity, being pure bodily entities. Each night they are allowed to leave their pit, led by their muzzled guards, who in turn have to answer to the Paper People or Cartacei. These Paper People, on paper boats built of ‘books of empty philosophy’ (SW: 195), come on shore at the Dune every night. They are led by ‘King, Emperor, God, His Majesty the Contradictor’ (SW: 194), whom we never get to see. His mentioning suggests that the Paper People are to be read as the official ruling political force on the island. The Paper People are what their name signals: ‘their robes shaped like yellow paper cones with writing on them. Each wore a circumflex cap, in reality an open black book turned upside down . . . They look out from grey, flat, eyeless faces, their mouths opened round like ciphers or O’s of amazement’ (SW: 194, emphasis added). Hence, if the Untamables can be read as allegorical figures of instinct, the Paper People can in a similar way be related to intelligence/official politics. Whereas they treat the guards with disrespect, they are depicted as having a pacifying effect on the Untamables, as if to suggest that intuition, a third (political?) faculty is about to take hold of the Untamables. Again, therefore, the suggestion is raised that we are witnessing the gradual formation of a futurist collective or community. The Paper Persons guide the Untamables, together with their guards, to the fringes of the last remaining Oasis on the island where all the other Paper People live. On the verge of the Oasis, their ways part, and the Untamables and guards are left alone to enter the Oasis. When night falls, so we come to learn, the Untamables each day witness how the vegetation at the outer fringes of Oasis transforms itself from an impenetrable, metal and solid mass to a green and soft material. Entering the Oasis through its softened-up vegetation, they hear and feel strange creatures. What at this stage seems totally irrelevant is that as they walk on (in realtà) they cross a ‘wide black river’ wherein cacti stand waist-deep. (This finicky detail will gain importance.) The deeper

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the Untamables move into the Oasis, which is described – like all other spaces in this novel – with meticulous precision, the more clearly they feel an ‘impossible tenderness’ taking hold of them. Wondrous sounds and noises are heard all over. They encounter rather peculiar birds, who fly into liana as if these were strings of a harp, making music that awakens a ‘thirst for knowledge’ in the Untamables. Then they reach the great Lago della Libertà or Lake of Liberty. Four chapters are used by Marinetti here to describe how the Untamables enter the Lake, and along with their guards come to form a single community, literally holding hands, singing with nature (with nightingales flying over) in a polyphonic ‘contrasto’ gradually dispensing with dissonance, in ‘insinuating, compelling music’ (SW: 201). In this event, the body parts of all Untamables light up, literally beginning to give off light. As they thus get out of the Lake, having reached ‘maximum freedom’ and ‘maximum well-being’, they no longer see, but feel and hear their way. Physically enlightened, a body of political leaders has been formed – the remains of the novel leave little doubt about this. Yet, remarkably, there is not a pitch of violence, nothing reminding us of bellicose sentiments, of sentiment whatsoever, in fact. Only joy or pleasure (goia, TIF: 982) and strength or power (forza, TIF: 980). This might allude to Marinetti coming to terms with his own poetic. For here, singular subjects other than the narrator are presented to us. Having formed a closely knit corporeal circuit or community, those liberated bodies have power within themselves, or at least streaming through them. The narrative takes a turn. The Untamables feel that a great site of splendour is about to materialise, higher up, behind the trees, in the middle of the Oasis. And, indeed, finally, they reach the City of the Paper People. Fluid and phosphorescent paper houses rise up, a long and wide avenue with paper traffic opens up to them. They follow the avenue as it gets narrower and drops down, and they observe fumes coming out of the sewer. Finally, they reach a tunnel at the avenue’s other end, clearly hearing industrial noise coming from below. They descend into the tunnel, and before they know it, they have entered the industrial underground: a gigantic paper mill recalling Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In this ‘inferno’ (SW: 225), we are introduced to a new ‘People’: the Fluviali or River People. Their bodies are very supple, almost liquid, and they wear black rags reminiscent of the ‘wide black river’ the Untamables crossed upon entering the Oasis. (There, everything was almost fully dark, which might explain why these River People were not spotted.) It is thus suggested to us that from the point the Untamables entered the Oasis a Black River runs into the City, consisting of a fluid work-force exploited by the Paper People. The noise in this industrial inferno is deafening, and

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it takes a while for the Untamables to understand that they are actually witnessing a revolution in the making. They have only just arrived in the city when in its underground a revolution breaks loose. The River People, supported by some of the Paper People, demand the right to flow into the Lake of Liberty! The ‘allegory’ is of course again rather obvious. Marinetti, it would appear, is doing over his ‘Italian Revolution’ of 1919, as if he were trying to figure out where things went wrong as the futurists came in. A caesura – the only one in the novel. Whereas in chapter 17 we are still underground, in chapter 18 we suddenly find ourselves, with the Untamables, on the main avenue of the Paper City again. The River People, too, have reached ground level. It has begun to rain and along with the rain they have risen up from the underground. There is an important authorial intrusion: ‘Not that it was really raining. Just a few drops’ (SW: 229, Non Piovera, in realtà. Soltanto qualche goccia, TIF: 994). We then learn that ‘a few yards from here rises the waterproof Cardboard Dam that is frustrating the hopes’ of the Fluviali to flow freely into the Lake of Liberty. Hence the River People’s objective: to break the Dam keeping them from flowing out of the City, into the Lake. That we have already seen this River actually running out of the City, thus indicates that the Dam marks its endpoint, separating City/River and Lake. In one of the book’s fresher passages, we then see the Cartacei preparing for the conflict. Gigantic books fold open, ripping their own pages, each of which becomes a Cartaceo or Paper Person. The books’ authors are named: Rousseau, MAZZINI, Spinoza, Pascal, Macchiaveli, Vico, Nietzsche . . . The Untamables, witnessing all this, look on in amazement, and suddenly stumble upon a book reading ‘I MANIFESTI DEL FUTURISMO. MARINETTI.’ This book, along with the others mentioned, marks one of few moments in which the allegorical mode is cast aside. And (of course) the book immediately strikes the indomitables with inspiration. It is the final push needed for this Futurist contingent to be baptised futurist proper. Mirmofin, in fact, decides to lead the revolution himself. Hence, by a puncturing of the allegory here, the Untamables are named futurists. The water in the meantime seems to have risen and reached the Dam a few yards away on the fringe of the City, for all action and agents have come to a standstill. A series of political speeches follows, in which one political Paper official after the other tries to dissuade the River People from flowing out of the city, yet their sibylline speeches are hardly understood by the masses. Mirmofin opposes them, interrupts their speeches, and calls for a revolution. He is the first to start dismantling the Dam. But then something inconsistent within the narrative’s logic

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happens. Thus far, every event can be spatially mapped out. The novel in fact displays the acute sense of topography typical of Marinetti’s writings in general. Within the allegorical universe of The Untamables, space is in fact quite consistently treated in Euclidean, ‘conventional’ terms. As is liquid matter or water: the rising River follows the common rules of gravity and communicating vessels (rising when it rains, for example, and stopping when its embankments arrest its movement). Now, however, when the Cardboard Dam breaks, instead of flowing out of the city, the narrator shows how the whole Paper City floods. The River People before this point were nonetheless described as being contained within the City, without a flood. To the reader, who has already seen the Untamables crossing the Black River earlier on outside the City’s limits, the whole event of revolution described here makes little sense. For either the ‘revolutionary’ flooding of the city had already occurred before it is described, or the events outlined here transgress the rules of the novel’s logic. This is not to suggest, evidently, that the events evoked would not abide by Marinetti’s earlier oeuvre. La Conquête des étoiles (1902), for example, already played with metaphors of sea and waves as symbolist tokens of man’s tempestuous nature. Moreover, The Untamables in part shadows the narrative structure of his early play Roi Bombance (1904).80 Dealing with an allegory, we could further interpret the wave here as one of many ‘fluid’ tropes Klaus Theweleit analysed as associated with the Socialist ‘threat’ in his classic Male Fantasies (1984). Yet it proves worthwhile to stick with the text, according to whose logic this one ‘improvised’ event of revolution is inconsistent. The narrator does not leave us long to contemplate this narrative inconsistency, however. As the River finally flows out of the city, into the Lake of Liberty, it also washes the Untamables away, who just before dawn reach the vegetative outskirts of the Oasis as these begin to turn to steel again. Back in the Dune, in the glaring sun, it is as if nothing has changed. Mirmofin kills the negro guard Mazzapà, the Untamables are thrown in their pit again like beasts, and a temporal circle is brought to a close. The Untamables have apparently forgotten everything. The final chapter, through which the novel is commonly read, is entitled ‘Arte’. It is about one page long, and describes how one of the negro guards is staring into the pit, hearing Mirmofin remembering: ‘I can see it now, here inside me, everything that happened last night in the Oasis and at the shores of the lake!’ In terms recalling Marinetti’s introduction, the final sentence reads: ‘Thus, stronger than the crude dissonance of Sun and Blood, it was finally the superhuman, cool Distraction of Art that caused the metamorphosis of the Untamables.’ This closing sentence is highly ambivalent. To what ‘Distraction’ does it refer? To

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the Lake of Liberty, where the Untamables came to sing in unison? Or to the Futurist book the Untamables stumbled upon in the City? How can it be that, until we picked up this book, the Untamables had each night gone into the Oasis to forget what happened, and now, suddenly, remember? How can Mazzapà be dead at the end and alive in the beginning? Why is it that respected experts such as R. W. Flint claim that this novel displays a ‘cyclical theory of history’ (SW: 246)? Who says things have not changed, too, behind the steel vegetation surrounding the Oasis? Who, in fact, knows anything for sure at the novel’s end? Even the instance narrating is cast in doubt at the end, because ‘Arte’ opens the possibility that (in realtà) we have been listening to Mirmofin trying to reconstruct events from the very beginning – and in this scenario, we are not witnessing a cyclical repetition, but a single stream of action ending in Mazzapà’s death. And, why, on what grounds, do critics claim that this is a book of despair, bracketing change (through art), if the narrative itself first poses and then transgresses the space and time conception set out? Why, above all, is this a book showing political disappointment according to critics? If this novel reflects on Marinetti’s prior political exploits, then where is the law, for example? Where is the Party? No doubt about it: to answer all these questions, the novel invites us to read it again. Obviously, the main narrative nexus or nodality of The Untamables is the revolution of the Fluviali led by the Untamables. Once we leave the novel’s superficial story space, to bring into scope its discourse space and modalisation of events, an additional set of elements point us to that revolution’s indeterminacy. As we saw, for example, the narrative performs a moment of gapping or caesura in the passing from chapters 17 to 18. In the former the Untamables are still underground, in the ‘inferno’; in the latter they are back above ground, in the City’s phosphorescent quarters, in the rain. This ellipsis is announced in the final paragraphs of chapter 17, where we read that the Untamables hear a ‘vast rustling and wailing, which recalled the noise of the Oasis, even more so the sound of people rioting’ (SW: 227). The suggestion raised here is that the ‘music’ heard in the Lake of Liberty before was not just that of nightingales and other animal-like creatures or birds, but also that of people rioting and striving for liberty – of mass-produced noise coming from a distance, and in the Lake uplifting the brutal instincts of the Untamables to the level of intuition. The difference between noise and music has always been a debated issue. Yet the Futurists did have a clear idea of what set them apart. As Marinetti’s companion in sound-art, Luigi Russolo, for example put it in his manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913):

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Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power to remind us immediately of life itself. Musical sound, a thing extraneous to life and independent of it, an occasional and unnecessary adjunct, has become for our ears what a too familiar face is to our eyes. Noise, on the other hand, which comes to us confused and irregular as life itself, never reveals itself wholly but reserves for us innumerable surprises. We are convinced, therefore, that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling noises we will enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected sense of pleasure.81

Readers going through The Untamables’ chapters dealing with the events in and around the Lake of Liberty will notice that almost all kinds of noise Russolo’s manifesto subsequently enlisted can also be found in the novel. Much like Russolo, the novel thus presupposes that noise can be annotated, that ‘every noise has a note – sometimes even a chord – that predominates the ensemble of its irregular vibrations’ in tempo and in intensity,82 and that as such noise can be partially mastered, used in art as a creative principle leading to pleasure. It is from a collection of noises (notes), indeed, that the novel in these chapters, in a crescendo movement, composes chords in polyphonous yet accidental harmony. This harmony reaches its peak at the end of chapter 12, after which a silence follows, caused by Mirmofin’s plea to be quiet and listen, and chapter 13 (‘L’orchestra vegetale’ or The Green Orchestra) opens. Quite subtly, we are here made aware of the fact that what the Untamables are hearing is not only the noise of nature, but a ‘supernatural music’ (SW: 212, musica soprannaturela, TIF: 976), that is, noise made by human toil and civilisation. In fact, the sounds they hear, as previously suggested, are noises of the imminent revolution in the City. As the wind blows through the leaves of the trees, ‘long, lowing, underwater notes, full of torment, menace, rapture’ are heard (SW: 212), and as the nightingales begin to sing – ‘tio tio tio tix . . . tinoo tirradin cicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicici’ – the narrator notes that it is ‘as if they were trying to reach the depths of human elation and grief’ (SW: 213). Elation and grief, torment and rapture: we here come to understand that the Lake of Liberty and the immense feeling of Goodness, of a unison of singular or sovereign subjects, is not the product of complacent morality, but of a ‘superhuman’ moment beyond good and evil, a celebration of both the cost of rioting whose sounds are transported on the wind’s wings, and the desire for change. That we are indeed hearing sounds of rioting softly shimmering through – sounds which the Untamables, later on in the ‘inferno’, at first cannot make out because of their volume – is emphasised at the close of the thirteenth chapter, where an at-this-point enigmatic interjection alludes to a repetition of events still to come or perhaps even

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coinciding with events chronologically anterior: ‘in raptured hearts . . . Remembering . . . like seashells’ (SW: 214). In the subsequent chapter, this act of remembrance is again stressed when the voice of a Paper Person ‘alone and recognizable’, says, ‘I praise you all, Untamables, and you, Negro guards, because you’ve discovered the great rhythm. You are all worthy of entering the City’ (SW: 216). Referring to the great cosmic rhythm, a musical concept impossible to imagine outside of time or the flow of events, the Paper Person at once alludes to a ‘cyclical’ or rather universal, Nietzschean ‘return of the same’, and to the dis- or re-covery of memory of events dispersed in time. In chapter 15, we find Curguss, one of the Untamables, describing how he had ‘felt like the music were burning my face. And it really was. Then I couldn’t see anymore. Now I can see with my heart’ (SW: 219). The stress in later chapters again shifts towards to visual (in synaesthetic articulations as ‘light/sound’, SW: 220) – until the revolution unchains – for all the Untamables and their guards now feel certain body-parts lighting up ‘with a white, studious, scientific, laboratorylike light’. Just before reaching the City, they go through a patch of the Oasis steeped in total darkness, and along with them, we as readers are prepared to ‘look’ in a ‘laboratorylike’ fashion at what comes next: the strange cartography of the City and the indeterminate direction in which the broken Cardboard Dam makes the revolution flow. Quite, as they reach the City, it is ‘lying open like a huge golden book’ (SW: 220). A book within the novel thus opens to us, an aporetic zone to which all prior and later events outside its ‘pages’ invite us to return. Perhaps for the first time in his oeuvre, Marinetti here manages to grant some agency to the reader, who is to appeal to his own memory of events passed and still to come. Bergson’s vitalism returns with a vengeance here. Yet it is not the Bergson of Creative Evolution (1907) which Marinetti’s pre-war poetic drew on. It is Bergson’s earlier views of time and memory, in Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896), that are important here.83 In Time and Free Will, Bergson introduced his famous concept of longue durée or real duration, to denote that on a deeper level of consciousness, mental life is a qualitative sequence not of separate (quantitative) individual states, but a seamless whole in which all of these states permeate one another. In or through memory, Bergson argued, we can access this real duration, since it stocks prior experiences for us. Our brain, however, compartmentalises the multi-linear and -layered flow of foregoing perceptions and recollections. Because of that, Bergson posited, memory cannot be reduced to the brain, which deals with perception in quantitative terms. Memory, he speculated, may therefore well be an intersubjective entity not fully belonging to the body, but ‘a

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reality’ transcending it. ‘It is here, in the phenomenon of our memory, that we may come into touch with it (durée) experimentally.’84 Memory in Bergson thereby became the gateway to true liberty, since it shows us that our actually lived experiences form part of a much larger process of becoming, and that no event is ever a pure repetition but always a singular event. ‘To act freely’, is ‘to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration.’85 It does not take us long to recognise that forces much akin to mémoire and durée are operative in Marinetti’s novel. On a surface level narrating a set of logical and separate events fractured by a ‘revolution’ disturbing perception, the novel plunges us into a deeper level showing us how individually perceived events are interlocked and permeated in a seamless whole. This whole is certainly not cyclical, but part of a process of endless becoming and renewal. In a way, the novel thereby bends our view of the élan vital or life force, locating it no longer exclusively in the body and intuition, but now also in memory. By drawing on our memory as readers, The Untamables suggests that we can arrive at a different and singular experience of events. Doubling this act, the allegorical novel itself can be read as an attempt at remembering just what went wrong in Marinetti’s prior political texts or ‘book’. And by drawing on our own memory of these events, it can indeed be shown that this novel does not merely repeat prior events in a thin allegory. It scaffolds them again for us, as experiences singular in time, events taking place differently for the first time. We have seen that it is tempting to read in the Untamables an allegorical presentation of a futurist political entity becoming. They are an ‘oppositional’ force, however, leading a revolution to overthrow the ruling system of the Paper People, members of which, as we witnessed, also supported the ‘just’ cause of the River People. Among these Paper People, we indeed find a second entity, as it were mirroring the ‘futurist’ Untamables: a veritable contingent of futurist Paper People. This faction (fascia) if not Party within the City or polis, is formed when the threat of revolution arises, as if suggesting that it is called into life, as in Marinetti’s own prior politics, to bend and ‘legalise’ the revolution. The very moment of revolution in the novel is an aporetic event – recalling in part the un-representable public space in Italy during the biennio rosso. During this period in history, Marinetti presented his Futurist Democracy as a necessity grounded in the authority of ‘life’ or nature circulating in the public space’s body politic. Marinetti’s discourse thus basically posed a link of necessity between life in civil society and law. Well, in The Untamables, this articulation is thoroughly reconsidered. When the threat of revolution arises in the Paper City, we saw, books flap open and a new league of Paper Persons is given birth to. One of the

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books mentioned is a collection of Marinetti’s own writings. Reading its pages, Mirmofin is struck with inspiration and, like Marinetti before him, promotes himself to a politicanto or amateur politician, an ‘instant’ leader. The subversives are in need of a leader, Mirmofin contends, and because ‘the great book of Futurism teaches us to make up (improvvisare) everything, even God!’ (SW: 234, TIF: 999) – as well as the law – he and the Untamables decide to lead the revolution. The narrator here pauses for a moment, concluding the chapter describing these events in hesitation: ‘Perhaps . . . because they were blind,’ they ‘had absolute creative insight’ (SW: 234). Perhaps, indeed, politicanti can begin a new and more just state, impose freedom on the body politic. Yet the novel’s further dénouement does not allow us to ascertain this: the Oasis’ fringes close off, and we never get to know how or what the revolution led to. Yet, at the exact same moment as the books (within the City/Book contained within the novel) flap open, a second futurist force seems to assert itself. Enter the Paper futurists, representing another stage or ‘singular’ possibility: the futurists already in power, within the polis’ political system. Here, then, for a second time the allegorical mode is cast aside to name an alternative futurist force. Unlike the Untamables, this ‘representative’ body does not intervene, and does not enter into an alliance with the brutal force of the Untamables. These Paper futurists have access to the law, but as they are morally ‘indifferent’ or selfless (TIF: 1006), their faction within the state does nothing, except write: On high, the Paper Futurists, unmoved by what was going on, intensified their activity as immortal lights and reigned over those wafting, luminous constructions. Almost indifferent to the great blue revolution of the River gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg People, they continued to beam up at the sky from the cones of their robes gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg those long chalk/light fingers of theirs, writing imperious words-in-freedom. (SW: 240)

These other, Paper Futurists, then, project their words onto or into the sky.86 Their words are ‘imperious’, but they are not, conspicuously, projected onto the body politic. Their necessity, in other words, is purely selfreferential and not grounded in a ‘natural’ or pre-given authority. Their words are empty, moreover, shining holes in the dark sky like stars. With this reference to stars, futurism’s first practical political goal – transformation of the nation, of ‘Italy’ – is returned to here. It is well known that Marinetti rather early on in his oeuvre cultivated an obsession with celestial bodies. Here, the comparison between wordsin-freedom and stars has more than literary connotations attached to it, however. Italy, after all, had already been symbolised in the evening star

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Hesperus (the planet Venus) for 2,000 years. The Greeks had given Italy its name (Esperia), and during the Roman victories of Julius Caesar, this name was given a political value as Caesar claimed to be a descendant of the goddess Venus, thus connoting the star-symbol with the idea of renewal and Risorgimento.87 We have seen, at the beginning of this chapter, how various options circulated in political culture to culturally renew ‘legal Italy’. While Mussolini identified with Caesar and the cult of romanità, and others opted for a discourse of negativity, Marinetti rooted authority and renewal in the subject. This is precisely what we see the Paper futurist faction doing here: no longer drawing on the necessity of law and common code, but again situating potestas in the subject, showing to others in their manifold stars that they are free; not imposing their freedom on others. The oxymoron in Marinetti’s own post-war politics is thereby circumvented. The indeterminate (physical) direction the revolution takes in The Untamables is an element that ‘disnarrates’ or erases the whole of the foregoing narrative, which thereafter persists only ‘as a kind of optical afterimage’ colouring our experience of the story.88 Indeed, the closedworld construction of the novel is here disrupted on the level of the story itself, where spatial deictic elements for the first and only time in the narrative do not fit. The ‘(Italian) revolution’ in The Untamables is thereby inscribed in the novel as if it were an ergodic moment, a ‘work-path’ comparable to the far more complex I Ching, for instance. It is almost certain that Marinetti in 1922 was not aware of the (accidental) indeterminacy in his text.89 Yet that is perhaps also the beauty of his novel: it allows us to experience past events in a different way, regardless of Marinetti’s intent. And not only events prior to the novel . . . The Untamables is an experiment in political philosophy, trying to come to terms with, to remember, what went both logically and, as far as the state of exception is concerned, legally wrong in the blueprint Marinetti’s political writings set out. Luckily, perhaps, this blueprint was never acted on by Marinetti. Yet a commensurable project was performed in later years by Mussolini, after his well-known volte face and ‘conservative’ turn. According to Claudia Salaris, there is a character in The Untamables which clearly represents Mussolini: the Paper Person ‘Mah’ or But. It is this character’s ‘opportunism’ that gives him away, Salaris claims.90 On closer inspection, ‘opportunism’ does not seem apt. Just before the Cardboard Dam breaks, this Paper Person calls out for reason and reflection. ‘Wait!’ he says, ‘This is a serious moment.’ Before deciding anything, we must study the condition of the dam and also if the new free course, which we all justly demand, might not, as I fear,

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overwhelm us . . . and with us the enlightening spirit that must guide the river to the Lake of Liberty. (SW: 238)

Thus, in a moment arresting the novel’s speedy action sequence, Mah draws attention to the indeterminacy that is to follow, and then goes on: Let us find a way of reconciling its (the River’s) right to flow freely with the continuity of the enlightening Spirit. For your sakes, for ours, for every one’s, I want the River People to achieve finally their goal of flowing in the Lake of Liberty, at the same time supplying light to the city. I am not a conservative, as you all know. I am an old revolutionary, and it pains me to say to you: Wait! because my suffering along with yours has no more patience. But revolutionary wisdom and the experimental nature of violence urge me to pronounce these dreaded words: Wait! Reflect! We’ll decide tomorrow!

This passage could be read as a call upon intelligence (the Spirit) – the hypotactical ‘But’ adding to the point – stopping the intuitive flow of revolution. Yet Mah also calls on the ‘experimental nature of violence’ and further refers to (civil) ‘right’ (diritto). This is an articulation we are quite familiar with. Mah, when listened to attentively, wants the revolution to find a legal character, to keep both the old City or polis in place, and to have a revolution, a clean sweep. Mirmofin, the orchestral surgeon recalling so many of Marinetti’s narrators, quite succinctly responds: ‘No! No! No! . . . The great tomorrow is now, here in your hands!’ And while the revolution subsequently unchains, the Paper futurists, unmoved, cast their Words-in-Freedom into the sky, writing ‘revolution’, neither ratiocinating nor regulating it. Now, there is knowledge in this narrative event, practical political knowledge, in fact, which for readers today could seem exotic or out of place, but which in the 1920s was not. Obviously, Marinetti in 1922 could not have known what was about to happen. Yet as we know, allegories over time can be read out of their original context and used as prisms through which to look at other constellations. Marinetti himself seems to have done so. We need not move very far into the 1920s to see why he may have tried to see his novel also published abroad later on, in a French translation.91 He, too, may have eventually recognised that his novel’s tenor had drastically changed. Already in 1921, after Mussolini had for a long time upheld that fascism was an ‘anti-Party’, he founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party, PNF). The party entered parliament in late 1921, while ex-combatants in part under his command enforced a return to order on the public space, taking over one constituency after another, beating and, if necessary, murdering Socialist protesters. By mid-1922, when The Untamables was published, and Gramsci’s Communist Party of Italy had

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been installed, civil war seemed nearer than ever. Prime Minister Luigi Facta requested the King to declare the state of exception, so that the officially elected regime could once again gain control over the public space. The King refused, and instead appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister, who from here on began constructing a ‘dual state’: one respecting Italy’s constitution, and one not legally formalised, repeatedly calling into life the state of exception.92 Both within and outside the confines of the democratic constitution, then, Mussolini’s ‘dictatorship’ was fleshed out. When we return to the passages just quoted from The Untamables, they seem remarkably succinct. For, indeed, Mussolini eventually did exactly what Mah proposed: he kept the democratic polis in place, and at the same time had an uncontrolled ‘revolutionary’ (but in effect repressive) force legalised. As is well known, Mussolini’s ‘Fluviali’, his private ex-combatant army, could crop up at any time, at any place. While thus having come to power democratically, he later made clear to what his ‘dual state’ amounted: ‘Let no one kid themselves in believing that I do not know what is going on even in the smallest village of Italy. I may perhaps learn about it untimely, but I will know eventually.’93 Or, how Marinetti’s dreamt-of circuit of (Italian) ‘life’ did eventually see the light of day, through politics. Agamben’s observation on life and law seems befitting here: ‘There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation into a biopolitical machine.’94 It is only by recognising the political (Lefort) – the lack of essence at the ‘centre’ of civil life – that law can become an instrument serving the people. Marinetti had always upheld this non-essence. From late 1918 onward, he, too, however, seems to have suffered from short-time memory loss. In light of all this, it is quite difficult to maintain that The Untamables is a novel voicing political disappointment. Insight might be a better term. The novel does not make Marinetti less of an enigma, nor does it explain the many contradictions in his oeuvre. Yet Marinetti’s case is that extreme that it does introduce a number of enjeux we will re-encounter in subsequent chapters in more subtle forms. The writers discussed in these chapters never went as far as Marinetti in practical politics. But, curiously, the less practical political their engagement – Van Ostaijen desired to enter politics but could not; Huelsenbeck almost accidentally entered it, never really asking for it – the more practical political their avant-garde writings will show themselves. This is all the more reason to turn to these two other writers, who, unlike Marinetti’s Parisian orientation, looked mainly to the cultural capital of Berlin for inspiration.

Chapter 3

The Paper State: Paul van Ostaijen, Expressionism and Constitutional Heterotopia

Expressionism owed much to Georg Büchner. As Paul Celan suggested in his speech ‘The Merdian’ (1960), part of Büchner’s attraction may well have come from the general questions about literature he raised. Büchner’s play Danton’s Death (1835) in particular, a tragedy depicting an activist’s disillusionment with the French Revolution, found a sympathetic reader in Celan. Drawing our attention to the apparently benign character Lucile – Celan calls her ‘die Kunstblinde’ (the one incapable of seeing art) – he quoted the peculiar retort this character utters in the midst of a heated discussion about aesthetics and political revolution: ‘Long live the King!’ This seemingly misplaced and reactionary outcry, Celan contended, can be read as ‘a counterstatement . . . that severs the “wire,” that refuses to bow before the “loiterers and parade horses of history.” It is an act of freedom.’1 A singular patch within the play, it fractures and at once defines its literary context, momentarily spinning a referential web that surges in all directions. This web makes the reader in turn somewhat of a ‘Kunstblinde’. Where and when indeed do such political citations topple from the literary language game into that of politics and vice versa? Are we not all at some stage blind to literature, taking it for something else? Similar questions surface upon reading Paul van Ostaijen. Poet, prose writer, art critic and political commentator, Van Ostaijen was almost single-handedly responsible for the breakthrough of expressionism in Flanders, the predominantly Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Like many experimental modernists coming from cultural and linguistic minorities, including the unparalleled Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland and the extravagant Catalan experimenter Salvat-Papasseit, Van Ostaijen never left any doubt about the local geopolitical stakes invested in his work. Writing in Dutch, he particularly opposed the social, political and cultural hegemony of the francophone elite in Belgium, and he even went as far as to back the idea of an independent Flemish state with

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a Dutch-speaking government. To this end, he produced often highly subtle political arguments in manifold shorter texts for journals and newspapers, but also seriously considered entering the realm of practical politics himself. Even so, Van Ostaijen regarded himself as a poet first and foremost, and, conspicuously, in his creative work and poetic, too, explored the possibility of instituting another state through literature. It is this possibility, which at first sight comes with all the naiveté characteristic of Büchner’s Lucile, that I intend to test here by paying close attention to Van Ostaijen’s immensely rich poetic and art-theoretical project between 1916 and 1921. In his short life (1896–1928) Van Ostaijen wrote five poetry volumes, two of which – De Feesten van Angst en Pijn (The Feasts of Fear and Pain, 1921) and the uncompleted Eerste boek van Schmoll (The First Book of Schmoll, 1928) – appeared posthumously. His debut Music Hall (1916) took as its main point of reference French unanimism, the movement launched with Jules Romains’ La vie unanime (1908). Like Romains’ thought and that of other intellectuals associated with the French commune of the Abbaye de Créteil, Van Ostaijen’s early poetic was based on the psychological concept of group consciousness and collective emotion, and it proclaimed the need for the poet to merge with this transcendent consciousness. Het Sienjaal (The Signal, 1918), Van Ostaijen’s second poetry book, extended the desire to speak in the name of a larger collective. This was his first proper expressionist collection, and it paved the way for a generation of Flemish poets to follow in his footsteps. More outspokenly than Music Hall, The Signal drew on German sources for inspiration. The volume’s general mindset was clearly indebted to German Activism as it could be found in journals like Die Aktion, Die weissen Blätter and of course Der Sturm, especially in the contributions of Kurt Hiller, Rene Schickele and Heinrich Mann.2 Commuting between a pessimistic outlook on the depravity of society on the one hand, and a Romantic belief in the possibility of triggering its change through art on the other, The Signal displayed affinity with the celebration of love and the ‘Welt- und Allgefühl’ found in the work of Franz Werfel, Ludwig Rubiner, Leonhard Frank, Kurt Pinthus and others. Formally, too, The Signal marked a move away from the style exercise of Music Hall. Most poems in his second volume drove on an associative strand finding its match in hymnal free verse, never attaining the formal experimentalism of August Stramm, for instance. Paying homage to the creative powers of Van Gogh as the apogee of artistic creation, The Signal drew closer to Else Lasker-Schüler’s more abstract extended tropology. As such, the poetry collection’s experimental value resided above all in the images it brought together in a collage-like

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fashion. Van Ostaijen’s third and final published volume Bezette Stad (Occupied City, 1921), which takes centre-stage in this chapter, again fully reshaped his poetic project. Visually unique, combining handwritten patches, experimental typography and various print colours, this marvellous book of poetry recalls the best of Guillaume Apollinaire and the most beautiful patches of Blaise Cendrars. With this collection Van Ostaijen recounted the occupation of the seaport town of Antwerp during the Great War, haphazardly citing objects and speech from popular culture. More than The Signal, Occupied City tore down the walls between high and low culture, but its political aspirations, at first sight, were also more modest than those of The Signal. Critics generally agree that Van Ostaijen’s final collection of poetry left readers with little more than a weak sense of hope for change in Flanders.3 It did, but what analysts have so far failed to bring out is that it was in this volume, too, that the poet finally managed to make his alternative state public to readers in the form of an ekphrastic snapshot. Van Ostaijen translated patches of Kafka, no doubt because Kafka’s shorter stories showed clear similarities with his own grotesque prose pieces. In one of these pieces readers are advised: ‘You should take all this within a kaleidoscopic landscape’ (VW, III: 350). Throughout his life Van Ostaijen indeed stressed that everything he wrote should be read as sprung from the mind of a totality thinker. He aimed to recreate ‘reality as a whole’ and to this aim placed all language games on the same ‘plane’,4 those of literature and politics included. Near the end of his short life, however, doubt set in. In one of the shortest autobiographies written in the foregoing century, Van Ostaijen briefly before his early death reported that he ‘Wrote three books: Music Hall, The Signal, Occupied City. Maybe this too was nothing more than mass-hypnosis. Who can prove that he has really read these books? Let alone: understood them. Lord forbid: understood. I myself have not understood them.’5 There was a moment of truth in these words, as Van Ostaijen not always fully grasped the far-reaching political implications of his vanguard work, as we will see. As a result, many critics have cautiously called his political thought, as it found its way into his literary work, incoherent,6 naive7 or Romantic.8 Others have outright ridiculed it.9 But perhaps the most apt way of looking at his political aspirations for literature is to regard them as a literary retort akin to that of Büchner’s Lucile, the powerless outsider who dared to intrude an extremely politicised aesthetic realm. Like Lucile’s ‘Long live the King!’, Van Ostaijen’s search for an alternative state in literature initially comes across as wideeyed. Yet like a flash of lightning it also exposes its extremely politicised context. In fact, just as Celan read in Lucile’s words an act of freedom,

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Van Ostaijen’s literary state as well can be regarded as a remarkable achievement given the politicised sphere of literature from which it arose. Where Lucile’s outcry proposed to return to the old political order, however, Van Ostaijen’s literary state, so I wish to show, offered an actual alternative to practical political issues that democratic officials were at pains to deal with at this point. Van Ostaijen’s attempt to flesh out another state through literature can be related to various currents in aesthetics and literary history that predated his work. It is undeniably so, for instance, that his project could also be read against the backdrop of a utopian tradition. It is well established that the rise of the spatial category of utopia in early modern literature historically coincided with the rise of the modern state.10 And no doubt a reading of Van Ostaijen’s literary work in light of this tradition would yield fruitful results. Yet Van Ostaijen’s state, as it eventually took shape in Occupied City, cannot adequately be termed a u-topos or non-place. By the time he began writing Occupied City (it was written between 27 July 1920 and January 1921) he had witnessed at least three modern state forms or models: the state of exception, parliamentary democracy, and a Bolshevik state. His alternative in Occupied City comes to us in relation to these other state forms, because in this poetry collection Van Ostaijen made very clear when, why, and under what judicial constraints his other state could (have) come about. Heterotopic rather than utopic, defining itself in relation to other existing state models, Van Ostaijen’s project could also be related to an aesthetic tradition that harks back to antiquity. For instance, to Plato, whom Van Ostaijen often drew on, the ‘state’ was an ideal form never to be installed in worldly politics, but only to be glimpsed at or sensed through an art serving political idealism.11 The ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’, as E. M. Butler called it in 1935, also left a mark on Van Ostaijen’s expressionism.12 Like many of his contemporaries in Germany, but also like numerous German writers from the eighteenth century onward, Van Ostaijen tended to privilege the role of art in political matters, claiming that art could play a vital role in shaping an ideal state. The argument that modern German aesthetics, like Van Ostaijen’s work, is indebted to the at-once aristocratic, aestheticist and political-democratic view of the Greek polis is well rehearsed.13 Yet Van Ostaijen’s work did not come about in the Greek polis, but in the context of a series of crises, states of exception even, within the typically modern, representational democracy. First during the Great War in Belgium, whose democracy was installed already in 1830, and subsequently, from late 1918 until 1921 in post-war Berlin, he lived through some of the most daunting moments in European democracy’s history. In Berlin, for example, Van Ostaijen

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was an exiled outsider who witnessed the November Revolution and the birth of Germany’s first parliamentary democracy or Weimar Republic. Throughout this period, his political writings never failed to draw attention to the institutional or practical side of democracy in his day, suggesting, at least, that his alternative literary state also came with practical political implications. Or, as he parodied Plato: ‘lyricism is a state-injurious disease’, and the poet ‘suffering from it cannot be isolated severely enough’ (VW, IV: 372). Occupied City, I intend to show, indeed had clear practical political, if not ‘state-injurious’ ramifications, the first signs of which were pushed into the open in Flanders during the final war years.

In Flanders Fields, 1916–18 Flemish expressionism shared with German expressionism the conviction that ‘modernity was a condition of servitude from which humanity had to break free.’14 Yet the political landscape onto which Paul van Ostaijen’s discontent with modernity was cast in Belgium during the war differed considerably from that of its German counterpart. Whereas expressionism (like Dadaism) in Germany voiced its political ambitions most explicitly in practical political terms after the Great War, particularly during the November Revolution, expressionism in Belgium gained practical political momentum mainly during the war.15 From 1916 until 1918 Van Ostaijen belonged to a group of pro-Flemish intellectuals for whom politics and literature were inextricably intertwined in a battle against the supremacy of the French-speaking elite. For reasons that will presently become clear, he was forced to escape to Berlin just before the war ended. Before this escape Van Ostaijen, along with a battery of others, believed himself to be a witness to a political tabula rasa, to a moment upon which the political arena in Flanders had been cleared, making it possible for the Flemish people to seize power and destroy the Belgian state from within. What he failed to recognise, however, was the ostentatious concentration of military power displayed by the German occupiers as they created the illusion among Flemish political activists that their people’s emancipation was drawing near. Since the instauration of Belgium’s democracy in 1830, practical politics and its state apparatuses had been in the hands of wealthy Frenchspeaking (often Walloon) officials. Bordering France to the south and the Netherlands to the north, Belgium also had a significant number of Dutch-speaking citizens in the region of Flanders. Economically, socially and culturally, Flemish citizens were set back. They were subjected to

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linguistic discrimination, for instance, which among other things entailed their being unable to receive higher education in Dutch. This language divide gained a bloody edge in the trenches of Flanders fields. Numerous Flemish soldiers of a modest background, led by French-speaking officers, met with death simply because they were unable to comprehend the commands of their superiors. These events boosted the Flemish nationalist subculture that had been developing ever since the late nineteenth century, especially among the youth. And among the latter was Paul van Ostaijen, aged twenty in 1916. The German occupier, in an attempt to let the remnants of the Belgian state disintegrate, took advantage of the Flemish frustration and endorsed through martial laws what it called a ‘Flamenpolitik’.16 It allowed Flemish political activists to collaborate and undertake several initiatives to emancipate Flemish citizens. Chief amongst these initiatives was the introduction of Dutch courses at the University of Ghent in 1916. Equally important was the launching of the Flemish Council, which in hindsight can best be regarded as a sort of puppet government with little actual leverage, installed by the Germans. Failed attempts were made to expand the legislative and judicial radius of the Flemish Council, and, conspicuously, here, too, the name of Paul van Ostaijen popped up, as we will see. Like many of his generation, Van Ostaijen cherished high hopes during the Great War, trusting that one day the German occupiers would just take off, leaving the Flemish Council in check and giving way to the autonomy of Flanders. Nothing of the sort happened, however. In 1917 Van Ostaijen was convicted to a three-month prison sentence for publicly venting his political opinions during a parade of the pro-French Catholic Church.17 (The Vatican, so he came to learn, was a state whose importance to the Germans by far outreached that of a Flemish state.) With his appeal pending, and having been involved in other Belgian state-treasonous activities since his first conviction, Van Ostaijen thought it wise in 1918 to flee to Berlin before the war ended. And with good reason, since after the war numerous Flemish activists would be sentenced to death. For several years Van Ostaijen thus mistakenly believed himself to have witnessed an ill-defined political arena in Flanders. After Belgium’s King Albert I declared a state of exception in response to the German onslaught, the old state indeed quickly perished as the Germans bulldozed the country. Yet they in turn installed a state of exception, cunningly masking its true face to Van Ostaijen during the war years. Only in post-war Berlin, where a true people’s revolution was to take place, would the poet come to realise his mistake. During the Great War, however, he benefitted from a modest boom in the field of Flemish

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literature brought about by the German ‘Flamenpolitik’. Perhaps unwillingly playing into the German occupiers’ hands, Van Ostaijen, along with other writers defending the Flemish cause, was tolerated as a proGerman propagandist. Structurally, the occupiers’ state of exception was articulated with the sphere of Flemish literature. Almost all of Van Ostaijen’s wartime texts, for instance, appeared in pro-Flemish periodicals and magazines, many of which were financed with German money18 and all of which questioned the pre-war political status quo. His poetry debut Music Hall, published in an edition of 200 copies, appeared with a pro-Flemish publishing house in Antwerp, and as a sympathising poet after Van Ostaijen’s death was to observe, students ‘in Ghent were among the first and most ardent admirers of Van Ostaijen’s poems.’19 His second poetry volume, The Signal, was also printed in a run of 200 copies and was rolled off the presses of a pro-Flemish Antwerp daily. These and many other Flemish publication channels all voiced their sympathy for a pan-Germanic empire at some point. This explains why their often modest literary outlet was allowed to pass censorship. It does not explain, however, why Van Ostaijen was so misled. While people on the streets were at pains to find food, pro-Flemish intellectuals were able to freely distribute texts often printed on expensive, handmade paper. Displaying little awareness of literature’s highly politicised condition, Van Ostaijen penetrated deeply into the pro-Flemish counterculture, and as the war progressed his political views radicalised as well. A number of his 1916 writings dealing exclusively with practical politics,20 as well as his serialised set of articles ‘Voorgeschiedenis van de Vlaamse Beweging’ (The Origins of the Flemish Movement), evince that his initial aim was to provide the Flemish people with a historical consciousness and cultural memory. The typically modern notion of ‘the people’, as an ethnicity,21 from the start came to form one of the pillars of his thought. Charting a cultural history for his people, the main objective of writings such as ‘The Origins’ was to announce the becoming of a Flemish ethnicity so far materially repressed. Van Ostaijen seemed to believe that a distinct Flemish identity would one day reach the surface on the condition that the French bourgeoisie, which was everything the Flemish people were not, had first been done away with. Thereby negating the other’s identity in a friend-foe logic, and leaving an identity-lack in the Flemish people to fill, his poetry set out to capture the ‘essence’ of his people’s identity. From the outset he also gave his project a European dimension. In ‘Nasionalisme en het nieuwe geslacht’ (Nationalism and the New Race, 1916), for example, he claimed that throughout the European arts new racial and national identities were emerging. The Flemish people were, in short, not the only minority repressed, and for

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their joint emancipation they had to unite themselves in the larger body of Europe, a European conglomerate of united peoples. A lot of hope thus went to Europe, but it was from art and literature that Van Ostaijen expected most as far as Flanders went. A brief look at his poem ‘Gulden Sporen negentienhonderd zestien’ (Golden Spurs Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen) illustrates just how closely tied Van Ostaijen’s literature and political views were. The poem was written in 1916 and was eventually taken up in his 1918 expressionist volume The Signal. Formally it is by no means representative of The Signal, but it is typical of the distinctly (and ever complicating) nationalist pitch of Van Ostaijen’s expressionism. ‘Golden Spurs Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen’ is pregnant with imagery from theodicy and references to popular views of the ‘origins’ of the ‘new (Flemish) race’. Its title refers to the early fourteenth-century Battle of the Golden Spurs, during which a modest Flemish army defeated a league of French knights. This historical anecdote had already been epitomised by popular novelist Hendrik Conscience in De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders, 1838) as a key moment of the people’s resistance to the French. (Van Ostaijen’s mentioned ‘The Origins’, in fact, claimed that here the ‘Flemish movement’ was born.) His poem, like Conscience’s historical novel, pitted and at once defined Flemish identity against its oppressor in a friend-foe logic, displacing the fourteenth-century battle to the year 1916, and then continuing: But nineteen hundred and sixteen will, side by side, smack, row upon row, witness the active army grow, 5 into a will and into an act, backs bent and fists clenched, that will hit the enemy and the night; breaks day comes dawn. Nineteen hundred and sixteen, year that became word, word that became flesh, 10 army of our country, ... Determined, we stand in battle. We stand. (VW, I: 115)

These lines subtly cast the reader into a disorienting retrospective mode. Written in, as well as about, the year 1916 (but published in 1918), the poem logically ends in the present tense, claiming that an army (the Flemish people) stands united. (The lyrical persona expresses itself in the second-person plural and within the context of the entire poem – albeit through a reference to pro-Flemish youngsters22 – clearly does so in the

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name of the Flemish people.) Yet before that, the poem adopts the past tense (lines 8–9), then again the present (line 7), only to describe what happens in 1916 in the future tense (lines 1–6). Somewhat estranging here is the combined use of the past and future tense. In conventional speech we would expect the use of the past tense throughout – thus not ‘will’ but ‘would’ to evoke the future in the past. The first six lines, written in the future tense, allude to the Flemish army (people) becoming, a process accentuated by the staccato diction and use of alliteration, assonance and repetition: in 1916 it will start aligning itself to form an army that will one day hit its oppressors. By the end of the poem, still in 1916, the army stands. In between, however, its troops are described in the past tense. If this had been a revision by the author in 1918 just before the actual publication of The Signal, this could, to some extent, hint at a retrospective aside introduced in 1918. Yet although Van Ostaijen made some changes to this poem in 1918,23 the past tense was already there in the 1916 version. Why, then, does this poem display such an estranging use of tenses? To foreground a pivotal moment in the Flemish people’s becoming, it would appear, to stress that it ‘became word’ before it ‘became flesh’. To an informed reader these events could refer to the becoming Dutch of the University of Ghent in 1916, which would develop into a mouthpiece of pro-Flemish thought. Yet in these same lines a reference can be located to Alfred Kokoschka’s influential essay ‘Von den Natur der Gesichte’ (On the Nature of Visions, 1912), which allows for a less historico-referential interpretation. Kokoschka’s essay, drawing on biblical revelatory jargon as well, reads: ‘we have to listen with complete attention to our inner voice in order to get past the shadows of words to their very source. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And then the inner source frees itself, sometimes vigorously, sometimes feebly, from the words within which it lives like a charm.’24 Like Van Ostaijen’s poetic in Flanders, Kokoschka here expressed the belief that, through words, images can suddenly and ekphrastically take concrete shape before us, showing the writer or reader things as if they are looked at for the first time. A similar revelatory experience appears to be thematised in Van Ostaijen’s poem. Lines 8–9 repeat what came before, but they displace the closure of the process of becoming (word) within the text, and then push the event outward again: ‘word that became flesh’. Here, the idea of the gathered troops materialises through language – as had been the case before with the soldiers fighting the Battle of the Golden Spurs in Hendrik Conscience’s The Lion of Flanders. ‘Golden Spurs’ thus shows itself both a thetic and a highly self-referential poem. The people is because this poem said so, today. The one ‘word’ lacking: the

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command granting the attack on the French rulers once again, an attack that would lead to eschatological closure. Despite the militarist rhetoric and essentialist identity-politics of this 1916 poem, Van Ostaijen’s political convictions at this same time appear to have been moderate and liberal. It was only by the end of 1917 that his public political interventions radicalised as well, and that he began to side with the ‘anti-Belgian core of activist collaborators, who . . . were willing to deploy violence if necessary’.25 Monitored and tolerated by the German ‘Flamenpolitik’, this faction demanded the unconditional autonomy of a Flemish state, freed entirely from the French-oriented Belgian state. The Germans granted part of the activists’ demands, letting them erect the aforementioned Flemish Council. This Council was allowed to govern a minimal set of domains, yet even here martial law always gave Germans the right to refute Council decisions. The numerous (often brief) texts Van Ostaijen composed for activist periodicals26 and ‘De nieuwe zending’ (The New Mission) – a speech he read during a ‘Conference of the Activist Youth’ on 18 October 1918 (‘Activism’ here denoting the movement of Flemish activist collaborators) – all gave evidence of a radicalisation of his convictions along these lines. In those texts Van Ostaijen frequently implied that the negation of his people’s rulers was to come first if Flemish identity was ever to show itself. Rampant and restless, he was also found willing to suit the action to the word in practical politics at this stage. When, during the final year of the war Flemish Council, leader August Borms unilaterally declared the independence of the Flemish state,27 Van Ostaijen lent his full support. He was present during the ‘referendum’ Borms set up on 3 February 1918 in Antwerp to declare the independence of Flanders. But more importantly, he was also involved in its envisioned realisation. Although actual independence never came about, Borms and a few others did make preparatory steps toward it. When plans were made to launch a Flemish state police so as to ensure the state’s internal peace and safety, if required by repressing dissonant voices, Van Ostaijen was asked to function as the police’s ‘captain-adjutant’. (The poet’s main source of income so far had been a job in the Antwerp town house, ‘second bureau’, office of ‘public security’. This office coordinated police and militia affairs. In all likelihood, this was one of the main reasons why he was asked to take the post of ‘captain-adjutant’.28) Had this state police ever been established, Van Ostaijen would have been made second in command. The few sources at our disposal suggest that he accepted the Council’s offer, and the activities he would have filled his days with can easily be imagined.

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Van Ostaijen’s poetic radicalised politically as well from 1917 onward.29 Although many of the implications raised in his writings about art and poetry during the last war years would only find their conclusion in Berlin, these writings, too, hovered around the idea of an alternative state. So much so, in fact, that it is at times hard to decide whether his politics impelled his poetic or vice versa. In his key essay ‘Ekspressionisme in Vlaanderen’ (Expressionism in Flanders, 1918) Van Ostaijen drew on Kurt Hiller’s distinction between an expressionist art intent on the ‘development of a worldview’ and an art geared at the ‘realisation’ of this worldview.30 However, and conspicuously, where Hiller put ‘worldview’ Van Ostaijen wrote ‘state’. He gave art and literature a double function: ‘the design of the future state, and the task of gradually moving from the old state toward the future state’ (VW, IV: 23). This remarkable substitution of terms, easily overlooked, shows how closely Van Ostaijen identified his role as poet and potential political official. We cannot go as far as to say that he conflated or confused both roles, however, given the fact that both the language games and the modes of production of literature and politics in Flanders clearly overlapped. In practice, literature and politics already coincided. The above quoted passage from ‘Expressionism in Flanders’ nonetheless comprised all the major questions Van Ostaijen’s project entails. How could literature design states, without adopting the rules of discourse and conduct of the political language game? And how would literature ever be considered a serious guide in practical politics? Only later, in Berlin, where he became a political outsider, would Van Ostaijen again pick up those questions. In Flanders, though, the conditional facts were these: had history been on the poet’s side then he would have assisted in the unfolding and very instauration of a new state whose legal and institutional design, apparently, had already been completed for him. And since Van Ostaijen appeared to believe that this state would one day be erected in Flanders, he decided to invest his energy as a poet primarily in creating and shaping Flemish identity. That way there would not just be a Flemish state, a juridical and administrative entity, but also an actual nation, a social and cultural imaginary animating the state’s institutional organisation. Van Ostaijen from the start thus implied the traditional distinction in political theory between states and nations, hoping to attain a nation-state. The Council (himself included) would take care of the state; as a poet he would help create a national myth. To that aim, his essay ‘Expressionism in Flanders’ accentuated that Flemish art and literature had to turn against (French) Impressionist culture, which backed up the French/Belgian state that kept under

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tutelage the Flemish people.31 An art and literature that wanted to work toward the actualisation of the future Flemish nation-state, so Van Ostaijen claimed, would have to be ‘democratic’ and ‘accessible to all’ (VW, IV: 62). What this democratisation entailed in practice, other than poetry being written in Dutch, was not made explicit, however. In fact, instead of making art accessible to all, Van Ostaijen stressed the revelatory and in part pedagogical power mounted in art by citing the image of the social pyramid from Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). Here, Kandinsky had described the spiritual life of a community by way of a triangle, the top of which coincided with an enlightened, artistic elite, the lower regions becoming increasingly materialistic. The lower regions, according to Kandinsky, would gradually move in an upward direction (making the triangle a horizontal straight line), provided (democratic) art did its job: ‘where “today” the highest top is situated, “tomorrow” is the next echelon, that is, what today is comprehensible for the highest tip only, will be meaningful and emotioninvested content for the second rank tomorrow.’32 Art and literature had to become ‘spiritual’ and ‘essential’ or ‘real’, as opposed to bourgeois art which was both shallow and materialistic.33 Kandinsky further stipulated that art and literature could only be ‘spiritual’ and ‘essential’ when they resulted from an ‘inner necessity’ (innere Notwendigkeit). To Van Ostaijen this principally meant the lyrical subject posing on the pyramid’s peak and synthesising the phenomenal world as it looks down. Thus Van Ostaijen’s poetic and literary work set out to evoke or ‘fill’ the identity of his people, which was at once inexistent (or at least lacking in the people as well as in his own writings), and phenomenal, that is, already ‘real’ or given as an essence, but unable to show itself as long as the French bourgeoisie ruled. There is reason to believe that, as the potential ‘captain-adjudant’ of the new Flemish state police, Van Ostaijen may have been confident for a while that the ruling class, indeed, would be set aside. Whence the essential Flemish ‘spirit’ would enter his expressionist writings, and how this ‘spirit’ would subsequently be adopted by the Flemish people, is less clear, however. Nevertheless, drawing on insights from sociology, he backed up the privileged position he put aside for himself in ‘Expressionism in Flanders’ by invoking Max Weber’s critique of the secularisation in the Western liberal democratic or capitalist state. According to Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), the ‘mechanised ossification’ of the masses, leaving them without ‘spirit’ (Geist), was imminent.34 For Weber, little hope of fundamental change thereby remained for secularised Western societies, unless new prophets arose. This social defect, according to Max Scheler’s ‘Der bourgeois’ (1914),

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an essay Van Ostaijen quoted as well, could only be remedied by artists and intellectuals.35 They were the new prophets in Scheler’s view, a postRomantic conviction also adopted, as is well known, by many German expressionists. Siding with them, Van Ostaijen implicitly equated the ‘Flemish people’ with a ‘working class’ bereft of consciousness too: the ‘capitalist spirit’, he wrote, could be encountered both ‘in the actual bourgeois and the aristocrat, the Christian and the social-democratically syndicated labourer’ (VW, IV: 11). Ideologically as well, then, the people did not exist. Defined in opposition to the ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘working class’ and ‘people’ in his writings were indices to a lack that required a substance coming from literature. Regarding himself as protean poeta vates frequenting the Kandinskian pyramid’s tip, Van Ostaijen’s mandarin poetic professed that in his work modern Flemish consciousness was given shape. In my poetry, my people’s spirit symbolically comes to life. My lines fill the void I mark. The poetic ‘subject’, in short, was equivalent to the ‘nation-state’, thus coinciding with the ‘people’ and the ‘working class’. The logic grounding this mandarin argument was sound to some extent: once every communal (national) or collective-sovereign worldview had been done away with, only singular subjects would be left to construct a new one. However, this was still a long way from illustrating why the lyrical subject or artist – and not, say, a politician or a working-class man – was the only subject capable of articulating a new national worldview. It is as if Van Ostaijen believed that the plain act of writing free verse somehow poured the essence of the future nation on (and off) the page. The page and the writer’s body are material. The act of reading, in turn, is sufficient to prod a reader into action. Van Ostaijen’s The Signal (1918) as well failed to give positive indications of what made for ‘Flemishness’ as such. A conceptual hollowness or silence sounded in many of The Signal’s poems when it came to Flemish collective identity. Many patches, such as ‘Aan een moeder’ (To a Mother; VW, I: 138–40), dedicated to the mother of a deceased Flemish soldier, drove on an admittedly powerful appeal to passions and emotions meant to oppose power relations in Belgium. Yet predictably such patches also failed to positively capture the essence of Flemish identity. Nonetheless, The Signal’s long title (and closing) poem did mark a substantial shift in Van Ostaijen’s poetry, which before his leave to Berlin manifestly ran ahead of his politics and reflections on writing. Taking the lyrical subject as the building block of a future Flemish state, this poem moved from his essentialist friend-foe logic to a subtly differential exchange of certain elements between the other’s and one’s own identity. The poet’s task was not, and never had been, to destroy the other (the bourgeoisie) – this

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would have been taken care of by the ‘captain-adjutant’. Instead, the poet, according to ‘The Signal’, was to select (and thus also to exclude) certain elements from within the other’s identity so as to re-align them in a new constellation or combination. Thus the way to a more affirmative counter-hegemonic narrative or myth opened itself up. The poem ‘The Signal’ brings across a double message. First of all, it stages a Kantian, ethical imperative: ‘Understand others and demand for them what you demand of yourself what you love / Sing the glorious song of the International, yet do it without denying the ethos of the other’ (VW, I: 146); ‘This is the Signal to go to the sanctifying river Jordan of our conscience, / to understand the other’ (VW, I: 147). In later years Van Ostaijen would grow critical of this pacifist message, because it entailed the view that man was inherently benevolent and good. Here, however, the imperative to be tolerant and the anthropological presumption that man is tolerant still coincided. ‘What lies outside of us is in its completeness ungraspable;’ the poem reads, ‘we must give all things the living expression of benevolence, of beauty, / we who are, at each turning point, the guides to reality’ (VW, I: 145). At first sight prophetic, professing unconditional pacifism, ‘The Signal’ thus equates lyrical expression as such with the new ‘spirit’. Say something beautiful, as I do, and you will know who (and how good) you are to others. However, the ethical imperative is preceded by a second message: the importance of identifying only with certain elements and excluding others in adjacent identities. For the narrative poem stages and in the opening lines directly addresses or seeks out a persona (‘whoever wants . . .’), thus also implicating the reader. This persona is called upon to lead the masses as a ‘guide to reality’ after he has been tested three times. First, to check his self-reliance and ability to resist any transcendent or collectively sovereign spiritual doctrine in favour of his own beliefs. Secondly, to see whether he can resist the distraction of earthly (female) temptation. And thirdly, to determine whether he is willing to sacrifice himself and let go of (conventional) ‘happiness’.36 Withstanding these temptations, the lyrical persona is then handed the task of reshaping reality, selecting from what is given that which it wishes to retain: ‘Understand the old race of the French spirit that is still growing / in the forever revived shadows of the Cathedrals of Chartres, of Reims and Rouen; / Understand the young zest for living that seeks a place under the sun in Germany’ (VW, I: 147). Without getting entangled in eugenics here, the lyrical persona thus proposes to launch a new (Flemish) nation or community matching the best European culture had to offer. In so doing, the poem asserts, not just the Flemish people but Europe in its entirety would be saved.

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Like other expressionists, Van Ostaijen adhered to the idea that writing should be a passionate expression of ‘das innere Erlebniss’. But from the outset he coupled this expressive desire to a collective political programme. Expression as it showed itself in ‘The Signal’ amounted to a process of (instrumental) sacrifice and (intuitive) selection, a craft that excluded and then re-articulated what it had saved into a collective narrative. In a way that would become characteristic of his rich but short career, Van Ostaijen’s poetic as well bore witness to this process of selection and recombination. Leaving his debut Music Hall aside, this early stage of his work is commonly labelled ‘humanitarian expressionist’. His writings from 1916 until 1918 absorbed the work and thought of numerous artists and philosophers from abroad. Some of them would have been bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble, especially within the post-war German context, where ever more clearly a Romantic-Idealist strand (epitomised by Werfel, and focused mainly on bringing across the message of ‘Menschheit- und Allgefühl’), and a more autonomist and object-oriented strand (often located primarily within Der Sturm, characterised by a more abstract, formal experimentalism à la Stramm and Lasker-Schüler) began to define themselves as opponents.37 With Van Ostaijen in Flanders, however, this bunch con brio was always tainted with couleur locale by his political ambitions. And precisely these ambitions of course made his work distinctly ‘Flemish’. In Berlin, the high hopes Van Ostaijen invested in art and literature as political media would not diminish. Yet they would be radically redefined. In Flanders, a political project, its outcome still unclear, had been born. When the poem ‘To a mother’ put (and note the quotation marks) ‘“Democracy”: we have betrayed’ (VW, I: 140), Van Ostaijen prefigured that the truly democratic state, his other literary state, was still to come. This promise was again emphasised by his ever peculiar use of tense in his work at this stage. ‘The Signal’, for example, like ‘Golden Spurs’ set teleology adrift: the poem ends in (and thereby also foreshadowed) the future anterior, that which will have been. Shortly after Van Ostaijen left for Berlin, Belgium saw the end of a four-year state of exception. In the first years after the war the impact of the Flemish movement began to show itself, because Belgium’s parliamentary democracy was subjected to important changes. Despite the tragic fate of many Flemish activists after the war, initiatives were taken to improve the life of the aggrieved Flemish people. Universal suffrage, for example, was introduced in 1920 and educational reforms facilitating tuition in Dutch were launched. The sphere of literature, too, was restored, yet not until democratic officials had ordered a clean sweep of the ‘Flanders Field’ of literature first. All remaining copies of The Signal,

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for instance, were confiscated. It is hard to imagine just how disillusioned Van Ostaijen must have been when he fled to Berlin. Yet this new city would bring other, more pressing issues to deal with.

Berlin, 1918–21 From October 1918 onward, Van Ostaijen lived for eight months in the Wilhemstrasse, which housed, amongst other official buildings, the German Reichstag. There he witnessed what he had hoped for in Flanders: a people’s revolution. He merely had to look out of his window to see what was going on in the German Reichstag. The significance of the November Revolution in German (and European) political and cultural history is still highly disputed. In Georg Meyer’s 1977 bibliography about the topic, for instance, over 2,500 titles were already incorporated, many of which gave evidence of a more than politically biased take on the events.38 Every political doctrine at some point has claimed the Revolution. It is nonetheless a quintessential event to a proper reading of Occupied City, which was published just before Van Ostaijen returned to Belgium. Therefore a few words about the November Revolution are called for. The November Revolution fell apart in three consecutive phases,39 the first of which saw the wartime state of exception in Germany lifted. The first phase was the people’s revolution of November and December 1918, and it was characterised by ‘optimistic proclamations of socialist equality and the brotherhood of mankind’.40 As the Kiel uprising reached Berlin, soldiers put down their arms on 9 November and put an end to the war’s state of exception. Along with a mass of workers and artists they streamed past Van Ostaijen’s window into an empty Reichstag. They met no resistance as they entered, because the centre of political power had been completely vacated. The King had fled the country and had left his state unattended. A truly empty political arena thus opened itself up in a society that in juridical terms had stopped to exist: no one was representing the country. The people intuitively started to re-organise the centre of political decision-making, establishing various councils which were thought to be modelled after Russian soviets in the barracks and factories. These spontaneous events will prove of importance to Richard Huelsenbeck in Chapter 4 of this book, because here in the Reichstag, albeit just for three days, the Rat geistiger Arbeiter (Council for Spiritual Labourers), led by Kurt Hiller and joined by Huelsenbeck, was erected. On 3 December, prompted by another upsurge of civil entrepreneurship, a new artists’ organisation

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took shape: the Novembergruppe, comprising various expressionists such as Max Pechstein and Lionel Feininger – the latter would become a close friend of Van Ostaijen. Our poet kept at arm’s length from the Rat geistiger Arbeiter and the Novembergruppe, however. It was not until early 1919, when the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Working Council for Art) was established by Adolph Behne, that he engaged himself in yet another artists’ organisation tailing behind the people’s revolution. Van Ostaijen was willing to function in the Working Council for Art as a ‘representative of Flanders’.41 Little is known about what happened thereafter. But this episode illustrates that Van Ostaijen closely followed the Revolution as it unfolded. Early in 1919 a fundamental power struggle began to show itself. The status of the various councils in the Reichstag so far had been unclear. They held no actual representative power, and in the course of a few weeks came to be led by an interim socialist alliance. During the peace negotiations, the sovereign had left Berlin, literally leaving the state unattended. The main socialist party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had taken the opportunity to abdicate the Kaiser, and on 9 November, led by Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann, declared the republic. The first crack in the people’s revolution subsequently came about within socialist ranks: a choice was now to be made between a proletarian dictatorship or a parliamentary democracy. This moment of aporia, of undecidability – it would eventually be brought to closure through the use of violence – prompted Van Ostaijen to formulate his own answer, we will see, in Occupied City. With the German socialists the option of a proletarian dictatorship found a voice in the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), a meeting of which Van Ostaijen attended briefly after Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered on 15 January 1919.42 Liebknecht and Luxemburg, also known as the Spartakists and pivotal within the ranks of the German Communist Party (KPD), formed a splinter group of the USPD, which in turn found its opponent in the SPD. The SPD favoured the instauration of parliamentary democracy, and emphasised that it would oppose Bolshevism at every cost. As a result of this left-wing struggle the socialist alliance collapsed and the revolution entered its second phase. Universal brotherhood made room for violence, machine-guns, barricades, mass riots and strikes. Civil war was imminent and in this second phase officials returned to the state of exception. In response to the threat, if not the actuality, of civil war, the ‘Freikorps’, headed by SPD member Gustav Noske, was called upon by the central-left government to restore order. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered. Throughout Germany, and until the month of May, short-lived revolutionary initiatives thrived.

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By the time the Versailles Treaty was signed in mid-1919, order had returned both economically and politically, and the state of exception finally made way for the Third Republic. By 1920, so it has often been claimed, expressionism died as well. Having already gone through its ‘heroic’ aesthetic experimental phase, it now also lost its political impulse, forced to re-integrate itself in the restored cultural state apparatuses.43 During this third, restorative phase of the revolution the old political pressure groups, such as the industrialists, returned, but within a new constellation: the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first parliamentary democracy. Exiled, and witnessing the birth of democracy in Germany, Van Ostaijen distanced himself from practical politics in Flanders. He did not let go of Belgian politics altogether of course,44 yet it is important, if not only logical, to read his work in Berlin mainly as a response to the practical political context in which it was enunciated. Even the most superficial of looks at his political writings quickly brings out the imprint of the November Revolution. The repeated and emphatic use of the term ‘Volk’ in German political culture and expressionist rhetoric at this time45 left a clear mark on Van Ostaijen’s own discourse, for example, expanding the referential sphere of this term so that it came to include not just the Flemish people, but the people, the masses or body politic in general. Geographically, too, his scope widened. For instance, in the grotesque prose piece ‘Een kort opstel over koloniale politiek’ (A Short Essay on Colonial Politics, 1920), he now also turned to the European colonies: Politicians who wish to distinguish themselves talk about colonial politics . . . The question pertains to the pertinence of Europe as the governess of sea and land. Is colonial politics necessary? . . . If it is inspired by a will to civilise . . . then maybe England should be given to the Masaï or the negroes of the Golden Coast . . . The superiority of these peoples, however, appears so convincingly ‘and-that’s-that,’ that it is to be expected and dreaded these peoples will not accept my offer . . . Thus we still face the question: what with Europe? (VW, IV: 395)

The ‘colonisers’ and the ‘colonised’ here could easily be substituted by the ‘French’ and the ‘Flemish’. But the broadening of Van Ostaijen’s horizon clearly also pushed his thought somewhat away from the local and particular stakes in Flanders, into a more general stance toward European politics and what by then must have seemed its universal political system to Van Ostaijen: democracy. It is this gradual shift toward the universal that I would like to explore here. Van Ostaijen closely monitored the options that had been offered just before the Revolution entered its second phase. A moment of aporia, deeply affecting the lives of all German citizens had opened itself in

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that second phase. Either society was to take the shape of a Bolshevik dictatorship of the proletariat, or of a parliamentary democracy. The public was as divided about the issue as the socialists were. Moderate groups favoured the option of parliamentary democracy, radical left-wing organisations favoured the dictatorship of the proletariat, and reactionary groups, which for a while were pushed outside the political sphere, opposed both. During their spontaneous regrouping within the public space until the end of May 1919, many workers, soldiers and artists made clear that they favoured the radical-left option.46 And Van Ostaijen, it seems, sided with them. By the end of 1920, when his poetry book Occupied City had almost been completed, our author repeatedly claimed that his work could only function within a ‘communist’ state. ‘A new – communist – society could bring: an altered perspective in art’s onlooker’ (VW, IV: 134, my emphasis). For a while he refrained from writing about the concrete institutionalisation of this ‘new’ society, which might suggest that he took its outlook for granted or even as given. Yet if he favoured a sort of Bolshevik or soviet republic, then he must have based himself on what he had seen happening during the Revolution’s first phase. After all, at this stage no one in Germany (or Belgium for that matter) really knew what the state in Russia actually looked like. Information came in slowly and in distorted form. (Typical in this respect: Lenin is scarcely mentioned in Van Ostaijen.) For this very reason, it is pivotal to zoom in on the precise way Van Ostaijen defined his ‘communist’ state. This is a task Van Ostaijen studies so far have failed to take up, although, clearly, in this cloudy interregnum – the aporetic political bifurcation on the one hand, and the distorted information flow from the East on the other – all options lay open. How, in brief, did his political writings and poetic define that other ‘communist’ state? Browsing through his political writings of this period, it is obvious that Van Ostaijen came to form his own peculiar idea of what life in the soviet barracks and councils must have been like. Yet it is also clear that he came to terms with a number of questions he had merely touched upon before in Flanders. For one thing, he reconsidered how the state, as a judicial institution, related to nationalities and ‘worldviews’ – the term he had borrowed in ‘Expressionism in Flanders’ from Kurt Hiller. In 1921, with Occupied City finished, Van Ostaijen’s political writings suddenly marked an upsurge of optimism in this respect.47 In his essay ‘Rond het Vlaamse probleem’ (On the Issue of Flanders, 1921), which once again returned to the Flemish question, he turned Marxist epiphenomenalism on its head, and claimed that it was not the distribution of wealth, means and modes of production shaped the all-pervasive ‘capitalist spirit’ or dominant ideology, but that this ideology animated

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the (ritualised and object-like) state and its apparatuses, time and again perpetuating the power of the ruling class: In Flanders the situation is as follows: the higher clergy, the aristocracy and the finance bourgeoisie are frenchified. The introduction of universal suffrage has in the end brought no change to the supremacy of this trio: official religion, hollow rhetoric and money still rule. Money has overpowered rhetoric, or better still: rhetoric has become money. Because in Flanders they belong to the same caste, this has brought little change for the working and Flemish – actually the same – masses. One votes by way of electoral associations. There the influence of the mentioned trio, or rather their ideology is immense. The influence of the bourgeoisie directly or ideologically permeates the socialist party . . . Western social democracy anxiously holds on to the democratic principle: never to leave the soil of the constitutional state. As such, it is apparently forgotten that this constitutional state – if at all real – is built on rotten soil.48

What deserves our attention here first is the puzzling interjection ‘if at all real’. States as such have little meaning, Van Ostaijen implied. By now he had witnessed how in Flanders, then in Germany, they could be done away with when ruling ideologies proved inadequate. States, he now argued, are nothing but the empty, inanimate shells of ‘worldviews’ or discourses allocating certain groups in society power over others, who in turn give juridical institutions the power to interpret the constitution and translate it into bylaws and concrete initiatives actualising them. The above quote accentuates this by locating precisely where and when the system of modern democracy was re-animated time and again: in the voting booth, during that brief moment upon which people were given the right to intervene in politics by selecting one of a limited set of legally registered party-political discourses. Voting was a ritual predetermined. People were made to know what they would vote for beforehand. A new discourse offered to the people, a rhetoric not sounding like official party-political hollowness, could bring a change to this. Van Ostaijen thus let go of any ambition to engage in technical discussions about changing the apparatuses of modern democracy – at most expressing his dislike for (ruling) party politics. As he saw it, such technical changes would come about only when the people began to re-interpret the constitution from an ‘altered perspective’. Where did this optimistic suggestion come from? The Spartakists’ uprising had failed. Had he come up with a new way of interpreting democratic sovereignty? Had he found a narrative or discourse powerful enough to re-animate the old, inert democratic state in ways unprecedented? That he wrote this while finalising Occupied City makes these questions all the more suggestive. But above all, these queries indicate that his ‘communist’ state would remain distinctively ‘democratic’. It was another democracy he had in mind.

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Van Ostaijen’s reading of Karl Kautsky’s Democracy or Dictatorship (1918) is revealing in this respect.49 Kautsky’s book, written before the Revolution came to an end, displayed a near-doctrinal belief in Marxist historical materialism. Its author was convinced that the capitalist state was about the exhaust itself, and that the economical and political dogmas of historical materialism not only pointed at the necessity but also the inevitability of a new society. It was only logical that things had to change, because they were, to put it bluntly, unfair. The social backwardness of the proletariat, sprung from the unequal distribution of the means and modes of production, would unequivocally lead to an overturning of cultural and ideological life. Kautsky, however, warned that if the inevitable arrival of this new society was not properly prepared in culture, the danger existed that it could result in a dictatorial regime denying the proletariat direct involvement in political decision-making. Socialism in Western Europe, therefore, had to lead to a democracy in which quantity of voters ruled, in brief, a ‘dictatorship’ of the majority, the proletariat. This could only happen when the proletariat, hic et nunc, was shown the necessity of coming events. Education, therefore, had to be bettered and quality of intellectual and cultural life was to come first. Intellectuals were to chip in but not to claim power themselves.50 With the benefit of hindsight, Van Ostaijen was not quite convinced by Kautsky’s cultural (pedagogical) programme as it had been formulated before the Revolution’s restorative phase. He sided with the need to elevate and enlighten the people, as well as with the necessity of avoiding a dictatorship, and thus with securing democratic sovereignty. Yet he disagreed with Kautsky’s cultural politics. Like Luxemburg he had criticised Leon Trotsky’s thought because it rested on the humanist presumption that man was essentially benevolent and good.51 Van Ostaijen did not believe that man would automatically opt to undo the present state if he was shown the ‘facts’ about capitalism and the workings of liberal democracy. In a Berlin letter to a friend, Van Ostaijen, too, referred to Trotsky, whose views ‘would not be tenable when one does not depart from the idea that man is good.’52 From his ‘Open brief aan den heer Camille Huijsmans’ (Open letter to Mr Camille Huysmans, 1920), which sided with Kautsky in addressing the Flemish-based secretary of the Second International, it transpires that he stuck with this conviction for some time in Berlin. But as the Revolution entered its third, restorative phase, outright misanthropic patches on occasion marked his thought, whenever the actual chances of a ‘communist’ state or democracy arising were considered.53 Gradually, then, Van Ostaijen moved away from the anthropological presumptions still operative in The Signal. Man was neither good nor evil, but both. The question thereby

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raised was: through what kind of force could man be made to align himself with the future state Van Ostaijen had in mind? An aesthetic force, of course. Bereft of the prospect of any position in politics, as had been offered to him in Flanders, the poet’s pen alone remained. But just what would this force propose? How would it differ from parliamentary democracy? And how would his writing match the persuasive power of given political discourses? Here, we come to the core of the alternative myth Van Ostaijen would propose: its radical redefinition of political subjectivity. In a letter dealing with the ties between politics and literature from this period Van Ostaijen tendentiously lifted the veil with regard to how his state, at least its civil society, would look like if he had his way. When invited to contribute to the newly launched Flemish expressionist journal Ruimte (Space), Van Ostaijen, by then considered the arch-father of expressionism in Flanders, was sent the journal’s prospectus. This text, among other things, stated: ‘We share the conviction that, spiritually, individual egotism is over and done with. We are tied by the belief that reality itself adequately shows how the individual always yields pride of place to society.’54 While the ‘individual’ here could easily be interpreted as the self-centred ‘bourgeois’, Van Ostaijen replied somewhat agitatedly to this passage in a letter to the editors: ‘Society as a goal in itself is absurd in my mind. Society as a means through which each individual, each man, could realise his full potential, well yes . . . Society is a means, always a means.’55 Hence, the new state, which Van Ostaijen would also come to call the ‘natuurlijke staatsorde’ (natural state order),56 would have to be organised in such a way that each subject, the bourgeoisie included, could live up to its full potential in civil society. He no longer aimed at the emancipation of the (his) people or the working class, of a collective defining identity. Instead, the liberation of the subject as such, in short, of all separate members of the body politic came first now. Collective sovereignty thus declined into the background and subjective sovereignty took its place. At first sight Van Ostaijen dreamt of a communitarian and classless society in line with the old materialist Karl Marx. In the prospectus of the journal Sienjaal (an expressionist journal the poet eventually failed to get off the ground from Berlin in Flanders), Van Ostaijen stated: ‘Technically only norms pertaining to painting matter . . . Poetry is wordart.’57 Later elaborating the prospectus to a full-blown essay entitled ‘Et voilà’ (1920–1), he added: ‘A carpenter should make a good table’ (VW, IV: 89). Van Ostaijen’s new state, in sum, would be one in which everyone would be allowed to perform the kind of labour that pleased them. His view thereby differed from the common plea among

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Berlin expressionists. Most expressionists were primarily concerned about their own livelihood and income – many of them were as poor as the common worker – while the majority of them proposed to make artists of everybody – Jedermann sein eigner Fussball being the quixotic Dada reply to this project.58 Van Ostaijen, however, did not limit his scope to artists. Parting with his own mandarin stance in Flanders, he now proclaimed that artists and writers were in no way different from other workers. In his alternative state both would be allowed to choose the kind of labour they liked, without mercantile or economic concerns. The applied arts in the Bauhaus at this time, for example, were ridiculed by Van Ostaijen for their functionalism. When his friend, the expressionist painter Georg Müche, left for the Bauhaus in late 1919, Van Ostaijen warned him ‘not to undergo too much of the pedagogic’. Van Ostaijen told him that he ‘should remain a painter and was not to engage in the pros and cons of the use of the applied arts’.59 His communitarian society thereby also differed from the (aesthetic) ‘communitarianism’ encountered in the Romantic socialism or anarchism of Gustav Landauer,60 or with more recent communitarian political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre. In Berlin Van Ostaijen no longer claimed that ‘we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity’,61 such as professional groups, nations and peers. Nor was he arguing for the introduction of a new communitarian imaginary or the creation of yet another collective identity or ‘worldview’. Instead, Van Ostaijen now radically redefined the place as well as the nature of the subject, ridding it of essentialism, and of all markers of collective identity. All subjects were singular, he now posited, and had to be recognised as such in the sphere of politics. In sum, his ‘altered perspective’ implied the political representation of all subjects as contiguous equals, standing side by side, without an essence dividing or uniting them. Not the ‘core’ of subjects, but their sensual and bodily (spatial and temporal) finiteness got pushed to the fore here, the subject’s collective identity yielding pride of place to singularity. ‘“Democracy”: we have betrayed.’ Here, we come to understand what he might have meant with this line form The Signal. Van Ostaijen’s ‘natural’ state would remain ‘democratic’. It would not fully do away with the achievements and institutions of modern democracy. Rather, it would radicalise one of democracy’s founding principles: its stress on the subject’s freedom. He meant to reconvert democratic institutions so as to give way to a radically pluralist democracy in which ‘individuals . . . have the possibility to organise their lives as they wish, to choose their own ends, and to realize them as they think best.’62 The true ‘democracy’, then, would be one in which the ruling or ‘kratein’

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(κρατειν) of the ‘demos’ (δηµος) was performed by a multiplicity of singular subjects. This one ‘law’, reminding us of the Greek polis’ democratic organisation, was, curiously, already written up by the poet in 1914: ‘We want to live our own life.’63 This utopian aspiration, much like the ‘communitarian’ production conversion he proposed, was of course not novel. Van Ostaijen knew this, too. He explicitly harked back to key figures in modern political philosophy such as Immanual Kant, or ‘Himmanuel Kant’ as he is called in Van Ostaijen’s grotesque prose piece ‘Het beroep van de dichter of qui s’accuse s’excuse’ (The Poet’s Profession or qui s’accuse s’excuse, c. 1920, VW, III: 374). In Kant’s The Contest of Faculties (1798, section 2, paragraph 9) and in his Critique of Judgement (paragraph 65) mention was already made of a ‘Staatsprodukt’ wherein all civil subjects would be ‘not just a means, but at the same time the goal’ of society.64 Evidently, to translate this idea within a democratic institution into law would bring about considerable problems. When we recall Balibar’s notion of the citizen-subject, we can say that precisely law defines subjectivity in democratic politics. Strictly speaking, therefore, Van Ostaijen’s other ‘democracy’, a state in which everyone would be free to act as he or she saw fit, called for the cancelling of law. And this is, indeed, where Occupied City will take us. A second issue needs to be addressed first, however, before we turn to this poetry collection. For, obviously, to translate Kant’s ‘Staatsprodukt’ into democratic practice would undoubtedly lead to additional problems of democratic representation. After all, how (if at all) can discourse represent everyone as equal and singular? Van Ostaijen’s poetic in Berlin responded to this challenge in a rather clever yet complex way. In ‘Wat is er met Picasso?’ (What is up with Picasso?, 1920), for the first time in his career, he used the term ontindividualisering (de-individualisation; VW, IV: 77). This was the ‘conditio sine qua non for the creation of a new style: the artist is to try to block all subjective elements, his personal taste, his own opinions, in favour of the inner logic of the art work itself.’65 Still tributary to Kandinsky’s aesthetics, Van Ostaijen here came to realise that the notion of ‘inner necessity’ could be interpreted in two ways. As he had pointed out himself in Flanders, it could mean as much as ‘the inner urge of the artist, the subject, “maître souverain”’. But it could also be interpreted as a necessity imposed by the work or text itself, from ‘the sort of building materials of the artwork’ (VW, IV: 17). It was to the latter he now turned in Berlin. Art from here on had to become an ‘architectonic endeavour’ with a view ‘to create a new style. A new aesthetic scholastic, if you wish. Strict. A bas l’anarchie. Cast away the good taste of the subject as a norm. Laws. Precise, tangible things. In

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brief, away with the artist’ (VW, IV: 77). And thus also: away with the bourgeois individual, the only positive and all-pervasive identity Van Ostaijen’s work had marked in Flanders. Only things or objects could remain. Nothing could at once contrast more sharply with his mandarin, ‘humanitarian’ poetic in Flanders and simultaneously come so near to his altered political programme. If the fully freed subject was to become the endpoint, then an art bent on bringing this message across had to liberate itself first of all from its determinate Romantic persona. This persona had to make room for the onlooker or reader so as to leave him or her alone with the artwork to experience subjectivity in a way that would be as indeterminate as possible. (As opposed to what happened in the voting booth, for instance, where everything was predetermined from the start.) Pushing the lyrical persona out of the work, that work itself now gained a more abstract edge, and opened itself up to all subjects (at least in theory). In this second phase of his oeuvre Van Ostaijen looked to redefine his ever idiosyncratic variant of expressionism by bringing in tenets from cubism and constructivism.66 In so doing, he also quickly realised that a discourse or an artwork representing every subject as a singularity was an impossibility. A specific name lacking for the kind of state he had in mind (interchangeably called ‘democracy’, ‘communist state’, or ‘natural state order’), his other state would thus have to be inscribed in a discursive context by way of metalepsis (if not catachresis). Object-oriented from this point onward, Van Ostaijen drew on the work of Nietzschean philosopher Samuel (Salomon) Friedländer, who also influenced Huelsenbeck. Friedländer’s notion of ‘creative indifference’ (schöpferische Indifferenz), in particular, found a sympathetic reader in Van Ostaijen. For Van Ostaijen, creative indifference was ‘a viewpoint from which no more contradictions were perceivable, from which oppositions were brought to a kind of synthesis of extremes by the subject.’67 It is useful to illustrate how the principle of creative indifference was often translated onto the page. Consider this passage from Van Ostaijen’s De Bankroet Jazz (Bankruptcy Jazz, 1919), a film scenario that would remain unpublished during his lifetime, showing certain correspondences with Blaise Cendrars’ Le film de la fin du monde (1919)68: Revolution? Dada-jazz revolution? One sees approaching Noske, Noskites, grüne Polizei, Sipo, Sipol etc. Machine-guns. Flame-throwers. Hand-grenades. Military regulation. Die Revolution ist mit allen Mitteln zu bekämpfen.

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Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes From a bird’s-eye-view the street Jazz from the left. — Left a banjobelly: enlarged.

On the right Noske (Gustav) arrives Machine-gun on the right

Jazz-rhythm is slowed down. (And in the orchestra the bruitist accompaniment is silent.) (VW, III: 274)

This clenched evocation of the November Revolution’s first two phases has an Impressionist taint to it. A single reading suffices to install the impression it wants to bring across, because it manages to preserve the particularity of the opposites it differentially unites. It does so by indifferently introducing human figures, objects and experiential sensations. Even the name of ‘Noske (Gustav)’ is objectified by the way it is presented here. The first two lines hint at the ill-defined first phase of the Revolution. What is going on? A revolution? And what are the countercultural forces of Dada, jazz music (and, by extension, expressionism and all other artists involved) doing here? Are they revolutionary, too? Then the Revolution enters its second phase: Noske and his Freikorps approach. The scenario thereafter conveniently puts the people on one side, the military officials on the other side of the page. Left versus right. Optimism, chanting and eros (mirrored in the ‘Banjobelly’) versus brute force, mechanised noise and thanatos. But also, and importantly, the people versus the representatives of the state of exception. Subjective interjections are, remarkably, absent: it is through the depersonalised and mechanised camera-eye that we see. Then the scenario continues: Slow swirl of the opposing groups This snapshot from a bird’s-eye-view. Two animals the groups opposing each other UNTIL With a modest jump-start on what happens on the screen Orchestra KETTLEDRUMS bUrst of Homeric laughter. Snapshot from left to right, from bottom to top (upward-moving perspective) shows mouths split wide open. Laughter played in a very high tempo. (VW, III: 275)

Obviously influenced by the Dada spirit Van Ostaijen at this stage picked up in Berlin, this passage gives an edge to the previous quote. The Dada moment here lies in the grotesque laughter of the revolutionary

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public, which gains near monstrous proportions as it visually merges with its assailants. Through this second patch, we come to understand the objective of the first one quoted above: to give a snapshot of seemingly irreconcilable phenomena, the way in which they are presented only adding to the visual effect. It would be in a similar way that Van Ostaijen’s new state would have to be represented. This implied that vision, or at least visual imagination, was the sense or faculty he would draw on primarily. An image of sorts would be embedded in a narrative or discursive context. Van Ostaijen had highlighted his ocularcentric inclination already in ‘Expressionism in Flanders’. Mainly drawing on insights from the plastic and visual arts to develop a poetry and poetic of his own, Van Ostaijen in that essay proposed to look at art and poetry as ideoplastiek (ideoplastics), as an art that represented ‘the ethos in its core idea’ (VW, IV: 51). In Flanders, we saw, he firmly believed in the possibility of capturing the essence of ideas and identities. This was also apparent in his views of sculpture. ‘Sculpture can speak in the name of an entire people, understand the monumental unity of the entire people; it stands opposite the priest, the king, the entire nation, as a monument warranting recognition beyond diversity’ (VW, IV: 51). Van Ostaijen rightly observed here that monumental sculpture can help to define cultural memory and identity. That the essence of Flemish identity or ethos nonetheless remained absent in Flanders is a point already made. Either it proved a synecdochal trope, as in ‘Golden Spurs’, or it was vaguely circumscribed in a narrative, as in ‘The Signal’. However, in Berlin he came to recognise that maybe the power of images and sculptures resided principally in the way they allowed for the sensual experience of the (abstract or ‘pure’) idea they embodied. The ‘essence’ here thereby shifted from the writing subject to the art object: ‘At best an image can take along the plastic/expressive idea of the object, only its atmosphere . . .; functional/meaningful images are never the idea.’69 Upping the ante – as now literature had to become such an (architectonic) monument – a new literary-political narrative thus had to be produced that inscribed within itself a complex object (trope or image) granting the near sensual experience of (the idea of) the new state. Van Ostaijen was quite clear about how a monumental image representing all as equal and singular had to be produced: ‘three steps: empiricism, subject, de-individualisation’ (VW, IV: 78). Rephrased: ‘1° the registering of empirical data in the mind of the (creative) subject; 2° de-individualisation of the data through a visionary synthesis of that . . . subject; 3° expression of this vision in a closed, depersonalised form.’70 Having only the ‘depersonalised form’ to fall back on, a reader or onlooker would always be cut off from the first two phases. Form, to the reader, thus

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became ‘empiricism’, tangible and concrete experience. In that form, in sharp contrast with his ego-centred poetic in Flanders, the lyrical persona would be absent. Hence, when we here remind ourselves of Kandinsky’s pyramid, it could be said that the tip (the now absent lyrical subject and textual persona) was lowered in Berlin. To the reader there no longer was a pyramid. The writing subject and the reader both (re-)approached the work as equals, side by side; the subjective inevitably making room for the intersubjective. The work itself thereby became a political and no longer politicised object, because it allowed for the experience of (inter)subjectivity, making the reader scrutinise his or her own acts of judgement. Its practical use and ‘economic’ exchange value thereby coincided, securing an aesthetic oppositional and political role for art. Yet the question remains, of course, how Van Ostaijen’s other state, or better, his other perspective on democracy, would come to look. His goal had gained near sublime proportions. This might explain why we also find Van Ostaijen drawing on rather occult and mystic sources at this stage, calling the moment of synthesis, the moment upon which all opposites, all singular subjects are captured in a multiplicity, an abstract unio mystica. ‘The last step of the intelligible’ he characterised as ‘the Wonder that can only be understood through the flow of the Wonder into the subject and the subject into the Wonder’ (VW, IV: 85). In a letter to Victor Brunclair he further made clear why he experienced such pleasure in drawing on mysticism. Mystics as Hadewych, Catharina van Sienna, Bouvières de la mothe Guyon and Gerlach Peters, ‘and this I find their greatest value, succinctly objectify their subjective vision.’71 The subjective here should be understood as the abstract, as that which is concrete only to the singular subject and abstract to all others.72 Or as Van Ostaijen himself put it: ‘Objectification, making concrete the subjective, to others abstract, visions. To push the subject toward the object.’73 Or, as we are now ready to read Van Ostaijen’s Occupied City, to push us toward his other state.

Occupied City (1921): The State Without Exception Typographically unique in its time in Flemish literature, combining handwritten patches, numerous fonts and print colours, Occupied City can be divided in three parts that add up to a stuttering, sylleptically attenuated and highly elliptical narrative. It opens with the long poem ‘Opdracht aan Mijnheer Zoënzo’ (Dedication to Mr Such-and-such). This first section of the poetry book is programmatic, as it introduces a cultural and political tabula rasa and does away with the European

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constitutional, democratic state. The second and main section of the book consists of a long series of highly diverse poems that recount the occupation of Belgium, more specifically of the Flemish sea-port town of Antwerp. In this second section we come to experience a second state model: the state of emergency. In the final section of the volume, a long poem entitled ‘De Aftocht’ (The Retreat), we witness how Belgian democracy is again restored, the first state model thus reaffirming itself. Together with the first section or ‘Dedication’ this final part of the poetry volume can be said to represent a norm or paradigm of convention. The ‘Dedication’, however, explicitly announces that the book will transgress convention. Logically, that transgression should therefore be located in the second part of the poetry volume, and, indeed, what I wish to show is that in the second section, inside the state of exception, Van Ostaijen also introduced a third state form, that of a state without exception. Occupied City’s opening ‘Dedication to Mr Such-and-Such’ and closing poem ‘The Retreat’ set out a paradigm of convention in clear spatial terms. The ‘Dedication’ is quite specific in geographically fixing the outer limits of the paradigm of convention, since they coincide with the European continent. Transgression will take place within and not outside Europe. The site of convention and (cultural) conservation par excellence, Europe will be redefined internally. The ‘Dedication’ (as well as the closing pages of ‘De Aftocht’) further openly identifies the institutions and individuals embodying or personifying the paradigm of convention. As if performing in a naval pageant, nearly all socialised and politicised offices, forms and institutions that are animated by political culture pass by: priests professing the (Catholic) procreation-doctrine, ‘all cathedrals’ and ‘all prophets’, ‘all isms isthms’ and ‘all lecterns’ for philosophers, all art movements, the bourgeois or ‘rasta’, as he was called in Flanders, the supposed war heroes, all political officials and ‘statisticians’ and everything that even remotely recalls capitalist product-fetishism (VW, II: ‘Opdracht’). Not Europe’s borders, but these internally (and internalised) limiting institutions and discourses will be transgressed in the subsequent section of Occupied City. The closing ‘The Retreat’ adds the ‘nation’ to these limitations. All those embodying official culture and politics seem to return at the end of the volume, yet now they are joined by ‘national heroes / national ribbons / everything national / hail to the royal vulvae’ (VW, II: ‘Aftocht’). Traditionally read as a reference to the restoration of the Belgian state, the closing section also mentions the murder of Liebknecht, and, conspicuously, Woodrow Wilson’s new ‘world order’ found in his famous Fourteen Points. Van Ostaijen’s wide international perspective and his sneer at the plain

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rebuilding of other European states suggest that we can read the state of Belgium as a synecdoche, as a part of Europe representing the entire continent. In fact, when we turn to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, of which point VII explicitly dealt with the state of Belgium, we also find a shift from the particular to the universal. First stressing the significance of evacuating and restoring Belgium, Wilson noted: ‘Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.’74 Contrary to ‘The Retreat’, the ‘Dedication’ not once mentions the word ‘state’. Yet the state apparatuses it refers to clearly delineate that an alternative European state is envisioned here. The state legally enforces these apparatuses, physically as well as mentally containing them within internal(ised) borders. In sum, the paradigm of convention coincides with the European constitutional democratic state. The prefacing ‘Dedication’ can be called an ‘apocalyptic short’,75 because like the work of other expressionists it manifests despair and destruction while also locating in the chaos a moment of liberation and redemption.76 What is more, the opening section is quite programmatic and explicit in pointing out to readers what they should be looking for and how they should read. Van Ostaijen does not make us dig deep, for example, when it comes to locating the main medium he will use for transgression. The alternative that Occupied City will propose, so we quickly learn, is to be deciphered as a verbo-typographic collage of quotes from popular culture.77 Already in the first line of the volume poetry and popular film are drawn closer together: ‘You will be much forgiven / because / you have seen many films.’ Countless objects from everyday life, pop songs and famous opera arias are subsequently referred to. In so doing the volume instantly explains why its subsequent narrative will draw mainly on popular culture. Popular culture is ‘democratic’, it is ‘accessible to all’. ‘Everyday woundwords / the simple stammering of a man for love’. Hope lies in ‘plain words’ and the wartime culture of the people, not in that of their rulers. Instead of referring to the great French cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and other monumental achievements of ‘high’ European art as in The Signal, it is now to the fleeting emanations of the everyday that Van Ostaijen’s modern ‘scholastic’ poetry directs its attention. Of course, the ‘Dedication’ does not fail to underline first that popular culture as such forms part and parcel of the status quo as a privileged storage space for convention in common culture. But the opening poem also symbolically announces that it will undo popular culture of conventional meaning and highlight its potentially politically empowering role. To this aim, the main semantic procedure used in citing popular culture is also made explicit: desemanticisation. We already have some sense of

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how this tactic works based on my reading of Marinetti. Claiming to reduce convention to ‘nihil’ – a lexeme that occurs more than twenty times in Occupied City’s opening section – Van Ostaijen’s ‘Dedication’, in one haul, pushes the received meaning of popular culture aside ‘to capture again coreform / these plain words / . . . this echohole’. ‘Positive is to convince oneself / of emptiness / . . . an awareness of full emptiness / the echoing’. The instructions, too, could thus not be clearer: words’ ideational and referential load (or ‘signifiant’ and ‘signifié’) will be done away with so that (the experience of) other tenors can take their place. In fact, Van Ostaijen even goes as far as to illustrate how he will go about desemanticisation, using the signifier ‘Europe’ as an example. Thus goes (and note that I from here on refrain from reproducing the volume’s typography, merely marking line-endings and capitals):

5

10

15

20

You have gone through all the ballads of Europe Your expectations die Utahindians Aztecs PLACE BLANCHE and it is to your considerable merit inventor of a map Europe according to its erotic channels we have known Europe for só long só long stretched elongated sideways and upwards geologically river-basin politically religiously commercially and so on and so on but78 this erotic map is a necessity soon private tutors will give courses on this invention until now of humanity (VW, II: ‘Opdracht’)

A blank map of Europe is thus handed to us on one of the first pages of the volume. No map is actually drawn up, unlike, for instance, the French Surrealists ‘mappemonde’ of a few years later (see Figure 1.1). Rather, ‘place blanche’ (line 4), of course referring to the famous Paris square, invites a reader to draw or fill this map according to his or her own desire. Erotic or sensual bodily desire is thereby foregrounded as the only ‘faculty’ performing judgement. It will be to the reader’s merit: to move across Europe (in a dandyesque fashion) contemplating where borders could lie once all inner borders and inhibitions in Europe will

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have been done away with (lines 5–7). Importantly, in proposing to redraw the map of Europe, the poem suggests that it is to ocularcentric moments that we should turn. This time, however, to moments that tend to fall outside of writing or speech, or that at least balance between the purely pictorial/iconic and the linguistic/tropological. It is an image, a (synecdochal) drawing of a new paper state that will be Van Ostaijen’s contribution to ‘humanity’. Time and again Van Ostaijen adamantly stresses in his ‘Dedication’ that these are all instructions. Having referred to various popular films, even touching upon the process of montage – ‘à / cou / per’ – the book suddenly reads: ‘now I want to be director’. Thus marking one of the few patches breaking with the volume’s heterodiegesis, the lyrical I compares himself with the archangel Michael – amplifying the suggestion that eschatological closure is near and announcing that what will come is the de-individualised synthesis of (everyday) life by a poet who has carefully orchestrated everything, as if he were a film director. Conspicuously, the poet thereafter prostrates before the reader: ‘uw moraal the one plausible thing for us / to do’ (sic). The reader’s ‘morality’ will thus determine the actual import of the volume. To the bourgeois reader the book might mean little. To those who wish to let go of conventional morality in order to question themselves in an ethical fashion, however, it will give way to a situation wherein singular subjects will unite in a multiplicity (‘for us’) that will act (‘to do’). Here the opening poem again makes clear that the multiplicity will do something, not that it will necessarily speak, write, or represent linguistically. Hence, claiming to return to words’ protosemantic materiality, and opening with a direct address to the reader, the ‘Dedication’ predicts that in line with Van Ostaijen’s Berlin poetic a reader will be given a chance to see abstract, ‘hollowed out’ words from an ‘altered perspective’ that will be made concrete to him or her only. After its opening poem ‘Dedication’, Occupied City does what it announces by means of tangible wartime experiences, adding a narrative and experiential dimension to the programme of desemanticisation. The middle section of the book can again be divided into two parts: its first sixteen poems, and a second series of poems entitled ‘De kringen naar binnen’ (The Inward Circles). The first sixteen poems seem to build up towards ‘The Inward Circles’. As each poem follows after the other, we get the impression of looking through a telescope zooming in on increasingly smaller spaces. First we witness the fate of the Belgian army trying to defend the country’s borders against the German onslaught. Expectations rise. In the poem ‘Bedreigde Stad’ (Threatened City), spread diagonally over the page, we find ‘shrapnels’ and ‘washing desire’. The war, ‘Threatened City’ suggests, provides an opportunity to start afresh,

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to unleash desire in unprecedented directions. Subsequent poems thematise the war’s effective way of doing away with the constitutional state. In ‘De Obus over de Stad’ (The Howitzer over the City), the state is anthropomorphised and crushed: ‘Sheds a country all of its legs / sheds a country all of its arms / . . . / sheds a country.’ Then all of a sudden we read ‘SIEG’: the Germans have defeated the Belgian army and seize power. The book then zooms in on the seaport town of Antwerp, which is left empty and motionless: ‘YOU no longer have the lyrical dynamics of a tentacular memory’, ‘the Fullness Falls,’ ‘empty’ (VW, II: Holle Haven). The ‘exodus’ has come to an end. What remains is the ‘Nomenclature of deserted Things’, of objects bereft of human investment: not just the state, but all conventional forms of communal life have disintegrated. The whole city has been evacuated, leaving only bundles of soldiers and corpses to populate the public space. Inside their houses those who stayed put sing the dead, their lives being purposeless beyond lament. Sadness sets in and the city quietly mourns. In a first idle attempt people try to pick up everyday life again, but this results in the poem ‘Banale Dans’ (Banal Dance). The people lack something to believe in, so it appears. Then the volume zooms in on a ‘Huis, Stad, IK’ (House, City, I), marking an empty, cleared stage even within subjects’ consciousness. The first sixteen poems of the volume following the ‘Dedication’, in brief, perform the programme outlined in the first section, literally smashing the paradigm of convention to the ground: the conventional, constitutional state is substituted by a lawless state of exception. This lawlessness, and the gradual disintegration of everyday convention with which it coincides, is accentuated by the final poem before the ‘The Inward Circles’ (see Figure 3.1). The conventional social imaginary people knew before the war is depicted again in this poster poem in a synoptic way: the ‘Great Zircus of the H. Spirit / presenting tonight’s show of / Religion & / King & State!’ This poem highlights three signifiers (in the original they are set in red ink) that sum up the basic choices readily available to Belgians under the state of exception: either they accept their fate and turn to religion, or they join the resistance in order to see the return of Belgium’s monarchical democracy. The poster poem’s position in the volume is peculiar, because it is placed right before ‘The Inward Circles’ and immediately after the preceding sixteen poems, which focus on increasingly smaller sites, investing them with ever greater significance. While the poster poem in part adds to the sense of truthfulness of the narrative – it marks the rise of the resistance, boosted by pre-war Belgian nationalism and patriotism – it also goes against the increasingly focused topography of the narrative, which is, by consequence, fractured by this poster poem. Positioned there, the poem gives way to an aporetic

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Figure 3.1 ‘Groot Zirkus van de H. Geest’ (Great Zirkus of the H. Spirit), a poster poem from Paul van Ostaijen’s Occupied City (Antwerp: Sienjaal, 1921), n.p.

zone: either people/readers return to the state of exception, or they opt for the constitutional state. Traditional interpretations of the volume’s political load halt here. The people do not decide. The choice is made for them, as Van Ostaijen had stressed himself in Berlin – whence the return of the constitutional (monarchical) state at the end of the volume.79 Yet

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The opening lines of the five-fold poem ‘Music Hall’ in Occupied City.

this is skipping the remains of the middle section, which, as I will presently show, provides a third option, sidestepping the aporia raised. In ‘The Inward Circles’ we see the city of Antwerp coming back to life. It opens with the poem ‘Music Hall’. The first lines of this poem read: ‘PLOTS/ binnen de kring van haar moedeloosheid/ begon de stad te/ leven’ (SUDDENLY within the inward circles of her despondency

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the city began to live, VW, II: ‘Music Hall 1’). In between the previous poster poem and these lines we find two blank pages and two title pages. We can thus safely read ‘SUDDENLY’ as marking a break or contrast with what precedes: it is an entirely new life that begins here, within a state that is neither constitutional nor martial. Rather, on a small-scale, particular level, with(in) a community of modest proportions, things will begin anew here, bottom-to-top. For, now that every communal imaginary has been done away with, it is left to singular subjects to construct an alternative one. The typesetting of the lines opening ‘Music Hall’, too, thematise the necessity of interpreting the coming community as a miniature state model (see Figure 3.2). Shaped as an amphitheatre, ‘leven’ (to live, life) takes centre-stage, ‘moedeloosheid’ (despondency) sits on the back-benches, and ‘begon’ (the beginning) is on the first row. (Time – ‘SUDDENLY’ – is excluded.) Here we need but recall Jacques Derrida’s observation that democratic sovereignty most often takes the shape of an amphitheatre or semicircle – ‘circular, she is a circuit.’80 The amphitheatre or semicircle, moreover, returns in the volume’s final section ‘The Retreat’, right before the restoration of the constitutional (Belgian) state sets in. Here, a line is typeset in the shape of a smiling mouth, mirroring the shape of the opening lines of ‘Music Hall’, as if to suggest that in between these two word groups a new life, in a new community or state, has been bracketed or housed – for the text in ‘The Retreat’ actually reads ‘koepelruimte’ (domed space). Furthermore, the first pages of ‘The Retreat’ seem to tie in closely with the poems from the ‘The Inward Circles’, since in both time is derailed and slowed down. All watches have been broken; events – ‘tik tak tik / tak / tak / tak’ – take place in illo tempore. In sum, a political community is boxed in here that can be read as pars pro Van Ostaijen’s promised state, a community, as the reader going through the volume again might notice, in which soldiers are absent for the most part. Before even entering Van Ostaijen’s other state, significantly, our attention is already drawn to the precise moment and location of Van Ostaijen’s (future) state: it will be or is in war that his state can take shape. For, only under martial law, the improvised law that negates democracy in legal terms, can an alternative, lawless state be imagined in which subjects’ freedom is no longer judicially constricted. Far from being an impossible utopia, Occupied City thereby suggests, Van Ostaijen’s other state is as real and tangible, but also as exceptional, as the state of exception itself. So what happens in the volume’s amphitheatre? ‘The Inward Circles’ continues to evoke the hollowness, pointlessness and the sorrowful aspects of war-life after circa 1916.81 Yet the

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poems here also give evidence of something entirely different happening. Portraying a political arena or stage, it simultaneously draws us into life within an alternative community. To distinguish the ‘old’ (state of exception) from the ‘new’ (state of Van Ostaijen) the text draws on a number of synaesthetic modalisations. Quite pronounced, for example, is the positive evaluation of visual popular culture, whereas its musical (and more generally acoustic) counterpart is depicted in negative, purely instrumental terms. For instance, ‘Music Hall’, a five-fold poem, first evokes a community ‘full (of) / vague / longing / . . . / people in expectation’, but then confronts us with ‘the banal wonder’ (VW, II: ‘Music Hall 1’). Banality thereafter sounds, since in ‘Music Hall 2’ it takes the shape of an operetta and a Verdian aria. The second unit of ‘Music Hall’ thereby shows us music and noise, swelling and becoming increasingly louder until ‘all concepts FALL / Halt!’ (see Figure 3.3). The role of popular music is highly ambivalent here. Banal, it also allows for a numbing halt to thought, which helps to cleanse signifiers, reducing them to hollow (sound) objects. In ‘Music Hall 3’, actors (acrobats, to be precise) enter the stage of life and literally merge with the music that guides their performance: ‘Drum and acrobats Óne’. Hence, not just words and concepts but creative subjects, too, are bracketed as meaningful. They, too, become hollow (acoustic) objects. The fourth part of ‘Music Hall’ turns to the (bourgeois) audience as well as to the objects surrounding it. It describes how they follow the fate of the acrobats as they too are subjugated to the music of the drums: ‘The Cups of Coffee They Dance With the Human Heads Dance’. The fifth and closing part of ‘Music Hall’, finally, brings us to the entrance of the cinema, with people outside pushing their fists against the box-office window to get in. Their fists eventually unite in the large, capitalised ‘CLUTCHING HAND’ (VW, II: ‘Music Hall 5’). The banal, that is, the audience and its hearing, behind us, the visual is thus announced, and with it the long ‘Asta Nielsen’ poem that follows. Or, as ‘Music Hall 5’ reads: ‘hear your heart / your blood / your sinking away // how everything sinks away around you,’ and see how only the visual, ‘your kino, your dynamo, your heart’ remain. In a rather overt fashion, then, ‘Music Hall’ calls for silence, announcing a (monumental?) film or sweeping image that will grab (the ‘clutching hand’) the artist and spectator by the throat. Enter Asta Nielsen, the famous Danish movie star about whom it is impossible not to think when popular (Berlin) film of the 1910s is brought up, and to whom a long poem is devoted after the five-fold ‘Music Hall’. After the acrobats in the latter, Nielsen is the only person so far to enter the new ‘life’ or political amphitheatre. In ‘Asta Nielsen’ Van Ostaijen again picks up the differential logic first encountered in The

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Page from ‘Music Hall’, part 2, in Occupied City.

Signal. The poem goes out of its way to illustrate that Nielsen is partand-parcel of bourgeois culture. Nielsen is first a capitalist icon, ‘queen of the market’.82 Then she is characterised as a sex object to the (male) onlooker, as a ‘Sebastowhore’. But as the poem progresses she is inserted into a different, heteroglossic constellation in which numerous voices project meanings onto her screen appearance. In her every movement

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she becomes so much more than an icon of the status quo: ‘plenty is the fall / of your / hands’. ‘For a small admission charge / you are everyone / provided there is individual imagination.’ Nielsen, in brief, can be everyone to everybody. At least in Europe, because she is above all a European icon. First characterised as ‘Our loving Mother of Denmark’, she turns out to be not just Danish. She could ‘become Spanish’ too,83 we read, thus adopting different nationalities as her movements on the screen unfold. As such, she recalls the poetic of desemanticisation announced in the opening ‘Dedication’. She is overdetermined, overloaded with connotations, to the point where she becomes abstract and ‘hollow’. By the same token, she shows how the empty stage and its ‘woundwords’ can be refilled and resemanticised. The poem depicts her as a de-individualised figure, as an abstract shape or formal equilibrium: ‘immanent KINEMABALANCE / . . . pure kinemaequilibrium / . . . give us the Objectivity of your feet balancing / . . . something different / more imagination’. Abstract, she becomes concrete to everyone (the poet, cropping up as ‘Paul v O’, included!). She is the true Wonder, the real ‘unio mystica’. She makes felt how life could be in a community where everyone is free to experience his or her singularity. Identities cease to have any communal element. Each subject is captured in a short phrase representing an interpretation of Nielsen’s moving image. With each line a singularity begins and ends. Far from being a mere expression of our poet’s masculine fantasy or an emanation of Romantic iconoclasm,84 ‘Asta Nielsen’, then, is a sort of nodal point or nexus in which desires and passions condense. Her ethereal screen appearance always remains opaque, out of reach and thus forfeits closure. The poem thereby foregrounds a popular icon like Nielsen as the people’s (Weberian or Schelerian) redemptive prophet. More than ‘Schopenhauer Bergson and the farmer’s union’ she provides ‘our nourishment’. Her role in popular culture, in fact, makes conventional religion and the monarchy redundant. The poem calls her both a ‘queen’ and ‘Our Virgin Mary’. Thus, two thirds of the ‘Great Zirkus’, that is, ‘Religion’ and ‘King’ or monarchy, have come to be replaced. Ast(r)a Nielsen appears to have everything required to take part in a representative body of the new community in which different opinions and passions coincide without any of them outvoting others. In fact, and as is of course well known, Asta Nielsen was a silent film star. Hence, it is through her silent and ever changing iconicity that she becomes the ‘gnostic’ sovereign. She does not represent her (political) audience through language, written law or speech. Only in the last two lines of ‘Asta Nielsen’ does (musical) sound return: ‘Liszt / Asta Nielsen en Liszt’. The heteroglossia staged before this point could therefore be

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read as a silent, interior monologue of a multiplicity watching a movie, captured in a ‘panoptic’ snapshot of the heterotopic space of the cinema. (To recall Michel Foucault’s words about the cinema as a heterotopic space: ‘The cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees a three-dimensional space . . . juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces as in . . . the theatre.’)85 That the volume turns its back on political speech is reiterated further on in ‘The Retreat’: ‘(all monarchs declare that is their craft) / democratisation of the government / . . . Wilson panopticumhero’ (my emphasis). Here, constitutional sovereigns (the monarch, the president) have again come to replace Asta Nielsen, Wilson proclaiming his Fourteen Points speech, thereby reinstalling constitutional states throughout Europe, suspending the state of exception worldwide. With ‘Asta Nielsen’, however, we have reached a community that is not troubled by voices shouting over others, since no one speaks. For a brief instant, Nielsen thus positively (allegorically) redefines ‘Religion’ and ‘King’. Yet what about the ‘State’, that other signifier privileged on the poster poem? Then follows the poem ‘Bar’ – preceded by the contrasting ‘Mobile’, a poem once again introducing loud dancing music and representing people in the form of geometrical shapes. The first page of ‘Bar’ is remarkable. Its left upper corner reads ‘The bar is empty’; the lower right ‘and full of people’. In between the page is left blank. Here, then, we find the blank ‘place blanche’ of the ‘Dedication’ reiterated. Only now the blank is not to be filled by the reader, it would appear. Instead, he or she is to judge, to make a choice between emptiness and fullness. Of what? Is ‘Bar’ an ekphrastic snapshot of Van Ostaijen’s other state, of a ‘life’ in which everyone is allowed to act and express him- or herself freely? So it appears, because when we turn the page, ‘Bar’ reads in a grammatically deformed fashion: ‘we want to fill vacancy our long life must enclose.’ We are rather close here to Van Ostaijen’s adage ‘We want to live our own life.’ This, indeed, is the synecdochal evocation of the state in which all are free. This is the indifferent synthesis, the ‘idea’ of Van Ostaijen’s state: a life beyond or outside law, a state as exceptional as the state of emergency. For, here a space is staged in between the state of exception (brute force without set law), and the constitutional, democratic state (with its ‘fullness’ of law and representation). More than representing something we know, then, ‘Bar’ presents something that is only meaningful by its contiguity to the previously evoked constitutional and martial state. That the poem’s opening page is blank, that its ‘content’ is evoked not just by written language but by language’s very absence, suggests that this other state cannot be represented positively in writing or law. Yet, once again, this other state is presented as just

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as real and tangible as the state of exception. Thus, with this powerful allegorical image, testing the representational boundaries of language, Van Ostaijen finally lives up to his promise of presenting his state. The ‘pinnacle of my desire a lexicon’, the volume eventually reads ‘is to be unmediated’ (VW, II: ‘Aftocht’). In a totality in which we are all free as singularities, we stop to exist in discourse, ever bouncing back to a proto-discursive moment upon which all options lie open. No figure or figuration in language remains. In the absence of law nothing constricts subjectivity. Pure subjective sovereignty rules. Wondrous, indeed. But nothing could at this stage be quite as impractical as Van Ostaijen’s state-model. Readers are not given much time to consider its implications, however. Immediately after the opening pages of ‘Bar’ loud popular music sets in again; the community gets drunk and gains the grotesque, at once monstrous and carnivalesque qualities the body public had been endowed with in Bankruptcy Jazz. Halfway into ‘The Retreat’ all watches are repaired. The ‘knocking at the wall / we fall not the wall’ reintroduces the defining paradigm of convention. Yet the near empty or blank opening page of ‘Bar’ is the one page around which this entire volume seems to hover. How are we to interpret it within the context of Van Ostaijen’s thought in Berlin?

‘The General’ (1919): An Afterword The first page of ‘Bar’ is many things. Superficially about a lonely individual,86 it also invites a reader to decide about his or her attitude toward the community he or she has previously experienced in the cinema and the states before it. The choice is indeed the reader’s: either the constitutional state, the state of exception, or Van Ostaijen’s alternative. The latter seems a state stripped bare, a non-state almost, but we can only interpret it in a contrasting relationship with the other two models. It is indeed perhaps no coincidence that Van Ostaijen should have evoked his state in places that Foucault called heterotopias, which begin ‘to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.’87 The cinema and the theatrical amphitheatre in which Van Ostaijen stages his alternative turn his state into a place that necessarily reflects on other states. Occupied City, when read in isolation, nonetheless leaves us somewhat in the dark as to what substantially differentiates the state of emergency from Van Ostaijen’s own state, although (or perhaps because) they co-exist simultaneously in the volume’s narrative. His mind-boggling grotesque prose piece ‘De Generaal’ (The General), however, allows us to move

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beyond this indecision with some precision. ‘The General’ was written before Occupied City, in 1919, and it is one of many texts Van Ostaijen kept with him unpublished for a long time. It would eventually appear in the daily De Schelde (The Scheldt) in 1923. Van Ostaijen in Berlin wrote several other prose pieces like it, most of which would never be published during his life time. ‘The General’ is an exception to this. Read in tandem with Occupied City, this story delineates more precisely the nature of Van Ostaijen’s state, because whereas the poetry volume stages at least three state models, ‘The General’ deals exclusively with the state of exception. Here is a synopsis. At four o’clock in the morning, the narrator meets up with an old general, Ricardo Gomes, in a bar. Drunk, never having been really successful (he has barely killed 100,000 people), the general engages in a conversation with the narrator. A ‘Plato-type’ whose main characteristic is ‘pessimist idealism’ (VW, III: 333), Ricardo begins to sing the virtues of martial law. In war, the general claims, martial law leaves a state stripped bare, a ‘natural’ state. All options lie open in war, he goes on, which allows for an entirely new legislation: ‘If one departs from the pure idea, for instance Condorcet’s idea that humanity is susceptible to undefined progress, then we can hope for conquering war. At least, were the pure idea theoretically provable and by consequence true. Theoretical knowledge is truth . . . Let go of the chatter of pacifists who have absolutely no knowledge of mankind . . . Cruelty, the bellicose, is, scientifically proven, a pure human quality . . . What is war? War is the clash of two parties with the aim of distinguishing the victor from the defeated. No generally important children’s game does not depart from the bellicose . . . Everyone who is against war should strive for this: to replace the artificial classification according to caste, nationality, religion by a given biologicalethical differentiation of human values . . . (In war) all parties are principally equal . . . Peace contradicts their current nature.’ ‘But it is clear, my general, that humanity at least tries to dam up its instinct. The Law of Mozes, a synthesis of Azian and European beliefs, not? It says: “Thou shallt not beat a man to death.”’ ‘Correct. Man has adopted this Law and still he beats to death. The nature of any law is first of all to mentally restrain all instincts. Instinct wants to beat to death. Clearly . . . Stronger is our instinct. Ethics prostrates before biology . . . Ethic desire is as primitive as instinct. But the latter is stronger . . . Man is neither good nor evil. At this moment the will to power rules. We have to defend its momentary hegemony. Beyond that there is nothing . . . Look here, when someone aims to realise an ideal today we generally ask whether he does this in a disinterested fashion. That is completely wrong. We should ask what this person has to gain from it. That is the only reality . . . When I order breakfast, no one will ask me whether I would also content myself with an overcoat.’ (VW, III: 338, 349–50)

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This caricature of Nietzschean Will to Power, perhaps unwittingly parodying Marinetti’s interpretation of it, claims that war is inevitable, part of human nature, and beyond good and evil. It is a fact we cannot overcome within the constitutional democratic state, so it appears, since its ‘civilised’ and ethical identity-politics, its private and public legislation, fail to suppress man’s inborn desire to defeat the other. If we are against war, we should not return to the constitutional democratic state. For far from being democratic, it is artificial, and it denounces the true levelling of all people that comes along with war. Only in war is everyone equal. The problem, however, is that equality is impossible to live with. There will always be victors and defeated, friends against foes, the strong and the weak. A state, the general continues – now turning his attention to warring states – should therefore try to avoid civil war, and to this aim must organise its army according to other, more fine-tuned biological markers of human nature. ‘Modern states think that by wearing a helmet or red trousers they prove their martiality. Jesters!’ (VW, III: 343). The general, instead, wants ‘what Plato wanted when he went to Syracuse, I throw away the ascetic idea’ to put the idea of martiality ‘into reality’ (VW, III: 351). Hence, he wants martial law to become the constitutional norm, proposing a permanent state of war. At this point the prose piece gains its grotesque edge, because what the general wishes is in fact that society be organised as an army regimented according to soldiers’ sexual inclination. Not thanatos, but eros ‘is the means of the true war . . . Something as pure as martiality must not be connected to appearances such as social institutions. The realisation of martiality requires a pure element: eros’ (VW, III: 351). It is the element defining ‘state-civilisation’ (VW, III: 353), because in a constitutional state of exception ‘Your desire is mine’. Gay men, cross-dressers, heterosexuals, they will all be united in new state apparatuses built with the sole aim of war. When on occasion peace announces itself, desire will have to be subdued and here ‘narcotics will prove of the essence’ (VW, III: 359). A number of important elements from Van Ostaijen’s Berlin discourse reverberate in this morally reprehensive story. To begin with, there is the idea that man is in essence beyond or both good and evil; and thus that another than (bourgeois) morality is to come. Unlike Occupied City, which also brought in erotic, bodily desire, ‘The General’ further takes to man’s ‘biological’ death-drive. Hence, we can safely assume that Van Ostaijen did not side with the inherently Darwinist, essentialist solution of the general. The grotesque, after all, lies ‘not in the events described, but in the logic represented’, in how the story ‘lets logic and common sense go to pieces in absurdity.’88 Indeed, Van Ostaijen’s piece easily

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matches those of German practitioners of the short prose genre of the grotesque. Social Darwinism, however, was not entirely absent from his writings in Flanders. A remarkable passage in his essay ‘Het werk van Paul Joostens’ (The Work of Paul Joostens, 1917), for example, reads that ‘the artwork must contain a value in itself, independent of nature. It is nothing more than Darwinist theory applied to the arts.’89 When a year later ‘Expressionism in Flanders’ blamed the Italian futurists for giving too much attention to ‘outer . . . dynamics’, to the scientific quality of the artwork – a reprimand that also went to his own earlier work in which ‘outer dynamics’ played a vital role as well90 – we cannot help but notice an implied element of eugenics tainting his reproach: the Italians were not (could not) be dynamic enough. Yet these remarks were uttered in Flanders, at a time when Van Ostaijen positioned himself in the improvised state of exception as it was mapped out by the Flemish Council. As we observed, his potential role in the Council contrasted with his simultaneous pacifist plea in poetry. In ‘The General’, the narrator reminds us of the poet in Flanders. A pacifist, the few repartees he utters are always shoved aside by the virile ‘logic’ of the general. Above all, then, ‘The General’ gives evidence of Van Ostaijen coming to terms with, or thinking through, what had happened in Flanders. It evinces a recognition of the distinctness or particularity of the state of exception. In this way, it adds a caveat to his discourse as well as to Occupied City, for the prose piece lucidly points out that martial law is the only law remaining in a state of exception, adding that it is a law undefined, a law outside or adjacent to the laws of the constitutional state. Martial law is basically improvised. In this respect it is always ‘real’, or at least never represented in writing with the guarantee of it lasting long. It presents itself ad hoc in everyday life. It is a state in which random chance decides about people’s very lives, without any permanent laws regulating that chance operation. ‘The General’ further exemplifies, albeit in a ludicrous fashion, that the state of exception can also perpetuate itself. States wage war to safeguard (and imperialistically expand) what they have (in economic and practical political terms) and are (culture-wise). Yet nothing is to say that once the state of exception has been declared, democracy, the system or norm it is supposed to protect, will be restored. Or not quite, because the prose piece also suggests that the decision about how to proceed once the state of exception has been declared lies fully with the sovereign leading the emergency powers, here embodied by the general. Due to the absoluteness of the sovereign’s power, an office outspokenly contested in Occupied City when it is replaced by the silent, speechless monarch Nielsen, the state of exception comes close to being an indefinite dictatorship. Van Ostaijen

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in Berlin, however, clearly propagated a ‘dictatorship of the majority’. The people and not the practical political office of the sovereign thus took centre-stage. In fact, in his other state, not the institutional system of democracy, but the singularity and freedom of its (citizen-)subjects would be safeguarded at all costs. To Van Ostaijen no democratic institution has meaning in itself when it is not animated by desire, when its laws are not interpreted by its subjects. Democratic constitutions as a rule mention that all people are free to act and express themselves as long as the law is respected, for instance. But here, as Van Ostaijen ascertained, ‘Western social democracy anxiously holds on to the democratic principle: never to leave the soil of the constitutional state. As such, it appears to be entirely forgotten that this constitutional state – if at all real – is built on rotten soil.’91 This soil, of course, is the constitution of the Rechtstaat itself, an inanimate textual norm that artificially constricts freedom and stipulates among other things that only the sovereign is above the law, and, in economic affairs, that liberal democratic ideals are to be safeguarded at all times. Hence, it is perhaps no coincidence that Occupied City turned to the law, defining the paradigm of convention as the constitutional state. Ever so meaningful become the dissimilarities between the state of exception and his state. Like the state of emergency, Van Ostaijen’s alternate state as it emerges from Occupied City is not written but presented. It falls outside linguistic representation and law, and is to be found in ‘real’ life. Whereas the state of exception defines itself outside the judicial norm so as to protect it, Van Ostaijen’s state questions this norm’s efficacy, drawing attention not only to practical political options in democracy, but also to the political, to democracy’s founding moment: Enlightenment’s irredeemable promise of universal freedom. Unlike the martial state, which violently imposes itself on life to guarantee the (judicial) status quo of democracy, Van Ostaijen’s state violates the law by prohibiting it from coming about in language, safeguarding life and the promise it is always able to utter in speech but never to live up to in politics. We are either all absent – ‘the bar is empty’ – or present – ‘and full of people’. We are either all equal and/or not. Democracy as Van Ostaijen dreamt it, a multiplicity of singular subjects free to act as they wish, is of course a contradiction in terms within modern representational democracy. But so is the state of exception. And yet, in the same year Van Ostaijen wrote ‘The General’, the state of exception was written into the Weimar constitution. This gives us additional reason to speculate about why Van Ostaijen’s Occupied City set its own state model off against those of constitutional parliamentary democracy and the state of emergency. From a German constitutional

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perspective, the state of exception never existed before the Great War. In Belgium, ever since 1831, it had. Article 167 of the Belgian constitution, today still, stipulates that whenever the democratic state is threatened, the sovereign can declare the state of war. This was precisely what Albert I had done at the outbreak of the Great War. After the Great War, in 1919, the state of exception was also legally inscribed in the new Weimar constitution. Article 48 of the constitution regulated that: ‘If security and public order are seriously (erheblich) disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary to re-establish security and public order, with the help of armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights (Grundrechte) established in Articles 114, 115, . . .’92 The state of exception thus became legalised as a real juridical place, a constitutional heterotopia, a state that existed only on paper, ‘real’ or accessible only to and through the sovereign. Whenever democracy was threatened, the sovereign, backed up by the constitution, could from then on decide to suspend democracy in its name. Now, on paper, Van Ostaijen’s story clearly interlocked with the political language game of its time. His poetry volume, too, presented a paper state, pasting posters, soap wrappings, soldiers’ letters from the front and other remnants of lived experience into a paper collage. But his collage-state directly opposed the state of exception, giving way to a place ‘accessible to all’, a state which within the heavily politicised context surrounding it found no match, except maybe in the first phase of the November Revolution. For indeed, in Van Ostaijen state, possible only in times of war it seems, all but one option is kept open: the singular subject was always to come first. Van Ostaijen’s state, too, therefore, could be read as an alternative constitutional heterotopia. It was a literary retort to a political decision whose outcome in the 1930s he was never to witness but may have foreseen. When national socialists came to power in Germany, the sovereign president Hitler declared and then perpetuated the state of exception, unlike Mussolini’s ‘dual state’ fully suspending democracy. Or as the volume’s ever programmatic ‘Dedication’ already foreshadowed: ‘NIHIL in crux suastica’. Van Ostaijen was an outsider in Berlin, physically exiled and symbolically marginal within Berlin art circles.93 In the end coming to terms here with the politicisation of literature in Flanders during the Great War, and witnessing from a distance how in Berlin the political sphere subsequently deflated, leading to depoliticisation, his work shows how within this unstable interregnum literature came rather close to overlapping with the language games of politics. Like Büchner’s (or at least

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Celan’s) ‘Kunstblinde’ Lucile, Van Ostaijen in turn makes us somewhat ‘literature-blind’. For, when we look at his work as a mode reflecting on modern politics, it is difficult if not impossible to claim that Occupied City should not have been taken seriously within the political language game. There is knowledge in this poetry volume that evinces insight into the technicalities and aporia of practical politics. It could of course be objected that his alternative to these aporia was both vague and uncompromising, refusing any positive articulation. Yet this is already assuming that it was purely abstract and truly ‘universal’, while in actual fact his state was tainted by its particular discursive context, which included two other state models. Equally problematical therefore would be to claim that his state fell fully outside of discourse, since my reading obviously could not have come about without the political language game. To observe the obvious, that is, that the poetry collection was a literary text and not a juridical document is perhaps to touch the core of the issue. It would appear that in a very subtle fashion this irrefutably polyphonic text, indexically triggering in its (contemporary) readers countless small narratives, manages to do something that within the more technical political language is perhaps unthinkable: to allow readers to identify (positively or negatively) with a mythic social space that proposes an insecure future, a near ‘timeless’ community open-ended. Occupied City was published in Flanders in a literary sphere that once again began reclaiming its relative autonomy, recovering from the state of exception. Van Ostaijen had to borrow his brother’s money to publish the collection. A friend did the typesetting. The volume was eventually published in a very limited edition, which made it almost inaccessible to German readers. Nearly a century later the volume nonetheless allows us to look afresh at German expressionism. Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, to this day an important point of reference when it comes to the avant-garde’s institutional aspects, has often been criticised for not discussing expressionism. Richard Murphy notes that Bürger’s book merely ‘adds a suggestive note to the effect that one might, within certain limitations, discover a number of essential avant-garde features in expressionism, such as its critique of the institutionalized character of art and its characteristic rejection not simply of previous movements but of the tradition of art in its entirety.’94 For Bürger the critique of art as an institution and the work-immanent project of uniting art with life form quintessential qualities of the historical avant-garde. Nothing could seem more confusing than this assertion when we look at Van Ostaijen’s work. For in Berlin he went through a period that saw the institution of literature come to an end as Bürger defines it – at least in his most Weberian moments: as a materially demarcated realm within which a

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rationally differentiated work-force of aesthetic agents operated.95 The materialist critique that Bürger (and the quoted Murphy in his attempt to accommodate Bürger’s theory to expressionism) puts forth is here contradicted by historical events: even when most expressionists continued to see themselves primarily as writers or artists, the structural sphere in which they enunciated their work was that of a merger-institution of politics and literature. That key figures in German expressionism, too, such as Herwarth Walden, were financed and allowed to travel and promote expressionism throughout Europe during the war, provided that they also worked as German spies, stands to show that certainly not all expressionists saw themselves solely as artists or aesthetic agents. Perhaps, then, Bürger, the German scholar of Romance languages, was more indebted to the German expressionist avant-garde than his Theory leads us to think. For, Van Ostaijen makes us question whether or not the alleged vanguard programme to unite (or sublate) art and (into) life was a scholarly projection post factum onto historical contingency, confusing the absence of stable boundaries of the artistic sphere with work-immanent intentions of the avant-garde. When Occupied City puts ‘life’ centre-stage, nothing could make this book a more suitable object for a Bürgerian analysis. Yet when we remind ourselves that the poet explicitly put life within the political amphitheatre during or within the state of exception, thus when the stable, ‘bourgeois’ artistic sphere had already ceased to exist, we are also made to recall that ‘life’ came about contingently after it had already found its way into (political or civil) ‘life’. In war all is fair. But equating historical contingency with aesthetic projects may be pushing things too far. Van Ostaijen, we saw at the beginning of this chapter, struggled to put every language game on the same plane, to articulate a programme for society’s total change. His political myth would undoubtedly not have been received well by the body politic or phantom public, as Lippmann called it. And yet he kept on it, as if he had no choice. As he wrote to a friend in 1920: ‘For now I think: I am an artist. I suspect it would be better for me to cast off this delusion.’96 Here, perhaps, we find Van Ostaijen contemplating the ambivalence of his own structural position within the public space, as it had been constantly redefined for him by events in Flanders and Germany: posing as a writer, and a marginal one at that, he might as well have seen himself as a politician.

Chapter 4

The Secret Politician: Richard Huelsenbeck, Dadaism and the Redemption of Literature

The secret is one of man’s greatest achievements . . . The secret produces an immense enlargement of life: numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the presence of full publicity. The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world. Georg Simmel, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ (1906)

In ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845) Edgar Allan Poe described how a woman hides a secret letter. When a guest arrives, instead of concealing the letter in a drawer, she places it upon a table in view. Her guest, much interested in the letter’s contents but initially unaware of its whereabouts, quickly induces from her nervous behaviour that it must be close by. Then, suddenly, he ‘fathoms her secret’.1 He sneaks the letter out and, once home, repeats the exact same disguise tactic the woman had employed. When the police arrive to comb his place inside out, they begin looking for a space where the letter could be concealed without noticing it resting in a card-rack on the mantelpiece. As the detective Dupin in Poe’s story tells us, the mistake the police thus make is to assume they know how things are hidden. Upon entering the thief’s home, they know exactly what the letter looks like – its measurements, estimated weight, and so on – and presume that it must be concealed somewhere. The thief did no such thing, however. He disguised the letter by putting it in full view in an envelope redirected and resealed. Recovering the hidden truth about texts, Poe could have thereby implied, is perhaps not so much a cognitive affair (of uncovering concealment) as an experiential endeavour (of unmasking disguise). Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, an admirer of Poe, dealt with literature in much the same way as the letter is handled by Poe’s thief. Huelsenbeck held a unique place among Dadaists in that he was the only one ever to overtly ‘position himself (and Dada) in the political landscape’ and this without adhering to any given political doctrine.2 Critics, like Poe’s police, have been quick to point out that by being almost ‘exclusively

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oriented towards politics’ Huelsenbeck masked that his work was literary by nature.3 Huelsenbeck, so it has often been claimed, was politically naive,4 ‘more noisy than effective’,5 or simply too rash for practical politics.6 Consensus has it that his work never left the parameters of aesthetic criticism,7 that Huelsenbeck wrote literature, and did a bad job of concealing this. His work was cryptonormative and added up to little more than a politics on the ‘wrong track’.8 Such evaluations, clearly, are predicated on predetermined conceptions of what politics and literature are and of what sets them apart under normal, socially stable conditions. Yet just as with the police’s search in Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, these assessments are rather onesided. While they recognise the potential challenge Huelsenbeck poses to our general presumptions about modernist literature and politics, they fail to take this potential seriously. And they do not, by consequence, fathom his secret. This chapter focuses on Huelsenbeck’s Dada oeuvre as it was written during one of the most politically unstable and challenging phases in European history: the wartime regimes of Switzerland and Germany, the November Revolution and its violent repression, and the birth of Germany’s first parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic. My aim is to uncover through the experience of reading Huelsenbeck’s secret, that is, why the author in these exceptionally unstable political circumstances came to stress that his Dada was a viable political option in its own right. Huelsenbeck is a contested figure both within and outside the field of Dada studies. While some have portrayed him as a shrewd opportunist whose literary merit has been overestimated,9 others have praised his work and practices, characterising him as a prototype for later counterhegemonic figures ranging from Guy Debord to Johnny Rotten.10 The heated reception of his work no doubt in part results from the fact that reading Huelsenbeck is a challenge. The road to his work is strewn with obstacles that obscure our gaze. Several of these obstacles were placed by Huelsenbeck himself in later retrospective accounts with the intent of leading readers up the garden path.11 Silence in particular is always reason for suspicion in Huelsenbeck. Until the early 1970s, for example, several scholars assumed that he had briefly held an official position in practical politics. The first study to refer to this was Georges Hugnet’s 1932 The Dada Adventure (1916–1922). It cautiously noted that ‘rumour ran’ that Huelsenbeck had briefly been Commissar of Fine Arts in a short-lived government during the November Revolution in 1918.12 Volumes subsequently re-established this rumour, failing to check it and contending that he had served as a commissar or minister in 1917 instead of 1918.13 Meanwhile, after letting the rumour spread freely for more

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than two decades, Huelsenbeck intervened, stating in his authorised memoirs Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze. Auf den Spuren des Dadaismus (1959, translated as The Dada Drummer in 1974) that such claims were ill-informed.14 Critics in the mean time exposed the rather incomprehensible change of date, claiming that in 1917 there had of course been no revolutionary government in Berlin and thus that Huelsenbeck’s political role amounted to unsubstantiated hearsay.15 Several studies thereafter presumed that the author never played a practical political role. In his posthumously published and unauthorised autobiographical writings, however, Huelsenbeck returned to the Hugnet hoax, ironically noting ‘that I must record that I never was a Minister’. But he went on: ‘I did take a seat in the Rat geistiger Arbeiter, which was founded by (Kurt) Hiller and vegetated in the Reichstag for a while.’16 The Rat geistiger Arbeiter (Council of Intellectual Labourers) was formed during the short optimistic phase that marked the beginning of the November Revolution in late 1918, only months before the installation of the Weimar Republic. It was briefly put in charge of devising future cultural matters in Germany. Unfortunately, Huelsenbeck’s participation in the Rat is poorly documented. It is quite literally what Alain Badiou would call ‘un événement’, an event resisting scrutiny and of which only the effects can be traced.17 This might explain why so little attention has been paid to it in the well-established research tradition of his work. Yet precisely by pushing it to one side this tradition has ended up concealing a well-kept secret which Huelsenbeck’s experimental writings only managed to disguise. For the effects of his participation in the Rat geistiger Arbeit can be traced throughout his texts after the November Revolution and bring out startling features of Dadaism that have so far been neglected. When we turn to Huelsenbeck’s Dada writings in Berlin, it becomes apparent why rumour of his acting as a politician was able to spread. Not only did he publish, in early 1920, a volume with a telling subtitle: Deutschland muss untergehen! Erinnerungen eines alten Dadaistischen Revolutionärs (Germany Must Perish! Recollections of an Old Dada Revolutionary). His Berlin work furthermore marked a turn to politics in which ruling politicians especially stand out as the object of mirth. Nothing is quite as established in Huelsenbeck as contempt for the prevailing political culture in which he grew up and for the Philisters and Junkers who embodied it. In his pre-Dada writings there is already evidence of a near visceral distaste for the leaders of the Second Reich.18 In his military novella Azteken oder die Knallbude (published in 1918, but written in 1912–13), particular scorn is directed towards the feudal and oligarchic Junker aristocracy, which ruled the country without being accountable to the people. Since the unification of Germany by

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Otto von Bismarck, the Second Reich, personified by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s princes and the army, professed a homogenising cultural and language politics bent on eradicating all deviations from the ‘German’ norm. Until the end of World War One, the monarch thereto had a tightly regimented political system at his disposal. The Second Reich was characterised by a stratified political system consisting of a government with ministers handpicked by the Kaiser, a weak representative Reichstag elected by universal male suffrage, and an upper house or Bundesrat representing Germany’s princes who, like Reichstag representatives, were only intended to vote on legislation drawn up by the government. During elections the government campaigned for parties favoured by the Kaiser’s entourage. And wherever the Kaiser appeared, military splendour came along, representing his all-pervasive power. Thus, in Huelsenbeck’s early novella Azteken oder die Knallbude, reminiscent of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, we are introduced to the soldier Böhme who finds it hard to identify with the disciplinary imaginary of the Wilhemine regime. Stationed in the garrison town of Berlin when the self-named ‘Friedeskaiser’ publicly celebrated the twenty-fifth jubilee of his office – Wilhelm II indeed did so in 1913 – Böhme interrupts the festivities by shouting through a window ‘Your rags – your harlequins – your Godforsaken rags!’19 In an act that was tantamount to signing his own death-sentence, Böhme pointed ahead to a short prose piece entitled ‘Disziplin der Gegenwart’ (Present-day Discipline, 1914) published briefly before the war in the expressionist journal Die Aktion. Here Huelsenbeck stated that the Reichstag was but a ‘machine of consent’ in a country ruled by ‘internment in all areas’.20 Huelsenbeck’s pre-Dada writings show he had a good knowledge of how his country was politically and practically steered, and this knowledge, I want to demonstrate, in part determined his agenda in literature. For like van Ostaijen and Marinetti, Huelsenbeck, too, through experimental literature, would eventually give shape to a thought-provoking alternative to democracy’s practical organisation. Reading his allegorical novel Doctor Billig am Ende (The Downfall of Doctor Billig, 1921), notably Huelsenbeck’s final Dada text, we will come to a notion of what this alternative, a curious other politician, looked like, and, importantly, how this politician was gendered. The author shared with many of his generation a dislike for the Father-figure as the embodiment of the political status quo – for the ‘Father-State’ as Karl Otten succinctly termed the articulation21 – and aligned himself with a battery of writers who drew a bead on the Spiesser, Bürger, Schieber or bourgeois. Rather than another Father or Man, however, his ideal politician turned out to be an adoptive, androgynous Mother or Woman.

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Cabaret Voltaire: Towards a New Man Huelsenbeck’s story begins in neutral Switzerland during the Great War. In February 1916, shortly after Cabaret Voltaire had opened its doors, he entered the Dada platform on an invitation from fellow German émigré Hugo Ball. An intense six-month period of experimentalism followed during which a highly heterogeneous aesthetic ensemble sought to unite tenets from Cubism, futurism and expressionism, with the aim of producing a distinct modern art. Events in Cabaret Voltaire were fuelled by the Great War and its states of exception throughout the continent. Yet within the relatively safe confines of democratic Switzerland, Dada had other, more pressing concerns than those of war, which would lay the foundations for Huelsenbeck’s later political and aesthetic views in Berlin. Cabaret Voltaire entertained in the main an international clientele of drinking men. Locals were mostly students; their respectable fathers were scarcely noticed in the ‘Künstlerkneipe’. Located in the Spiegelgasse, one of many narrow streets in Zurich’s Niederdorf quarter, it could house about fifty people. Niederdorf, an amusement quarter and assembly point for international refugees, was a thorn in the flesh of local authorities. In 1916 Zurich legislation implemented a night-time curfew with the intent of ‘strengthening . . . old Swiss liberty’ and opposing the ‘foreign’ vices that flooded this part of town.22 There was even a ‘Sittenpolizei’ (vice squad) established, indicating the extent to which local officials desired to regulate public and private affairs.23 As Huelsenbeck later noted, women were scarcely seen in the Cabaret, and its landlord at one point during its six-month existence threatened to close the place down because ‘no person of any respect and dignity had ever been seen’ inside.24 From this brief sketch we come to learn who was the main protagonist in absentia of early Dada: the Bürger. Dada in Cabaret Voltaire drew its vitality from its opposition to the bourgeois, who both artistically and spatially insulated it. Everything suggests that to the émigré Huelsenbeck the Bürger was really a type, an ideal-typical category, neither to be confused with the bourgeois class-position nor with a particular nationality. Rather, the Bürger represented whatever identity was enforced on subjects. The Zurich Dadas, and not least Huelsenbeck himself, recognised the extent to which the Bürger was a subjectivised being whose identity lay fully in a repressive imaginary it identified with. And this imaginary in Zurich made the Bürger repress others in turn, in particular when it came to moral matters. While the bourgeois may have been absent from the Cabaret, for instance, the Dadaists did get to see their spies. On occasion, a ‘comical, petty bourgeois detective’ could be noticed in the

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audience. Whenever such a detective was spotted, ‘we sang softly, Ball modulated modestly on his grand piano, and Emmy (Hennings) omitted the stanzas from her songs, which we thought could offend.’25 Still, the Dadaists did not escape the authorities altogether. In the files of the Zurich vice squad Hennings is described as a morphine-addicted prostitute working for her pimp Ball. Briefly before Huelsenbeck arrived in Zurich, the Helvetian police had also compiled a file on his friend Ball, who had entered Switzerland under the false name of John Höxter.26 According to his posthumously published autobiography, Huelsenbeck was not spared from police retaliations either. Summoned to the policestation one day he was told either to present an official document or else be extradited to Germany.27 To what extent this policed climate influenced Huelsenbeck’s political convictions in Zurich is unclear, but this climate clearly weighed on the production and presentation of literature in the Cabaret. Officially a student of medicine at the local university, the author, like others working in the amicable and intimate atmosphere of the Cabaret, may have wanted to avoid attracting the attention of officials to the Dada circle. (Huelsenbeck already had some experience in this matter. When in 1915 Berlin he organised a ‘Memorial Evening for Fallen Poets’, all texts that were publicly read had first to be presented to the authorities.28 That Huelsenbeck infamously voiced his contempt for Germany during the evening by commemorating the French poet Charles Péguy, who had died fighting Germany, shows that the texts put to the censor may have differed from those actually read in public gatherings.) In any case his texts from this period hand us a blank canvas when we read them in a doxographic fashion. Officially, Huelsenbeck belonged to no practical political programme or ideology, not even a dissonant one.29 At the centre of his Zurich exploits stood an ambition to devise another, experimental literature, which from the outset sounded political overtones. Like the character Butterweg in his novella Verwandlungen (Metamorphoses, 1918, of which parts were written before and in Zurich), he expressed a desire ‘to make politics with my art . . . it is required that wholly new approaches are found to the clownery which in Germany has become Baroque. It has unfortunately become Biedermeierish and of belles letters . . . Which diplomat today can grasp my art?’30 While this passage is often cited because it allegedly illustrates Huelsenbeck’s aestheticism,31 its closing question, we will see further on, could be taken quite literally: diplomats and political officials, too, would ideally come to understand what his Dada was about. For Dada to turn to practical politics, though, Huelsenbeck had to wait. In Zurich, willingly or unwillingly, his energy went (and probably only could go) to

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providing an alternative to bourgeois morality. However, in so doing the basic design of his later work in Berlin was drawn up. Pivotal in his early Dada poetic was the articulation of literature, morality and ethics. Simply put: whereas literature in Huelsenbeck’s view had been reduced to a medium of conventionalised mores and customs, whereas it, too, had become a means for subjectivisation, he reshaped it into an ethical affair. No longer was literature to be determined by publicly (and in Zurich also politically or legally) codified norms, but by ethos (ήθος) or character, by personal or private desires and choices. Huelsenbeck here agreed with Ball about the need of putting man centre-stage again.32 Both men in fact made no secret of their allegiance to classical, enlightened humanism. They took up its anthropocentrism and wished to radicalise it. Their shared ambition was to emancipate people so that they could devise their own identity, and for that they recognised that people had to be desubjectivised first. With this, a second important element in Huelsenbeck’s Zurich aesthetic of literature, next to its stress on ethics, has been isolated: it put the freely cultivated man centre-stage. To an extent Huelsenbeck thereby drew on the (German) humanist canon, which celebrated the value of cultivation (Bildung).33 In its grotesque literary manifestations, however, Dada in Zurich protested against the virtues of discipline and the classical principle of kalokagathia (καλοκάγαθία) – ‘what is beautiful and/must also be good’ – which had equally become associated with the humanist canon. The link between morality and aesthetics had to be severed. What was good or beautiful was to be determined by men independently. Thus a 1916 press release of Huelsenbeck’s hand read that Dada in Zurich was to ‘once again draw attention to the true interests of men, and to become the champion of new happier times.’34 Dada’s ‘new art’ would lead to a ‘new life’, as the more tested formula goes. It wanted another, ‘inoperative community’35 in which no other communal goals were set than man’s free choice of means by which to develop to his full potential. To this end Huelsenbeck fully exploited the possibilities of Cabaret Voltaire, both in print and in performances. His famous practice as a performer demonstrates how the private and the public interrelated inside the Cabaret, and how on stage the bohemian community of Dadaists quite literally also (per)formed an alternative community governed by ethics, not by public morality. Most of the time Huelsenbeck came on stage wearing his everyday clothes, thus outside any matrix of character or fictional time.36 Like other Dadaists, he most often read his own, at times idiosyncratic texts, so that the publicness of his performances sitting alongside those of others became ‘constitutive of a new form of community – one constituted by . . . difference and linguistic diversity’.37

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Yet while the ‘public performance of privatism – of the mind’s and the body’s lawlessness, of perversities and pathologies’38 – was given shape by most Dadaists in sound poetry, Huelsenbeck went against many Dadas by refusing to give up conventions from the lexemic level of language upward. Unlike Ball, for instance, he found no solace in sound poetry. ‘Chorus Sanctus’ (1916) is his only preserved sound poem, and that it ironically mocks Ball’s project resulted from Huelsenbeck’s stress on keeping communication in check and experimentation limited to language’s components above the phonemic level.39 For Ball, (reading) poetry meant above all a restitution of the vox humana in an inhumane world.40 However sympathetic Huelsenbeck may have been to Ball’s goal, he clearly disagreed on the means to get there. If man was to be put centre-stage again, it required that he had to be led into the text in his present discursively determined state by some kind of (literary) convention he could readily identify with first. Only then could Dada’s future ethical alternative, personified by the Dadaists themselves, be communicated. Sound poetry, in its extreme celebration of de-semanticisation, provided no such convention, at least not to Huelsenbeck. It practised transgression for its own sake, presupposing that the Bakunian adage – destruction is an act of human creation – was self-sufficient.41 Few poems help us to come to grips with Huelsenbeck’s version of Dada in Zurich42 as well as ‘Ebene’ (Plane), the opening ‘bruitist’ negropoem of his volume Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers, 1916) which was illustrated by wood-cuts of Hans Arp.43 One of its most salient features is the dominance of free verse. It is mainly composed in conventional, though often elliptic, repetitive and paratactic syntax. Plane pig’s bladder kettle drum cinnabar cru cru cru theosophia pneumatica the great spiritual art = poème bruitiste performed 5 for the first time by Richard Huelsenbeck DaDa or else if you want birribum birribum the ox whizzes around in a circle mission to drill to light mines scraps of metal 7.6 cm chauceur44 share of sal soda cal. 98/100% beagle damo birridamo holla do funga qualla di mango damai da 10 dai umbala damo brrs pffi commencer Abrr Kpppi commence begin begin sei hei fe da to the homeland wanted Labour Labour 15 brä brä brä brä brä brä brä brä brä sokobauno sokobauno sokobauno tauntingof tauntingof tauntingof Garbage cans getting pregnant sokobauno sokobauno

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the dead rise above torches around their heads ... behold the lake Orizunde how it reads the paper a beef steak it eats ... behold the placenta how it cries in the butterflynets of schoolboys sokobauno sokobauno behold how the vicar closes his fly fro-hont rataplan rataplan the fly frohont and the hair how it grows from his ears ... we blow the flour from our tongue and cry and it ends up on the head on the tympanum ... all sweaty had o the papist bowels in heaven the boil in the joint belu blue always blue bloompoet yellows the antlers the beer bar obibor ... Tshuwuparanta da umba da umba da do da umba da umba da umba hi hi ... Mpala the glass of the wallflower trara Katapena kara the poet the poet katapena tafu Mfunga Mpala Mfunga Koel Dithyramba toro and the ox and the ox and the toe full of rust in front of the stove Mpala tanó mpala tanó mpala tanó mpala tanó ojoho mpala tanó mpala tanó ja tanó ja tanó ja tanó o the fly fro-hont Mpala Zufanga Mfischa Daboscha Karamba juboscha dabo eloé

‘Ebene’ opens with the evocation of a stale and immobile horizon of (rural and homely) objects that lie around lifelessly. The poem then calls for a modern spirituality (line 3) that is able to set the lifeless scene in motion, a spirituality first compared to that of (Kurt Hiller’s) ‘geistig’ expressionism but still in the same line (line 4) redefined as (futurist) bruitism. Not the human voice, but noise is put forward by ‘Richard Huelsenbeck DaDa.’ That ‘Ebene’, like Huelsenbeck’s writings on poetry at this stage, refers to Luigi Russolo’s bruitism without giving evidence of a sound knowledge of it, shows how the author loosely drew on futurism to find his own way. The idiosyncrasy of his ways is stressed by the act of self-promotion in line 5, which in part refers to the moment of performance, but which also carries within itself a work-immanent poetic since it thematises the central role of the poet/lyrical persona. Through an elaborate set of images we come to realise that we are shown what outer reality looks like from the perspective of the poet as he rapidly spins around on the same spot. ‘Huelsenbeck DaDa’ first refers to an ox walking in circles, perhaps, as ‘mission to drill’ suggests, driving a

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drill or borer as it is tied to the machine’s shaft. On closer inspection, however, the (mission to) drill functions as a metaphor for the (task of the) poet himself, because it is not the ox that is turning in circles, but rather the poet. As he spins, the lifeless and levelled outer reality gains motion from his central and inner perspective. References to industrialised war (scraps of metal or bullets of 7.6 cm, mines) and factory labour subsequently stress the levelled, rural scenery gaining motion. We are given the impression that a gigantic machine is slowly getting into its stride – ‘begin, begin’ – with the poet in command, standing in the middle of a whirlwind of rising corpses (line 19) and objects re-aligning themselves in fantastic combinations. War and industry thus form the machinery or catalyst aiding the poet, a tendency that is accentuated in line 15, which onomatopoeically captures the sound of a drill searching its way into the ground, taking everything with it as it descends. As we are shown reality through the eyes of the ‘dancing’ or turning poet, life gains a fantastic, apocalyptic edge. Nature is narrowed down to second nature in line 20, procreative organs are turned into toys, and religiously inspired morality is reduced to a preacher, who (in the complete poem) tries to close his trousers eight times, while the hair growing from his ears keeps gaining in length. (The latter, obviously, is the result of witnessing the same thing over and over while spinning around. The vicar’s ‘grotesque’ ear slowly loses its iconic contours.) Even the reader (or Cabaret visitor) is involved in the (com)motion in line 33, where the original reads ‘Eckzahn’, literally ‘eyetooth’ but in more informal use also ‘wallflower’. Hence, (as the poet watches) the reader or spectator quietly looking on, sipping a beer, he sees the beer glass taking off in his spinning movement: trara! Line 30 does not fail to refer again to the expressionist ‘bloompoet’ (Blumenpoet) locating within the apocalyptic scene a bedding flower, a new beginning, yet the expressionist poet, too, takes to ‘beer bar obibor’ (line 30), becoming part of the outer reality which is set in dizzying motion. In lines 36–7, finally, a sense of tranquillity and belonging suddenly takes over. These lines twice refer to the ox (sitting) in front of a stove mentioned earlier. As Roman Jakobson, perhaps referring to Huelsenbeck, succinctly observed in his essay ‘Dada’ (1921), Dadaists ‘lack(ed) that very “stove”, that hearth, that little house of their own, and (we)re everywhere equally chez soi.’45 Line 12, which reads ‘homeland wanted’ (heim gefragt), hooks up with this. While Huelsenbeck’s homeland obviously was Germany, the poem ends by positing an alternative ‘home’, in which men, or at least the poet and all those he involves, move their stove with them, however perilous and calamitous their environment is. Home is where man is. Man is the centre of the universe, and to experience his humanity he needs to set his universe in motion, create it

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afresh. ‘Ebene’, in sum, is a poem questioning the relationship between the subject and its stale perception of (social) life. The poem’s overt equation of lyrical persona and poet illustrates that the Dadaist set an example to others in Huelsenbeck’s early Dada poetic: he led the search like the ‘beagle’ in line 9. Not surprisingly, Wassily Kandinsky and Blaue Reiter aesthetics were often referred to in his Zurich writings on poetry.46 As to van Ostaijen, Kandinsky’s idea of ‘inner necessity’ proved of particular importance. A 1916 piece of Huelsenbeck in the periodical Cabaret Voltaire read: ‘A tree, for instance, is not a tree as it appears to us, but as it is. The reality of the tree does not lie with its twigs, its buds, its colours, yet in the . . . meaning of the idea ‘tree’, as it is given in the soul of the artist.’47 The adamant stress on getting reality and morality (as it is here represented by the vicar) moving, however, made him characterise his poems as consisting of ‘words that remain spherical images in their own right, small worlds that have their own lives and follow their own laws’.48 Hence, unlike in van Ostaijen, no synthesis was aimed at by the lyrical subject; temporal closure and above all movement were accentuated instead. As a result, Huelsenbeck’s Zurich poems always foreground the process of mediation between the subject and its environment, between man and morality, leaving open alternative ethical options to the reader. As ‘Ebene’ draws to a close and dusty flower is blown from ‘our’ tongue or language (line 26), evocations of other, ‘primitive’ languages add up. Such patches in the negro poems Huelsenbeck began to compose from 1915 onward were not drawn from existing African (or in other poems, Native American) languages. Phantastische Gebete presents pseudo-negro poems. However, to characterise them as a ‘white man’s “primitivism”’ is not taking his poetic into account.49 Admittedly, his poetological thought was tainted with exoticism. Huelsenbeck, the ‘Dada drummer’ who in performing his negro poems arrogantly beat a drum with a cane, also seems to have drawn on Kandinsky when he took to the ‘healing role of the shaman in primitive societies’ as a ‘metaphor for the role . . . the artist should play in the modern world’.50 Still, whereas Kandinsky in his work and aesthetics brought to the fore the primitive to preserve a metaphysical element veiled in mystery,51 Huelsenbeck’s Zurich poetry made sure to also comprise references to everyday modern life, anchoring his poems in materialist daily experience. His inclination was indeed not toward the metaphysical or irrational but to the rational and materialist. Like Ball’s work, his poetry was primarily geared against the ‘trivialisation of the intellect and of images’.52 Hence, whenever his texts accentuate the vitalist or liminal, we are to read them as bent on shocking and challenging reason.

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Why Huelsenbeck’s poems also needed the evocation of ‘primitive’ languages here has been explained in various ways – the most persistent argument being that the ‘primitive’ was but another variant of the liminal, an exotic O/other functioning as a vague provocative counterpart to ruling rationality.53 Yet one possible and more fruitful explanation has so far been overlooked: Huelsenbeck’s proximity to Carl Einstein. It is no secret that Einstein’s Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders (Bebuquin or the Dilletantes of Wonder, 1906–9) had pointed the way to both Ball and Huelsenbeck in their pre-Dada years.54 Whether Huelsenbeck was acquainted with Einstein’s Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, 1915) is not clear, though. Even so, the congeniality between his and Einstein’s views is striking. Einstein’s Negerplastik contended that far from being distant and historically at odds, modern European and primitive African art showed remarkable similarities. Long before Cubism, for instance, African art had taken an interest in the formal problems of three-dimensional space. Cubism and African sculpture thereby proved to be two local manifestations of the same universal primitivist aesthetic. This aesthetic surfaced whenever the mediation between consciousness and reality is fundamentally questioned in art. According to Einstein, a viewer became conscious of an artwork through in part internalised and in part externally enforced cognitive forms of perception. ‘Naturalism’, to give one example, was ‘not the imitation of the natural world outside; the nature . . . passively imitated (wa)s the standpoint of the viewer.’55 By questioning such formal conventions internalised or given a priori in the viewer, primitivism opened up an immediate space from which subjects could come to see things afresh in another communal myth – at least in the way Einstein defined it: ‘rather than assuming a fixed opposition between subject and object, ideal or real, myth conceives of reality as a flux of forces’ and interchanges between man’s perception and the forces outside of him.56 Georges Didi-Hubermann correctly notes that Einstein’s primitivism ultimately questioned European aestheticism at large.57 Far from being a socially irrelevant enterprise, art’s universal (though unsimultaneous) potential to perform (global) changes in perception to Einstein proved that (primitivist) art was the mode through which we perceive and reflect on reality as a collective. Put differently, it made people aware of the extent to which their perception was the object of collective subjectivisation, of how strongly (in part internalised) outlooks on (social) reality defined their identity. Opening on to another ‘mythic’ space, primitivist art as a consequence gave people the chance to emancipate themselves from given perceptual confines, to think and sense for themselves and to subsequently contemplate alternatives.58 Importantly, in Einstein’s ‘myth’, identity was thus not yet a given, only (bodily) singularity was.

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Einstein’s hermetic thought came close to Huelsenbeck’s ambition and practice. ‘Ebene’, too, staged a vantage point from which the poet and the reader got to question stale representational conventions. It did so by paratactically articulating and thus equating ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ language use, which suggests that Huelsenbeck might have set Einstein’s aesthetic theory in poetic practice. Moreover, Einstein’s theory may explain why the Dadaist felt so reticent toward the sound poetry favoured by Dada fellows: it could have amounted to experimentation for its own sake to him, to all too private, solipsistic fantasies averting the gaze too far from conventional (internalised) outlooks. Subjectivised, the (bourgeois) reader had to be treated as such. To get readers to identify with the Dada community model, some verbal convention had each time to be taken as a starting point, as Einstein himself notably had done before in his novel Bebuquin. Thus ‘Ebene’ not surprisingly names the poet (man) and (the parts of) reality he perceives, sticking to conventional syntax. Yet the most striking convention the poem draws on is yet to be highlighted: it also gives away its genre, the dithyramb (line 36). This ancient Greek genre, practised among others by Pindarus, originally sang the glory of Dionysus – Nietzsche being one of its many famous practitioners. That ‘dusting’ our tongue or language in lines 27 and 28 should coincide with a severed head ending up on a tympanum (thus with the connotation of it solidifying or turning to stone as well) is perhaps not coincidental here: convention and reason make way for bodily experience. The genre of the dithyramb further reminds us of the ever German-oriented nature of Huelsenbeck’s work. For in German literature the genre was also taken up again by one of the forefathers of humanist Bildung: Goethe.59 In subtle generic play, then, ‘Ebene’ also turns against the classical humanist canon as it was launched with German Idealism and Romanticism. Exiled in a heavily policed context, Huelsenbeck in Zurich primarily but decisively fostered his aesthetic sensibility. While his pre-Dada work had shown evidence of a desire to make politics with his work, the tight control exerted by Swiss officials must have made him decide to subdue this desire for the time being. In a press release of 1916 he went so far as to state that ‘our political goals lay far ahead of us’. They believed that their art ‘would be desecrated when subjected to whatever theory geared at changing stately or social institutions.’60 Politics thus lay far ahead in Zurich. Or, as Huelsenbeck’s pre-war writings prefigured and his return to Germany reinvigorated: outside of Zurich, in Germany. When local (French speaking) critic Henri Guilbaux accused Zurich Dada of being pro-German, for example, Huelsenbeck publicly responded in 1916 that Dadaism had nothing to do with practical politics. In light of his

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outspoken dislike for the German Reich, it made sense that Huelsenbeck intervened here. In this context it is worth noting as well that the Great War, as a textual topos, was largely absent from Huelsenbeck’s Zurich work. However, where it was alluded to, for instance in his 1916 prose poem ‘Der redenende Mensch’ (The Orating Man), Germany marked the point of reference. This poem can be read as a companion to Wilfred Owen’s later and quintessential Great War poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (1917). It also cited Sturm und Drang poet Ludwig Christian Hölty’s ‘Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit’ that used the melody of Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Die Zauberflöte and had become a reference work in German Bildung.61 Wherever historical allusions to the subjectivised Bürger are found in his Zurich poems, in sum, these references went to the German Bürger, who just across the border of Switzerland was waging a war without precedents. Huelsenbeck later contended in En avant Dada. Die Geschichte des Dadaismus (En avant Dada. The History of Dadaism, 1920) that he and other Zurich Dadaists had been ‘asses’ (Esel) in turning their gazes inwardly and championing abstraction.62 His reproach uncovered the paradox of his self-acclaimed role as an emancipatory agent or ‘beagle’. His ‘privatism’, the site from which he believed to be launching another, positive identity, was not up to the task he had set out for it. In a sarcastic mood we could note that it almost seemed as if Huelsenbeck believed that by simply turning in circles people could liberate themselves. In his diary Ball succinctly rendered part of Huelsenbeck’s objective: ‘to capture . . . the totality of this unutterable age’.63 Huelsenbeck’s work indeed successfully pointed at the near universality of people’s subjectivisation, and to how this process interlocked with the functioning of people in society at large. But his work at the same time failed to offer a discursive or textual technology that could be implemented to reconstruct an alternative, positive identity, which in turn people could come to identify with. The only subjects the Dadas changed were themselves, the bohemian community that remained loyal to its principles and that went out of its way to smother the bourgeois within themselves. Yet arguably its audience did not see it as the German Ball, for instance, saw himself: ‘I tend to compare my own private experiences with the nation’s. I see it almost as a matter of conscience to perceive a certain parallel there. It may be a whim, but I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation.’64 As Huelsenbeck left Zurich to go back home to Germany, one question must have travelled with him: literature was to be political, but how?65 Looking back on his Zurich work we cannot conclude that he had arrived

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at answering this question. In his poetic one antagonism got firmly established: the Dada (community), equivalent to the freely cultivated man (or exemplary of a future humanity) opposed the Bürger. Yet precisely in this antagonising relation lay the principal limitation of Huelsenbeck’s project: it was out of balance; Dada’s art proved a weak vessel to move from under the vast shadow the (universal) Bürger was casting over the free (Dada) man. The Bürger’s opponent, the singular or ‘new’ man, as he would come to be called in Berlin, thus had to be given some further thought. In 1917, upon his return to Berlin, our author did exactly this.

Berlin Dada: Another Citizenship Becoming With the heavily debated essay ‘Der neue Mensch’ (The New Man, 1917)66 Huelsenbeck’s thought was given a vitalist and libertarian twist. This essay drove a wedge between nature and culture or civilisation. As my discussion of ‘Ebene’ made apparent, in Zurich Huelsenbeck put both nature and culture on the same plane. Both were depicted as immobile, dead matter with clearly definable contours that had to be blurred and set in motion by the ‘dancing’ poet. In ‘Der neue Mensch’ Huelsenbeck now posited that underneath the stale, ‘civilised’ and disciplinary cultural realm lay another, natural world which was already in motion. Recoursing to a more deterministic Nietzschean view of nature and equating all domains in human culture with second nature, he gave the ‘idea’ tree (highlighted earlier in his Zurich poetic) the following decisively different meaning, for instance: the ‘new’ man ‘looks at a tree and finds that he only has the fiction of a tree before him. For he only sees the ambition to become bigger in each of its cells. A tree, it seems to him, is little more than the passion and Sehnsucht to reach the crown.’67 To the ‘new’ (Nietzschean) man, hegemonic outlooks and discourses mediating between the subject and reality thus hid an indifferent natural world that was neither good nor evil and that lacked a sense of purpose other than that of venting passions and bodily drives. Like the child that has just come to language and begins to encounter disciplinary codes, the ‘new’ man recognised his singularity and took (Einstein’s) ‘mythic’, unmediated or immediate space of forces fluctuating between the subject and reality as self-evident. In a way the essay thus displayed Huelsenbeck coming to terms with his work-immanent Zurich primitivism as it may have been inspired by Einstein. However, it was at this point also that Huelsenbeck went his own way. Shortly after the war and back in Germany after having spent time as a soldier in Belgium, Einstein began cooperating with several German

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Dadaists and started to place his hopes with the proletariat as the one agent who could come to identify with the primitivist, ‘mythic’ space he had outlined before.68 Bringing in elements from Marxism, Einstein averred that the working class was bereft of the material means to produce its own identity. Identity-less, having only the bourgeois class position to identify with, it basically already lived in the ‘mythic’ space where desubjectivised singularities freely circulated. As such, Einstein suggested, the proletariat formed the only collective agent who could arrive at articulating another imaginary in which subjects could choose and produce their own identity in communality. Huelsenbeck, by contrast, did not claim that his ‘new’ man resided somewhere in a distant future (as in Zurich) or that his realm was limited to that of literature or even a class-related (non-)identity. He now posed the ‘new’ man’s universality. His Nietzschean-inspired materialism made him a more consequential primitivist than Einstein, it seems. We are, for instance, quickly alerted to the essay’s misleading title: ‘we have known war for eternity and still there is man, a new man who came into being from all sides simultaneously, . . . a European, an African, a Polynesian or another.’69 The ‘new’ man was a ‘primitive’ of all times and cultures, residing in each and every subject, whenever it reaches the point in consciousness where its bodily desires and passions meet and clash with hegemonic discourses. And it is at this point in all men’s consciousness, Huelsenbeck would come to stress, that man ultimately experiences his own presence of mind and agency, if not simply freedom. For once the conflict between internalised bodily drives and passions and externally imposed (though in part again internalised) hegemonies channelling and censoring passions is recognised, nothing is to say that subjects could not be represented differently as a community or even a society. Huelsenbeck’s primitivism clearly held some affinity with Marinetti’s Bergsonian vitalism. Yet unlike the latter, it never articulated the ‘mythic’ with the necessity of violence. More consequential than Marinetti, Huelsenbeck’s essay was careful to leave singularity undefined. Not ‘futurist’, then, but also ‘Der neue Mensch’ did not once refer to Dada. Huelsenbeck later even expelled the essay from his Dada canon out of fear that readers would misinterpret its title as part of an expressionist humanitarian programme advocating man’s inborn goodness. (Huelsenbeck indeed wanted to avoid being compared to humanitarian or so-called O-Mensch expressionists like Leonhard Frank, who claimed humans were benevolent of nature, and called for this other universal, ‘new’ man to come forth.) Just a few patches of his work have to be quoted, though, to show that his ‘new’ man obviously became equated with the Dadaist in later texts. If one thing stands out in nearly all of

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his characterisations of the Dadaist in Berlin, it is indeed the articulation with freedom: ‘The Dadaist is the freest man on earth’;70 ‘He calls on his sovereignty’.71 Here, we come to notice how Huelsenbeck’s belief in literature’s significance as a vehicle leading towards better (or at least other) times scarcely waned after his move to Berlin – quite the reverse. The radical humanist Huelsenbeck, borrowing a term from Raoul Hausmann, later stated to have envisioned a ‘communism of feeling’ with his work.72 In his co-authored manifesto ‘Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?’ (What is Dadaism and What does it Want in Germany?, 1919) this ‘communism’ was described as a project envisioning a utopian polis or ‘light- and gardencity, which people would develop in freedom’.73 Lest there be any doubt: Huelsenbeck’s hope of one day witnessing the arrival of an open-ended and radically humanist society of sovereign subjects was kept firmly in check throughout his Berlin years. Read in line with his Zurich poetic, the ‘new’ man, now explicitly located in all subjects, thus coincided with a nascent identity, a zero-point or singularity stripped bare of all given markers of collective identity. Universal only by grace of the particular, experiencing his singularity only within very concrete and momentary situations (a ‘Gott des Augenblicks’), the ‘new’ man foreshadowed what life could be like: something that man could create for himself, a space in perpetual change beyond petty morality and regardless of teleology. The marvellous landslide effect of ‘Der neue Mensch’ was that it pulled the free or desubjectivised ‘man’ from the future into the present. Whereas previously Huelsenbeck had placed all his hopes in the Dada community to set the example in text and performance, he now implied that man’s singularity was already immanent, internalised in each and everyone. From the endpoint or finality of his project, ‘man’ was now posed as an ontological fact. However, internalised, what remained to be done was for him to be externalised, and devising a textual strategy to see this externalisation through became one of Huelsenbeck’s main concerns in Berlin. The best description of this ambition is found in Dada siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Dada Triumphs! Taking Stock of Dadaism, 1920): ‘The task of Dadaism: . . . to posit a naive human type, who stands outside conventional moral oppositions.’74 While the stress here is on morality, in line with his Zurich work, in other texts Huelsenbeck widened the field of oppositions to include basically all domains of culture. As before in Zurich, his energy went into showing how to let go of individuality as conventions and communal laws dictated it. However, the poet’s role or the lyrical persona’s task here no longer resided in voicing his own ‘privatism’. Instead of putting himself at the centre of an immobile world, fixing an (albeit fluid) identity for

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himself in it, he was now to ‘let himself be hurled by things’75 and to dissolve in nature’s given mo(ve)ment. In 1918 Huelsenbeck, to this end, enriched his poetics with Salomon Friedlaender’s ideas about subjectivity and creative indifference.76 Retracting himself from ruling oppositions and antagonisms, the poet was now to register indifferently what his body sensed and to actively open a space where the ego no longer proved the centre but an ever-shifting point of entrance to an ever-changing present. One of the most obvious changes this led to in Huelsenbeck’s (postwar) literary production was that it referred less to ‘primitive’ languages and more to modern city life, which tropologically invoked how reality was indeed already in motion. We already have some sense of how this works based on Marinetti, but Huelsenbeck clearly gave it a twist of his own. Modern city life, Huelsenbeck wrote in early 1918, ‘appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, and is thus incorporated – with all the sensational screams and feverish excitements of its audacious everyday psyche and the entirety of its brutal reality – unwaveringly into Dadaist art.’77 No poem of his expanded 1920 Phantastische Gebete better illustrates this than ‘Ende der Welt’ (End of the World). Although it was already taken up in the 1916 edition of the poetry book, in the new edition of the volume, this time illustrated by pungently mocking drawings of George Grosz, the poem stands out as having pointed ahead to his altered poetic in Berlin. Renowned for its opening couplet, it can be read as a miniature guide to Huelsenbeck’s poetic as it was refined during the last war-years. This is what things have come to in this world The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer Sings as sadly as a headquarters’ bugler and the cannons lament all day 5 That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about when he lost his eye Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawingroom but all the hoses are torn Ah yes Sonya they all take the celluloid doll for a changeling 10 and shout: God save the King The whole Monist Club is gathered on the steamship Meyerbeer But only the pilot has any conception of high C I pull the anatomical atlas from out of my toe a serious study begins 15 Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the opera in cutaways for the last two days and nights . . .? Ah ah ye great devils - ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know

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20 what our Father Homer wrote I hold peace and war in my toga but I’ll take a cherry flip Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow They beat time with a coffin lid If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers 25 out of the trolley car it’s a great age The professors of zoology gather in the meadows With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead Again thou hauntest castle and grounds 30 The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds (who would not go mad here)78

Opening colloquially, ‘Ende der Welt’ abruptly interrupts the everyday in line 2 by indiscriminately levelling elements of modern (Berlin night) life in paratactic yet correct syntax.79 The primitivist nature, it thereby suggests, already exists among us, but it is hidden underneath the ‘Monist’ cloak of culture and shouts as ‘God save the King’ (line 10). The poem’s title is telling of this as well. It obviously refers to Jakob van Hoddis’ famous 1911 poem ‘Weltende’, which had marked expressionism’s semi-official date of birth, at once launching the so-called Reihungsstil. When compared to van Hoddis’ poem, ‘Ende der Welt’ brackets ‘the need for tight control . . . the language moves in a leisurely manner from one absurd event to another and no attempt is made to impose metrical or rhythmical shape upon them.’80 Or not quite, since in this poem, as is often the case in Huelsenbeck’s work, Goethe is mocked. The stuttering (original) ‘Wille wau wau wau! Wille wo wo wo!’ (line 19) is a quote from Goethe’s Zigeneurlied. Within its new context, the citation parodies the cultivated mode of nature-poetry professed at the end of Goethe’s Lied, which reads: ‘Füllest wieder Busch und Tall / Still mit Nebelglanz’.81 Here, these lines are transformed so as to read: ‘Füllest wieder Busch und Schloss / Pfeift der Rehbock hüpft das Ross’ (lines 29–30). This in turn is revealing, because ‘Ende der Welt’ can clearly be read as a nature poem in its own right: a poem about the nature (the passions and desires) hidden ‘under the skirts’ (line 3) of the modern city and the second nature of civilisation. Indeed, no ‘primitive’ languages are to be found here anymore. Instead, a grotesque primitivism proper, as Einstein could have defined it, is given shape. As line 22 further suggests, Huelsenbeck began to stress the temporality of closure by derailing received tense use and by increasingly foregrounding that his texts were but ‘uncreative’ collages of bits and scraps of language already circulating in the public space. In lines 8 and 9, the lyrical persona pulls an atlas from his or her body, before embarking on a more ‘serious study’ of the ‘nightmare’ at hand (line 7), and after the ‘Monist Club’ has been

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tucked away on a ship heading for ‘high C’ (‘Hohen C’ or ‘See’). This musico-spatial reference, in combination with the eye lost in line 6, marks an anti-ocularcentric tendency taking over Huelsenbeck’s work. The command from now on was to ‘tear your eyes out.’82 What the eye sees is irrelevant in comparison to how the world sounds and is sensed. Futurist bruitism was hereby given a new, near haptic twist, as was the expressionist apocalyptic. Within this un-Zurich constellation, the poem stages a ‘chance’ persona made intensely receptive to what comes, no longer seeing him- or herself as the centre of the universe. In line 21, the lyrical persona resurfaces, indifferently holding both war and peace in his or her toga, and then, however modestly, acting as the body desires: ‘I’ll take a cherry flip’. The poem’s combined scaffolding of ‘God save the King’ and irrational passions and drives, in brief, adds to the decentralisation (or dis-anthropocentring) of the ego in second nature and to its solution in nature, thereby accentuating the conflict between body and culture (zoology and Goethian civilisation). Yet remarkably, the wish to belong to a community as it had been foregrounded in ‘Ebene’ appears to have fallen off the page. ‘Ende der Welt’ forcefully alludes to a primitivist or vitalist nature already amongst us. However, despite its success in dissolving given forms of individuality, the poem does not arrive at representing singularity in communality. The only imaginary it actually refers to (that of the German monarchy) is mentioned in negative terms. ‘Ende der Welt’ stops at the suggestion of the possibility of changing communal representation, as do all other poems Huelsenbeck had written in Zurich and would write in Berlin – even his two most explicitly political poems parodying the given hegemony: ‘Gesang der Vaterlandsfreude’ (Song of Patriotism, 1920) and ‘Schieber-Politik’ (Swindle-Politics),83 which appeared in the famous journal Der Blutige Ernst in 1919 as an addendum to a piece of Einstein entitled ‘Freie Bahn dem Tüchtigen. Ein Beitrag zur Demokratie’. ‘Ende’ roars with laughter at the present state, suggests that the subject has the means to emancipate itself from it, and then halts. Or so it appears. For once we insert Huelsenbeck’s work into its surrounding political constellation, we come to realise that it was already doing much more, that it was in fact already aligning another community: a league of citizens who under the state of exception in Germany, too, were slowly being stripped to bare wood as subjects. There was a deceptive simplicity to Huelsenbeck’s logic and textual tactics. Dada, in his own words, was from now on to become ‘a mirror which one quickly passes by’.84 It was thus to mirror ‘life’ in a veristic fashion, and so it did indeed, for what it was actually mirroring was life under the German state of exception. Reiterating what was already at

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hand, Huelsenbeck discovered the powerful tool of critical repetition. Using ‘uncreative’ repetition, his work came to comprise shocking and at times terrifying patches: ‘The sexual criminal Anton was a Dadaist when in his diary he wrote: Killed today a girl, it was fine and hot.’85 However shocking, these words could have been quoted verbatim from news reports in Berlin dailies on ‘Lustmorde’ or mass massacres. (As we will see further on, few texts bring out the war’s devastating effects on the mental sanity of Germans as convincingly as Doctor Billig am Ende.) Similarly, his texts on occasion appeared to expound an anarchocapitalism, praising the beauty of the emporium and its moving staircases, singing the song of disreputable Taylorites or of Chicago-style bandits.86 With a textual universe consisting almost exclusively of such personae, Huelsenbeck’s work came to stage a Hobbesian state of nature, to the point of competing with Sade’s experiments in radical libertarianism. Naturally, the author did not really envision the Hobbesian-like state of nature evoked by such shocking patches. This would have contradicted his utopian outlook on a future ‘light- and gardencity’, and would have implied that he wanted the state of war to extend indefinitely. As Peter Sloterdijk succinctly remarks, Huelsenbeck would then also have taken a one-sided approach (the approach of evil) to the agenda inscribed in his aesthetic. Speaking from beyond good and evil, his work here requires from the reader ‘experience with ironical-polemical ways of speaking’. Huelsenbeck ‘was trying out the new tactics on an immeasurably ticklish subject, namely, the art of declaring oneself, in an ironic, dirty way, to be in agreement with the worst possible things’.87 Indeed, in a way the war was doing with civilians what Huelsenbeck desired from literature: it desubjectivised, leaving Germans bereft of their dignity and rendering bourgeois morality plainly ridiculous. Revolts and strikes during the winter of 1917 and their violent repression under the German wartime regime had shown how ordinary people were dealt with as citizens with diminishing civic rights. Hunger set their agenda, the body being one of the few commodities the common (wo)man still had to offer on the market to acquire foodstuffs. With each day their country came to resemble more clearly an occupied state in which politicians and military officials struggled and experimented to make ends meet. That throughout the war Berlin was one of Germany’s principal garrison towns made the city all the more aggressive. Early in 1918 it became evident that the Central Power alliance had splintered irrevocably under the onslaught of Allied armies. As news of the Russian Revolution reached Berlin, a more oppositional political culture was able to take root, and resistance to the war proved increasingly hard to repress. So it happened that the German people also began voicing its passions,

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most notably its opposition to the German Reich. Hence, mirroring life, as his poetic prescribed, Huelsenbeck’s shift in thought, in particular his reconsideration of the subject, concurred with a wide spread public debate in which his poetic project surfaced as but one expression of an acute political problem: a (near) universal subject stripped bare, a homo sacer. The Great War inside Germany’s borders was doing for him what he desired of literature: it had begun to make people conscious of their (self-inflicted) repression in the Second Reich. Huelsenbeck’s poetics and German politics thus became inextricably intertwined: the ‘new’ man and the citizen under the state of exception coincided. From this nexus, this accidental or contingent joint, Huelsenbeck subsequently launched what can only be termed a politics of his own. Again, we are reminded of Marinetti here, but as will become apparent we are dealing with almost the negative cliché of Marinetti’s wartime and bellicose poetic. Huelsenbeck became less and less interested in what binds aesthetic subjects (readers or viewers) together, it appears, and ever more fascinated by what binds political subjects or citizens together as they are made to live together under the (absence of) law. His use of the term Bürger, for example, gained an unmistakably ambiguous tenor within Berlin political culture. When in 1917, again in ‘Der neue Mensch’, he wrote that ‘everything should live – but one thing should cease – the Bürger’,88 he surely meant to refer to the bourgeois as it had been defined in Zurich: the universal opponent of Dada. Yet within the context of enunciation the citizen as it was constricted and slowly stripped of subjectivity under the state of emergency now became tied up in the Bürger’s referential sphere as well. As Huelsenbeck’s own text further stated: ‘All aristocracies . . . of the Reich, their names are worthless.’89 Thus pushing into the open again his (pre-Dada) anathema to the Second Reich, he circumscribed the main party responsible for legally and physically repressing the citizen. The Zurich antagonism between Dada and bourgeois was thereby extended: Dada versus bourgeois90 and aristocracy. As this move into political culture illustrates, Dadaism in Germany considerably expanded its terrain of action when compared to that of Zurich Dada. Huelsenbeck indeed made culture the primary site from which Dada in Germany would bring across its message. In January 1918, he read his ‘Erste Dada Rede in Deutschland’ (First Dada Speech in Germany) in the Berlin Graphischen Kabinett I. B. Neumann, which officially launched Dadaism in Germany.91 As before in Zurich he stated that Dadaism wanted to be the forerunner in literature. But the task it thereby took up had radically changed. Barely a month later, he announced the founding of a German ‘Club Dada’ (Dadaisten-Klub),92 including Franz Jung, George Grosz and Helmut Herzfelde (John Heartfield), which well

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into 1920 would give way to a series of initiatives and loose collaborations – the international ‘Dada Tournee’ Huelsenbeck embarked on with Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader in early 1920 being one of many memorable instances. Importantly, Huelsenbeck from the outset characterised the Club Dada, which would never attain the amicability and intimate cohesion of the Zurich ‘Gemeinschaft’, as a cultural movement. This in part tied in with the unusually harsh critique of German Dadaists on anything that was even remotely related to art, literature or aesthetics. In Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaism had distinguished itself primarily from everything Biedermeierish, bourgeois and philistine. With a steady hand Huelsenbeck continued to foster this opposition in Berlin. Yet more explicitly than before he began to ridicule ‘die Moderne’ or the ‘high’ art of his time,93 and in particular the ‘meliorist’ expressionists who believed that by appealing to readers’ innate goodness things would change for the better. As can be readily deduced from this list of literary opponents, which encompassed just about every agent in German literature (high- and low-brow) at this stage, he came close to seeking out literature as such as it was practised in Germany. Therefore, the ‘cultural turn’ in his work has, rightfully, most often been read as an explicit move toward Kulturkritik. While humanitarian expressionists in his mind erronously posed the ontological goodness of subjects, others excelled in either reiterating uncritically given identities or drawing up aestheticist chimeras promising a better future. In so doing, Huelsenbeck claimed, they apologetically diverted attention from the brutality of war and every German’s complicity in it. Instead of fostering resistance they subdued the oppositional impulse. His attack on German Bildung, on how Idealist, Romanticist literature had become a model for other (vanguard) arts (his own Zurich work included), and for (nationalist) culture at large, culminated in his justly famous pathology of modernity, which prefigured that of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944): ‘What is German culture? (Answer shit.)’,94 and ‘Dada is eminently civilising’.95 Huelsenbeck indeed tended to regard German civilisation and culture as a cloak covering up if not upholding monstrosity. These are all quintessential aspects of his work. Yet stressing them too much also draws our gaze away from a more mundane issue Huelsenbeck raised at the same time. Pointing out expressionism’s complicity in the war, for instance, he was also noting a wide spread resistance to simply facing literature’s practical political determination and politicisation. While in Zurich the bourgeois had been the main oppressive agent in literary matters, in Berlin the sphere of literature appeared a fully public domain to the Reich’s Kommandantur. Huelsenbeck, for example, let ‘Der neue Mensch’ be accompanied by an advertisement

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and invitation for applications: ‘R. Huelsenbeck-Publishers, Berlin . . . EDITOR OF MODERN POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC PAMPHLETS. Sales agent wanted for Holland and Scandinavia.’96 Although his publishing house never got off the ground, he clearly and from the start gave his project in Berlin a political edge in public – which, as we saw, was something he was careful to avoid in the far less politicised context of Switzerland. Shortly after he placed the advertisement, however, the police confiscated all copies of Phantastische Gebete, which he had brought with him from Zurich.97 As (pre-)Dada initiatives by others in 1917 Berlin also illustrate, escaping censorship and finding alternative publishing channels were the subject of daily worries.98 The same went for events during the reintroduced state of exception after the November Revolution’s brief optimistic first phase. The numerous interventions of political officials in Dada affairs from late 1918 onwards – periodicals banned or censored, Dadaists spending time in prison without charges being brought against them, and so on – highlight that well into 1919 the realm of literature could arguably not be compared to its character in times of political stability.99 A plethora of documents thus marks that the practice of literature was as politically determined as the rest of social life under the German state of exception. The writer, the Dadaist thereby differed from other citizens in no way other than in his trade. The writer, too, had to eat and drink. He or she would have liked a ‘cherry flip’. Hence, that Huelsenbeck and other Berlin Dadaists here drew attention to the fact that ‘art was dead’ – a phrase reiterated in numerous critical assessments of the movement – could also be taken quite literally: from their perspective art had indeed ceased to exist as a relatively autonomous sphere. Commonly labelled an ‘anti-art’,100 Berlin Dada may have been one of the staunchest defences of art in modernity, as the state of exception in Germany threatened to smother it. That Huelsenbeck kept practising literature, an outlet he had always valued highly, and that he took risks to engage in politics, was no contradiction but a forceful act of opposition. Ambiguously, to be sure, Dada in Berlin, and not least Huelsenbeck, can be said to have embarked on a veritable redemption of literature. Only when this dreadful state of affairs in literature is taken into account does the extent of Huelsenbeck’s political potential at this point fully show itself. Huelsenbeck came to conclude, it seems, that if literature was to survive the state of exception, if it was not simply to give up the relative autonomy it had acquired for itself since German Idealism, it had to find a way of being (counter-)political in its own right. It had to prove its political efficacy. Naturally, for that to happen, literature had first to be thoroughly scrutinised. Thus, while launching Dada as a

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cultural-critical endeavour, one of the first things Huelsenbeck simultaneously did in Berlin was to cut the link between literature and ethics, which had been pivotal in Zurich. (In his later Doctor Billig am Ende this link would again be restored.) ‘Dadaism’, so he wrote in early 1918, ‘has made a break with the aesthetic approach to life by rendering all slogans of ethics, culture and inwardness, into their component parts.’101 What thereafter remained of literature and its producer? This became our author’s principal query, and the answer, we just saw, was a ‘new’ man, a vantage point from which to start afresh in literature, a way of coping with the times, too, since the ‘new’ man was able to experience freedom and autonomy even within the most constrictive contexts. In January 1918, Huelsenbeck publicly stated that Dada now faced a ‘turning-point in history. It is but a single step away from politics. Tomorrow, minister or martyr in the Schlüsselberg.’102 A few months later, in his ‘Dadaistischen Manifest’, the first in the German language, he celebrated Dada as a cultural ‘state of mind which can reveal itself in each and every conversation, so that one is compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST and that man is not.’ That the Dadaist could only be identified in conversation made clear that his identity still principally lay in language – literature thereby loses little of its significance. Yet he went on: ‘In some situations being a Dadaist might demand that one is more businessman or party politician than artist.’103 The Dadaist, in short, was no longer characterised as a man of letters but as a man who could come from all trades. This was only logical on the grounds of his universal materialist ontology. A ‘new’ man, the Dadaist was but an emanation of a universal phenomenon. By now however, and also adding that he was a man of all trades, the Dadaist became more explicitly identified as a citizen. And here, finally, Huelsenbeck’s Dadaism became political beyond refute. Mirroring the state literature was in, he debased the status of the writer until a ‘rock-bottom’ was hit and only the (legal) status of citizen remained. From this point onwards, no matter which way it is read, his work had irreversibly cut into the political language game. The idea that with the ‘new’ man another citizen was also coming into being is one that cannot be downplayed. Everything suggests that in Berlin Huelsenbeck came to see the state of exception as the acme of the Reich’s disciplinary and anti-democratic power, while at the same time locating in this period of martial law an opportunity to start afresh. Early in 1918, he stressed that Dadaism had always been for the war.104 And, indeed, our author, like Hugo Ball, had in 1914 volunteered to join the army in part because he believed that the war could bring an ‘irrational catharsis of society’.105 He thus opted for if not a silly then a naive German variant of Marinetti’s

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nationalist-vitalist glorification of war, because it was not a German victory but the prospect of defeat, the downfall of the old German Reich that prompted his actions. By the time he returned to Berlin, however, his conviction had changed. Yet the most obvious illustration of his ambivalence toward the war is found in his continued desire to devise a way for literature to be constitutive of politics. Not so much Dadaism but the interplay between Dada and its surrounding political context in Berlin finally made this possible, if not inevitable. Before the November Revolution, Huelsenbeck’s discourse scarcely reflected on the legal aspects the conscription of an alternative citizenship obviously entailed. This might appear an odd observation at this point, but it is precisely where his work subsequently takes us. Before the Revolution, his stress lay on the citizen-subject and not on the citizensubject as it lived (or could live) with others in civil society. Huelsenbeck seems to have bounced back incessantly on the old Nietzschean paradox. Departing from the plurality of perspectives and passions constantly changing and criss-crossing one another in the public space, this paradox poses both ‘the necessity and the impossibility of instigating a new legislation’.106 Impossibility because once everyone is treated as a singular subject, it becomes impossible to represent society as a collective body. Any form of socialisation, any ‘common good’ projected onto society at large here would fall short of its aims. Sooner or later it would have to recourse to a positive marker of collective indentity, a norm common to all people, an essence or foundation of identity that would contradict subjects as singularities. Necessity because, as Huelsenbeck further wished, everyone should be given the right to act as he or she desires.107 In order to avoid people impeding each other’s singularity here, and so as to ward off sliding into a Hobbesian state of nature, some normative model of socialisation, of legislation even, is inevitable – Marinetti, again, prefigured the dangers involved if this requirement is not met. Indeed, even ‘Der neue Mensch’ had made clear that at least some discursive (and by extension legal) demarcation of the subject was mandatory for it to experience freedom. The essay had highlighted that the ‘new’ man comprised two components: on the one hand his singularity lay in bodily sensations and passions; on the other hand it lay in language and discourse as it codified laws and imposed an identity, which conflicted with and aroused (other) passions. Hence, while permanently fixing the ‘new’ subject’s identity would have amounted to contradicting its universality with particularity, discursive constraint, law even, simultaneously proved constitutive of it. If no law, no norm was present, the ‘new’ man would be unable to experience his freedom. But what laws, which political system could ever match such a demanding task?

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This is the point where Huelsenbeck’s mind got stuck before the November Revolution. According to Richard Sheppard: For Huelsenbeck there was only the struggle to achieve a temporarily improved situation which, in turn, had to be struggled against when it became a break on further movement. Huelsenbeck took the Fourierist view that the ideal state should admit that men are governed by primitive drives and encourage them to use these in creative and individual ways.108

Sheppard’s analysis is a sound but inconclusive one, as it fails to go one step further and consider the temporal solutions Huelsenbeck subsequently did put forth. A pragmatist, the Dadaist underscored that the construction of a definitive practical alternative would only end in the substitution of the given state. Yet just as he would later come to foresee Dada’s end in his introduction to the Dada Almanach (1920) and En avant Dada (1920), Huelsenbeck’s take on politics, too, was a timely one. His stress in Berlin on having found the true ‘realm of our invention’ – ‘that realm in which we, too, can still be original, say, as parodists of world history’ – after the November Revolution gained irrevocable political weight. A temporal political solution, an invention within ‘the limitations of its own appearance’,109 was about to articulate itself. And this inside a vacated Reichstag, which like literature had so far functioned as a ‘machine of consent’ subjected to the German Kaiser’s power.

The November Revolution: The Dadaist as Politician After a tumultuous and widely reported Dada soirée in the prestigious Berliner Sezession in April 1918, Huelsenbeck was, for the second time since his return to Germany and like many physicians of his generation, conscripted into the army as ‘Feldunterartz’ in the industrial city of Fürstenwalde am Spree. He returned to Berlin just days before the Revolution surged forward. Based on his own apocrypha and anecdotes about the events, we know that on 10, 11 or 12 November he entered the Reichstag. In his unauthorised memoirs, notably in a chapter entitled ‘Tragikomödie im Reichstag’ (Tragicomedy in the Reichstag, dated 1942)110 Huelsenbeck recounts how, as a somewhat politically wide-eyed figure, he joined the Rat geistiger Arbeiter, which had been charged with (future) cultural matters. In this biographical sketch, Kurt Hiller, the leader of the Rat, is not mentioned once by name, while Hans-Georg Beerfelde is. Beerfelde was a member of the Executive of the Berlin Workers and Soldiers Councils that had been installed spontaneously

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during the first phase of the Revolution on 9 November. For three days, Beerfelde held a leading position in the Council system. If it had not been for him, Hiller’s idea of erecting a third power in the Reichstag in charge of culture would never have been acted on. When Beerfelde lost his position, the Rat geistiger Arbeiter was evicted from the Reichstag – as Hiller would later maintain, because only political parties belonged there.111 Interestingly, in his memoirs Huelsenbeck describes how he too visited Beerfelde. To an unnamed friend who accompanied him, Beerfelde supposedly expressed his fear of having to dismantle the Rat geistiger Arbeiter, since its leader was suspected of being a counter-revolutionary. Huelsenbeck’s friend, who later turns out to be the leader of the Rat in person, addresses his audience with the words ‘We want to introduce the Geist in politics . . . We will reach our goal . . . We are Activists.’112 This figure, who clearly goes out of his way to avoid being labelled a communist, is Hiller. Seconding reports from others who were involved in the Rat,113 Huelsenbeck’s memoirs further describe how inside the room where the Rat was installed everyone seemed to smoke and shout, the cry ‘humanity’ in particular triggering the wrath of many present. Finally, his memoirs recount how he and a second friend (a gynaecologist named Dr. F. about whom nothing further is known) were ordered to go and take possession of an important (though again unnamed) Berlin daily newspaper, backed up by an order coming directly from the Reichstag. When Huelsenbeck and his friend arrived at the newspaper’s headquarters they met with a somewhat laconic response from its editor-in-chief. So what there was a revolution? What did all this have to do with his paper? Huelsenbeck thus entered a near-completely vacated centre of legislative power during the November Revolution. In the previous chapter we saw what the November Revolution looked like from the perspective of an exiled outsider, who, faced with the aporia it gave rise to (the impossible choice between a parliamentary democracy or a bolshevist state), moved towards the option of a proletarian bolshevist state. With Huelsenbeck the Revolution has to be viewed from the perspective of an insider who came to favour the option of a parliamentary democracy and, like van Ostaijen, gave his favoured solution a twist of his own. What precisely did he have in mind? And how was it that, seemingly going against his previous charges against expressionism, he entered the Reichstag under the leadership of the Activist Hiller. Hiller after all was commonly considered the intellectual leader of humanitarian expressionism, and as a figure as contested as Huelsenbeck – Georg Lukács, in his famous essay ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ (1934), described Hiller as a fascist expressionist – it is rather surprising to meet him even near Huelsenbeck.

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Hiller, as one of the principal spokespersons of early expressionism, had played an important role in Huelsenbeck’s pre-Dada phase.114 Before the Great War we find Huelsenbeck (albeit implicitly) siding with the expressionist agenda championed by Hiller.115 The Activist, like Heinrich Mann, expressed a longing for the French Revolution to finally find its equivalent in Germany. To this end he put forth an alternative artistocracy or messianic body: a league of organised ‘geistig’ intelligentsia and artists, who would ideally come to embody the Geist of the oppositional ‘great Left’.116 Like Hiller, Huelsenbeck before the Great War also adhered to pacifism. The war however compelled him to relinquish his adherence to pacificism, and furthermore caused his support for Hiller’s programme to wane. As early as 1915 he abandoned Hiller’s proposed organisation of intellectuals into a potential revolutionary class. Bracketing all ‘isms’117 in a brief and playful manifesto he had composed together with Ball, the ‘supporters of Geist’ who yearned to unleash the (French) revolution in the whole of Germany were set aside, and instead came the ‘privatist’ revolt of Zurich Dada. Huelsenbeck had thus clearly cultivated differences with Hiller, most importantly by questioning his Romanticist intellectualism and his pacifist programme for an organised Geistig artistocracy. Yet Huelsenbeck and Hiller also had a number of things in common in late 1918.118 Like Huelsenbeck, Hiller despised the ruling aristocracy and its cultural politics. A homosexual, he found it particularly difficult to identify with a regime whose law penalised homosexuality.119 The venting of bodily desire in public, by consequence, was a more than primal concern to Hiller as well. Before the Revolution both men further shared scepticism about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Hiller would write in 1920 that the proletariat ‘overthrew the Emperor because he lost the war; not for the sake of his guilt but for the sake of his failure.’120 It did not care about politics as long as success was met. Neither would it stand up to provide an alternative, because, and here he agreed with many Marxists, it lacked means and education. Yet in both Huelsenbeck’s and Hiller’s view the proletariat lacked something additional: to Huelsenbeck it was a sense of adventure, to Hiller it was Geist. Their scepticism prevented both men from ever adhering to dogmatic communism and always made them somewhat uneasy when faced with the various branches of Marxism that circulated within German political culture around the time of the Revolution. Nor, for that matter, did they adhere to any other given political programme (although Hiller considered himself a ‘socialist’ of his own breed). While Hiller may have proposed the organisation of intellectuals, the outcome of his political agenda was left open-ended, just as with Huelsenbeck’s.121 In short, what

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principally tied both men together at the outbreak of the Revolution was their sense of singularity (elitism even), a resistance to collectivisation and a logically concurrent stress on safeguarding liberal rights. So far unstudied correspondence between Hiller and Huelsenbeck of the years 1944–1947122 shows that their involvement in the Rat123 gave rise to a lifelong friendship, in which they went on to cherish both their differences and ‘Kampfgemeinschaft’ (common stuggle).124 They kept each other up to date about their work and intellectual activities, Hiller, for instance, by drawing Huelsenbeck’s attention in 1944 to his forthcoming After Nazism – Democracy?125 They exchanged lists of expressionist friends who had passed away, told one another about relationships with others going sour, such as Hiller’s with Heinrich Mann. Everything suggests, then, that inside the Reichstag they forged a political alliance capable of bridging some of the most deeply engrained differences within the realm of aesthetics. Indeed, a look at what was actually discussed in the Reichstag – based on Hiller’s writings shortly before and after the Revolution – shows that they must have shared still other views, or better, that Huelsenbeck may have come to identify with at least part of Hiller’s project. According to Huelsenbeck’s posthumous memoirs, even during the second, repressive phase of the November Revolution, while machine-guns were emptied on the Berlin streets, he would meet up with Hiller and some friends in Café Josty, expressing their common belief in the ‘future of the German Republic’.126 Their support for liberal democracy united them in the Reichstag, then, but it was also one possible cause for Hiller being termed a counter-revolutionary by Beerfelde’s entourage. Shortly after the Revolution, and concurring with Huelsenbeck’s memoirs, Hiller would write that he considered liberal democracy the least of all evils. Liberalism, to Hiller, was the will to the greatest possible freedom from the state, without the rejection of the state according to the fashion of the anarchists. It was the anarchism of the sensible. We know that it allowed the pauperization of the poor, became Magna Carta of freely exploiting capital . . . every coming social order which is not anointed with plenty of drops of liberal oil will be unbearable. That means: the individual is protected from the clutch of the paws of the state . . . except when the real welfare of other individuals requires otherwise.127

Before the Revolution, Hiller had already recognised the importance liberal democracy had played elsewhere in Europe in emancipating subjects. Yet he had also forcefully exposed one of its limitations: its unconditional rule of the majority, a rule that was, as we saw in the previous chapter, also unconditional to many Marxists. ‘The uncommon person’, Hiller wrote briefly before the Revolution, ‘yes uncommon only through the fervency of his devotion to the common people who bristle,

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admittedly in incomprehension,’ is held down by the masses. This was ‘in opposition to the true interests of society . . . Nietzsche’s work is the titanic curse of this Democratism.’128 If anything was on Huelsenbeck’s agenda, too, it was the ‘uncommon type’, the ‘new’ man who could freely externalise his bodily desires and passions in the public space, and whose singularity came before communality. Unlike Huelsenbeck before the Revolution, however, Hiller made a difference between democratism (the value of democracy) and its meaning (rule of the people). This led him to put forth the institutional means to see this goal realised in practical terms: a libertarian criminal code. When we turn to Hiller’s ‘Ein deutsches Herrenhaus’ (A German House of Lords, 1918), which appeared only months before the Revolution, Hiller can be seen to be far in advance of Huelsenbeck, proposing another form of democracy which he would later call Logokratie, and which, importantly, may have offered Huelsenbeck a model that could institute his libertarian citizensubject. Hiller proposed the establishment of a bicameral legislature. The lower house would be elected by universal and equal suffrage and by proportional representation. There would be no division of the country into voting districts in order to ensure the fair representation of minorities. The upper house would be a home of wise men, of Geist. They would sketch a general program of action for the country which Hiller assumed would include the elimination of war and military conscription, a rational economic order, a libertarian criminal code, and a new system of education.129

It is easy to see what might have attracted Huelsenbeck to Hiller’s programme. Replacing the Reich’s male suffrage by universal suffrage, Hiller ensured that the political sphere would be capable of representing shifts in passions of the public more aptly, avoiding politics getting stuck in the inertia and anaemia of the old Reich. This in itself may already have appealed to Huelsenbeck given his stress on movement and perpetual change. Huelsenbeck here may have come to recognise what Claude Lefort has termed the ‘empty space’ characteristic of all societies as they move from feudal monarchies to democracies. ‘The democratic revolution’ in France, for example, ‘burst out when the body of the king was destroyed, when the body politic was decapitated and when, at the same time, the corporeality of the social was dissolved. There then occurred what I would call a “disincorporation” of individuals.’130 Democracy, Lefort stresses, dissolves the people’s symbolic collectivity. It challenges the people time and again (during elections) to symbolically gather its body parts and to define itself afresh. Or, as Huelsenbeck’s own description of the writer’s task read (rather eerily close to Lefort’s metaphors): ‘the best and most extraordinary writers

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will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life.’131 Here, Lefort claims, resides the ‘revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy’: ‘the locus of power becomes an empty space . . . it cannot be occupied – it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it – and it cannot be represented. Only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are visible, or only the men, the mere mortals, who hold political authority.’132 Theoretically but conspicuously, Huelsenbeck may thus have come to believe that democracy provided an institutional decorum for launching a generic ‘new’ citizen-subject. Contrary to the situation in the Second Reich, democracy’s innate inability to fix or secure the locus of power, made way for a power-struggle in the political sphere that was actually capable of mirroring the complex and pluralist public space. Hiller’s Logokratie, however, warned against this strictly theoretical approach to liberal democracy. The latter had to be pushed further so that not only could it do away with the totalitarian aristocracy of the Reich, it could also avoid falling into the very same trap of the Reich’s homogenising cultural and identity politics. In a society ruled by the majority, the centre sets the agenda and the margins get excluded. A radical or libertarian democracy therefore had to aid in codifying a libertarian ethos, respecting minorities and singular individuals who did not meet the majority’s norm. The legal conscription of identity or subjectivity, as a mechanism, would to this end have to be kept as open as possible; tolerance, plurality and difference would have to become normative in practical politics so that marginal identities could be de-penalised. For this to happen, a body of ‘mortals’, a buffer, had to be taken up in democracy that would see to it that sudden shifts and identities taking shape in civil society could find a match in political representation and that the norm could each time be widened in legislation. Hence Hiller’s ‘wise men’ or second chamber, whose members would be selected not on the grounds of party alliance but on the grounds of their individual expertise in different social spheres. Unlike Marinetti’s post-war Futurist Democracy, then, government would not just come to rest in the hands of artists or writers. Each to his trade, Huelsenbeck may have thought, just as long as the literary trade is restored and included. What happened after the Rat geistiger Arbeiter was evicted from the Reichstag is history. After the Revolution’s second, repressive phase, which once again introduced the state of exception, the Weimar Republic was installed. Within six months a parliamentary democracy was created. From now on, the president was to be elected by popular direct ballot, yet like the Kaiser before him he retained the power to appoint the chancellor and cabinet ministers. This time, however, the

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cabinet had to mirror the party composition of the Reichstag and it was furthermore responsible to this body. Reichstag members were elected by secret ballot and popular vote; suffrage became universal. All but one crucial piece of Hiller’s programme was thus realised: the chamber or house of wise men, of Geist, who would propose a libertarian criminal code, found no place in the Weimar Constitution of the National Assembly. Liberal democracy was installed. The chance of a libertarian democracy was missed. Evidently, the Weimar Constitution, liberal and in part pluralist in nature, paid ample attention to civil rights. In Hiller’s and Huelsenbeck’s view the Weimar Constitution thus must have entailed a change for the better. It decreed the universal equality of all citizens in front of the law, for example, stressing that ‘every man’s home is an asylum’ (article 115) and that privacy and freedom of communication within the confines of the private space were inviolable (article 117).133 It further recognised that each citizen with a right to vote had the right to stand in elections, thus endowing the citizen with subjectivity, that is, with the right to act and help shape democracy as a citizen-subject. In theory, everyone could now take a stand in the political sphere and proclaim his or her passion, albeit in practice by taking in a party seat first. Nevertheless, and despite no doubt welcoming these changes, Huelsenbeck kept voicing his contempt for Germany after the Revolution. The first text he (anonymously) published after the Revolution in the Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Every Man his Own Football, co-edited by Huelsenbeck) was entitled ‘Die Latrine’. This piece for the first time let Huelsenbeck’s practice of critical repetition loose on political speech in a collage mocking almost exclusively ‘citations from the National Assembly’.134 Clearly, the Revolution had a dislocational impact on his work and poetic. The reasons for his continued critique of German politics are easily identified, and are closely related to the alternative democratic model he and Hiller had previously designed in the Reichstag.

Weimar Democracy: The Kaiser’s Spectre Here is a remarkable passage from the Weimar Constitution’s chapter on ‘The Individual’, article 118: Every German is entitled . . . to express his opinion freely in word, writing, print, image or otherwise . . . There is no censorship; in case of the cinema, other regulations may be established by law. Also in order to combat trashy and obscene literature, as well as for the protection of the youth in public exhibitions and performances, legal measures are permissible.

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As this article makes clear, the Weimar Constitution carried traces of Wilhelmine politics in literary matters. Within the private space, authors could voice what they desired. In public, however, they could not. Here censorship was allowed if artists threatened to expose ‘the youth’ to opinions deviating from the norm. Next to ‘protecting’ the youth, though, censorship thus in part also protected Wilhelmine or philistine aesthetics, as they had been voiced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in his famous 1901 speech delivered on the Siegesallee: Art should contribute to the education of the people. Even the lower classes, after their toil and hard work, should be lifted up and inspired by ideal forces. We Germans have permanently acquired these great ideals, while other peoples have more or less lost them. Only the Germans remain and are above all others called upon to guard these great ideals, to nurture and perpetuate them . . . But when art, as often happens today, shows us only misery and shows it to us even uglier than misery is anyway, then art commits a sin against the German people. The supreme task . . . is to foster our ideals. If we are and want to remain a model for other nations, our entire people must share in this effort . . . That can be done only if art holds out its hands to raise the people up, instead of descending it into the gutter.135

The face of the Bürger, as he identified with the Kaiser’s power, thus became inscribed into the Weimar Constitution as a normative identity for citizenship, to be protected by law in the public space. Huelsenbeck never referred to article 118 in the Weimar Constitution. Yet he did reveal that in spite of the installation of the Weimar Republic the spectre of the Second Reich continued to roam through politics in a variety of ways. In his post-revolutionary writings, it is indeed hard to miss how Huelsenbeck soon discovered that in the theoretically ‘empty space’ of democracy, officials and mortals drew on what they knew best: life during the Wilhelmine era. A capital text in this respect is Deutschland muss untergehen! It is the only volume the author wrote after the Revolution that discusses politics in a quite constative, though elliptic and montaged narrative. It sharply contrasts with the increasingly dark irony of his other Dada writings. In this text a reader experiences the joy of meeting the implied author, as he throws off his ironic laughing, grotesque mask. Moreover, it contains the only explicit reference to the events in the Reichstag found in Huelsenbeck’s subsequently authorised Dada writings: ‘Hauptmann Beerfelde is not given permission to speak.’136 With this, Huelsenbeck’s Erinnerungen eines alten Dadaistischen Revolutionärs, the volume’s subtitle, brings out one of the principal questions of his post-revolutionary writings: which political official gets to speak, where, how and to whom, and what, if anything, does he say?

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Deutschland muss untergehen! can be read as a personal account of the Revolution, but its chief interest here is that the account is interlarded with a startling review of politicians. With each political official Huelsenbeck mentions, he also lays bare their ties to the old Wilhelmine Reich. Social Democratic Party (SPD) members mentioned include: Friedrich Ebert, ‘who was appointed by the old regime’ (p. 5); Gustav Noske, head of the repression, who is a ‘Hindenburg en miniature’ (p. 6); Philipp Scheidemann, who unilaterally declared the Republic and ‘who let himself be appointed from His Majesty to State-secretary’ (p. 6). About members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) Huelsenbeck is brief. He mentions Richard Müller and Emil Barth, ‘who both brought hand grenades to Berlin’ (p. 5). Thus perhaps alluding to the fact that these military men, who formed part of the clandestine pre-revolutionary Berliner Revolutionären Obleute, were completely taken by surprise when the Revolution spontaneously burst forth. All of these political officials, so Huelsenbeck claimed, acted according ‘to old schemes . . . totally unpolitical, gramophones to canonlike tracts and age-old slogans . . . before the court of law of humanity and humanitarianism, where Kaiser Wilhelm presides and where the audience every fifteen minutes is commanded to bellow hurrah. Nice this is’ (pp. 6, 10, my emphasis). Huelsenbeck here exposed the ‘spell of democracy’137 as it rids itself of feudal monarchism, a spell van Ostaijen around this time also uncovered in Bezette Stad. The November Revolution had repudiated the oligarchic system of the Second Reich in which an Emperor and a set of aristocratic Princes embodied the people. Like all revolutions, the November Revolution simultaneously ended up repudiating politics as such and, rejecting the Emperor’s authority, it looked to replace it with a new authority. It is here according to Huelsenbeck that matters in Germany began to go astray. Instead of replacing the Kaiser’s power with the people’s sovereignty and authority, the imperial body, as a ghostly demarcation, backfired right into democracy, splintered and internalised in the mortals heading the altered political sphere. Their way of acting and of representing was not consonant with what Huelsenbeck and Hiller had regarded as the potential of democracy in the Rat geistiger Arbeiter. It was unpolitical not only in terms of style – their new suits hid the military uniforms they had previously worn, so to speak. It also denied the actual diversity and plurality of civil life, even cancelling out its political representation in law. That Huelsenbeck’s pre-revolutionary poetic, especially its stress on other possibilities, within this constellation gained a far more political edge cannot be denied. However allegorically – though at times in Phantastische Gebete also just explicitly by the critical repetition of politicians’ or political institutions’ names138

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– his literary texts clearly began to reflect on practical politics proper. It would therefore be quite possible to reread his poems in this sense, yet something far more exiting was still to come, which I would like to address here instead. Deutschland muss untergehen! also mentioned German Communist Party (KPD) headman Karl Liebknecht, who along with Rosa Luxemburg had been captured, tortured and executed in the state of exception after the Revolution. Huelsenbeck praised communist Liebknecht for his style. He was a true revolutionary personality (Persönlichkeit). He stood up and said ‘Behold your Führer!’ and this, conspicuously, without consensus on what the Revolution was really about – ‘even though we have more than one Revolution’ (p. 5). Liebknecht in Huelsenbeck’s account is portrayed as a strong personality in whom a wide range of passions and desires condensed. Further, he is the only politician, at least in Huelsenbeck’s review, who did not lay claim to the Revolution by recoursing to old Wilhelmine habits. Yet because the latter, after Liebknecht’s death, formed the only habits at hand, Huelsenbeck concluded that ‘the biggest lie that was ever put on earth was that there has been a revolution in Germany’ (p. 8). For with the largely unchanged political official came the bourgeois citizen who was barely discernible from the pre-war Bürger, a model that had been taken up in law as the perpetuated norm. To illustrate this, Deutschland muss untergehen! staged the three phases of the Revolution in a series of separate paragraphs. The first brief phase, which saw the physical vacation of the political sphere, is characterised as a ‘happy dream’, as a true revolution, and when read closely also as the realisation of Huelsenbeck’s libertarian society: only instincts and passions rule (pp. 3–4) and ‘the élan of the people is elementary’ (p. 4), as if all the world’s prior revolutions condensed in Germany. It was not the outcome but the act or event that had significance. ‘Knowledge is not Power. Power . . . is the Sehnsucht for liberation’ (p. 5). The text then goes on charting the Revolution’s second phase, during which we see people fleeing the streets into the ‘private and family-circle’, and notice how other ‘primitive drives’, mostly fear, take hold. Then came the third, restorative phase, during which the old industrial pressure groups returned with unprecedented strength, and the Spiesser, who for a brief moment had fled into the private space, now straightened his jacket and put on his Wilhelmine Bismarck-hat again. Thus the Spiesser returned, devoid of singularity, conditioned and subjectivised as before the Revolution. Here the German Bürger did what he does best according to Huelsenbeck: ‘He has taken possession of an idea, that began to threaten him . . . and diluted then emptied it’ (p. 12). Rather than

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turning his back to the Revolution thereafter, though, the first cry the Bürger publicly makes, albeit by at once politely apologising for it, is ‘long live liberty!’ Hence, Huelsenbeck’s pathology of modernity, the idea that culture as a second nature was but a layer of varnish over nature proper, was extended to include powerful ideas (such as freedom) in political culture. Huelsenbeck’s post-revolutionary Dada texts that let his practice of critical repetition loose on political speech indeed draw attention to the purely symbolic if not phantasmagorical nature of political representation. Political change, so the suggestion went, could no longer be achieved through (rational) dialogue. Offering a solution, Huelsenbeck’s analysis in Deutschland muss untergehen! concluded with a statement we would have expected before the Revolution: ‘Es kommt in der Tat darauf an, DADAIST zu sein’ (p. 13); the crucial point was to be a Dadaist. Given the now heightened ambivalence of the term Bürger, he may still have had the Dadaist citizen-subject in mind. Within the constellation his statement now figured, however, he also seemed to address the list of politicians his volume had mentioned, promoting the Dadaist as a citizen-politician. Deutschland muss untergehen! launched a curious relation of equivalence in the statuesque ‘Dioskurenpaar’: ‘Ebert-Scheidemann – GoetheSchiller’. Ebert indeed was renowned for reading Goethe, and in Deutschland muss untergehen! Huelsenbeck even has his wife leafing through Faust II in her fauteuil at home. In May 1919, before the National Assembly, Scheidemann had in turn quoted Schiller’s aesthetic education: ‘The dignity of man is in your hands: take good care of it!’139 By equating political leaders with writers from the humanist canon, Huelsenbeck made apparent that in the aftermath of the November Revolution, Germany became ‘the land of poets and thinkers’, while it was ‘washed up as the land of judges and butchers’ in international politics.140 As a wholesale recuperation of Germany’s uncontested great cultural past was launched in the political sphere to reinstate the country’s cultural and political homogeneity, all but political culture remained. No literary text in this interregnum was devoid of political connotations. Unsurprisingly, the equation in Deutschland muss untergehen! of ruling politicians with authors from the humanist canon was subsequently inscribed into a chiasmus of which the second part is found later that year in Dada siegt! Here Huelsenbeck described a performance during the ‘Dada Tournee’ getting out of hand, noting that the aroused audience ‘wanted to kill us, like it killed Liebknecht . . . Bravo! Bolshevism in art.’141 The Dadaist was thus made equivalent with the murdered Liebknecht, a politician whose absence coincided with that of

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Goethe-Schiller and which left only the Dadaist and ruling democratic politicians as surviving opponents. The phrase ‘Bolshevism in art’ to accompany the chiasmus formed part and parcel of Huelsenbeck’s practice of critical repetition. It is well known that already in the late 1910s ‘Kultur-’ or ‘Kunstbolsjevismus’ were used in conservative circles to characterise experimental art.142 No doubt Huelsenbeck took up the term to ironically provoke the anger of part of his readership and audience, which during the ‘Dada Tournee’ in early 1920 could amount to 2,000 people each night!143 Yet the phrase’s referential sphere was somewhat more complex. It was also truthful in that it again highlighted Huelsenbeck’s distaste for the Bürger while carefully excluding any identification with the working class. It further showed his respect for bolshevist leaders. For it was not only Liebknecht who was admired by Huelsenbeck: ‘The real politician (such as Lenin seems to be) creates a movement, that is, he dissolves individualities with the help of a theory, he changes nothing. And that, too, as paradoxical as it may seem, is the import of the communist movement.’144 How so: without changing anything? Well, Huelsenbeck appears to have implied that communists had managed to expose the actual and given complexity of the civil life in the public space. They had (inadvertently) shown that both politicians and writers had gone about conceiving political change in the wrong way. All they had to do, so Huelsenbeck’s reading of the success of communism suggests, was to mirror ‘veristically’ what already was: a complex and plural civil society. The ingenuousness of Huelsenbeck’s political logic was as powerful as it was tautological: Lenin and Liebknecht were Dadaists, so Dadaism is communism. The latter’s theory, as it had been (re)presented by its leaders, had functioned as a discursive trigger which unleashed from the political sphere passions widely spread among the public, and this without any real consensus on the technicalities of its theory or on how to progress. The uncertain change it had conspicuously announced was embodied by a number of strong subjects, who within the spectral imperial political culture met and attracted the passions of ‘new’ men. Through politicians such as Lenin and Liebknecht the people’s internalised (private) passions were for a brief moment externalised in the public space, bursting out in all directions and spontaneously instituting a libertarian public space. Huelsenbeck’s post-revolutionary writings, in sum, transformed the ‘new’ man as he gained shape in the Dadaist from a nascent citizen into a model politician: a Dada communist, a materialist without history (or historical materialism), the Dadaist was already a revolutionary politician indeed, holding up a mirror to life.

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Evidently, by this time Huelsenbeck’s role as a practical political agent had been played out. It was thus left to literature to continue the opposition communism had bundled. If we were to chart the artistic disorganisation advocated by Huelsenbeck and other Dadas in Berlin or enlist the many activities which the Club Dada devised to mock political institutions (the Dada Party, the Dada United minority States, and so on), we would have to conclude that the author was not all that serious about the Dada politician. When we read his texts attentively, however, it is clear that we cannot take the Dadaist for a mere mock-politician. Already in ‘Der neue Mensch’, in fact, he had stated that the ‘new’ man derived ‘his authority (importance) from his personality’.145 In a letter to Tzara in late 1919 Huelsenbeck again stressed that the Dadaists in Berlin saw themselves primarily as ‘energetic and intelligent personalities’.146 This earnest stress on the Dada personality, which tied in with the strong personality Huelsenbeck had detected in Lenin and Liebknecht, found a further match in his post-revolutionary poetic in what might seem at first sight a clumsy redirection of the anti-ocularcentric tendency isolated earlier in ‘Ende der Welt’, where we saw the simultaneity of olfactory and tactile senses being foregrounded. Simultaneity can be regarded as Huelsenbeck’s own ‘theory’ by which he proposed to dissolve individualities in Berlin after the November Revolution. (‘Simultaneity applied to the economy of facts is communism,’ he wrote.)147 In Huelsenbeck’s pre-revolutionary poetic the term was still rather ill-defined and polyvalent.148 Now, however, in En avant Dada! (1920), Huelsenbeck wrote that simultaneity, as ‘an abstraction . . . presupposes a heightened sensitivity to the passage of things in time, it turns the sequence a=b=c=d into a – b – c – d, and attempts to transform the problem of the ear into a problem of the face.’149 The political implication of this theorem will be clear if the reader substitutes ‘things’ in the quote for ‘identities’ or ‘passions’. The equality and singularity of men are given. It is representing them, as a collective body of different singularities, that was and had always been the real challenge to Huelsenbeck. Was he announcing that he had found a way to achieve this? And how are we to interpret the puzzling word ‘face’ in the above quote where one would expect the noun ‘eye’? The German ‘Gesicht’ either means ‘face’ or ‘dreamlike appearance’, ‘figure’. Was he claiming that literature could stage a revolutionary politician, a face, with whom everyone could come to identify? And if so, how would this literary politician look? With this conundrum and all the weight it carries, we are ready to read Doctor Billig am Ende.

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The Downfall of Doctor Billig (1921): Dada as Politics Doctor Billig am Ende was officially the last Dada text Huelsenbeck wrote. The novel has, rightly in my opinion, been held up alongside more famous modernist classics such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928).150 It was published in early 1921 and can be read as the coping stone of Huelsenbeck’s politico-literary project. In line with his post-war poetic, it comes to us as an allegorical and demonstrative text, which promises to make explicit or embody in some way how identities could co-exist as free singularities. And this is exactly what the novel does.151 I would like to begin with three banal observations. First, Doctor Billig am Ende is a novel. Although our author had already written two (preDada) novellas, both published in 1918, his thought on Dada writing appeared to situate itself more in the lyrical than in the prosaic domain. Huelsenbeck, in brief, wrote a novel without a prosaics or theory of prose – a lacuna notably characteristic of Dadaism in general.152 Secondly, when we try to reconstruct the novel’s implied prosaics, especially the formal features it promotes, we are given the impression of dealing with two novels in one.153 The first chapter can be read in line with his Dada poetic as we saw it at work in ‘Ende der Welt’. In a temporally elliptic, rapid and paratactical way it hurls readers into the brutal, bustling and bursting city life of 1917 Berlin. As was also typical of expressionist prose,154 it by and large brackets the causality of events, and instead confronts us with a nauseatingly complex display of focaliseds. The three subsequent chapters, however, draw on more tested conventions in narrativisation and a pace of narration markedly slower. Thus, the further we move into the novel, the closer we come to convention, as if Huelsenbeck were leading us to a point in the here and now. Thirdly, the novel was written in phases. The first chapter was published in early 1918, during the war’s state of exception and at a time that Huelsenbeck’s work was primarily occupied with shaping another subjectivity or citizenship. The rather overt shift in style indicates that he wrote the remaining three chapters later, most likely after the November Revolution at a time when he began inquiring into a discursive articulation of singularity in communality and started scrutinising the role of Weimar politicians. With these three observations we are ready to proceed further. Here is the near Balzacian address to the male reader – all but Eugénie Grandet’s ‘All is true’ is lacking – that opens the first chapter: That we are dealing here with a very remarkable case will soon become clear to everybody, regardless of how you approach life. You are probably an

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office worker, you make 3,000 marks, you have to support your wife, in good honour and virtuousness she has given you three children (two girls and a boy) and in political terms you hold liberal ideas . . . However . . . you recognise that this life, and your life in particular, is a wild high, a brutality without end, a perpetual struggle to worsen yourself and everything else. And you are not even surprised, you categorise such an important insight right into your bourgeois creed and already you feel like: where is my coffee – or let father be now, he must read his paper . . . But at some point, once, maybe after you emptied a bottle of Piesporter or Rauenthaler Kesselring, your memory will resurface of those few minutes during which you knew more about life and during which you had, as a manner of speaking, a trembling insight.155

As in the opening couplet of ‘Ende der Welt’, the novel begins by staging convention in a colloquial and realist manner, to immediately disrupt the everyday. The narrator imposes (in a mode not devoid of irony) his narrative voice on us (‘we’), and in so doing makes us identify with the ideal-typical ‘you’ put forth. The narrator thus subjectivises us, forces an identity on us, a political identity no less. He suggests that we already know that our common perception of the everyday hides another, natural, amoral and vitalist life, which ‘worsens’ us to the implied entropic point of death. This other universal space, so it is announced, will be the subject of the novel, which thereby thematises its exemplariness: the particular story it will tell has demonstrative and even universal ramifications. Death, the finiteness of all singularities, is, importantly, from the start implied as the limit to the other identity hidden. With this clever metaleptic opening address, the reader is prepared for identification with Dr Walter Billig, the narrative’s protagonist and (with few yet important exceptions) also the novel’s main focal character. Billig is a bourgeois liberal who one day during the third year of war decides to relinquish control and live life to the fullest. A doctor in philosophy, he works as a legal advisor in an office in the city of Berlin, depicted as an apocalyptic site of noise, degradation and treachery. One day at the horse track, he encounters the prostitute Margot with whom he immediately falls in love and who subsequently uses him to govern an obscure speculator scheme she sets up with a number of client-profiteers. The scheme’s aim is to buy cheap grain in Romania and then to sell it at high rates in Germany. When the Austrian government prohibits private trade with Romania and the scheme gains a clandestine edge, Billig’s downfall sets in. Whereas Margot had tolerated his presence and had given in to his sexual fantasies before the Austrian intervention, he is shut out of her life after the Austrians’ protectionist decision to close the borders with Romania. In a Gidean ‘gratuitous’ act, Margot then murders one of the profiteers involved. Billig discovers the man’s body, gradually loses his sanity and ultimately stumbles in the street breaking

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his skull. ‘Quickly two people came and hurled him onto a wheelbarrow to the hospital’ (p. 129). This superficial synopsis suggests a failure on Huelsenbeck’s part: Billig, in letting go of the individuality society imposes on him and bringing out the ‘new’ internalised man, ends up an insane pauper. This is, admittedly, far from an attractive fate. It even opens up room for speculation as to why Huelsenbeck turned his back on Dada as a writer hereafter. Yet these are rather hasty conclusions, which require qualification once we venture a close reading of the novel that also embeds it in Huelsenbeck’s aesthetics and politics. The first chapter of Doctor Billig am Ende appeared in the summer of 1918, before the November Revolution, in a prospectus for the publishing house Freie Strasse. It came with a manual in the form of an introductory ‘Vorwort zur Geschichte der Zeit’ (Foreword to the History of the Times). As this title reveals, Huelsenbeck’s ambition stood in line with his project to mirror life as it was hidden underneath the cloak of civilisation. The foreword announced that a bourgeois would be staged as its main character, which would undergo a true Bildung or ‘humanisation’ (Menschwerdung, p. 26). Given its context of enunciation – Huelsenbeck’s discourse during the state of exception – the first chapter, as part of an exemplary case, could therefore be read as bent on desubjectivising the Bürger to the point of attaining a citizen stripped bare. And sure enough, it is worth following through this possibility. A rather complex set of identifications and modalisations mark Billig’s identity in the course of the first chapter, that could easily serve as a test case for William Nelles’ 1997 differentiation between ‘ocularisation, auricularisation, gustativisation, olficativisation and tactivilisation’.156 Focalisation here creates a forceful impression of how life looks like from the perspective of the internalised ‘new’ man driven by bodily passion and desire. That we are thereby placed outside of causal narrative frameworks is quickly made clear: By coincidence he ends up home where his landlady is awaiting him with her legs standing apart and a mocking face. He resembles a character from Poe, who nights on end roams around London, with a pinched face he throws himself into the mad mass of people, almost vomiting, with an even more infuriated face he erects himself, remembering the dreams in which he had to fight with the stump of an arm against giants, raging on, stumbling, roaring. The landlady, who always wanted to take up the role of the mother, says: ‘Listen here, little doctor, you could lead a more sensible life, organise work and pleasure well – come, come, such a young man and so sleepy’. (pp. 6–7, emphasis added)

Thus Billig, an ordinary bourgeois, returns home from a night spent in the bordello. The would-be mother-figure of the landlady gives him

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a crucial piece of advice: to organise well or better what he does in private (pleasure) and in the public space, where he works as an advisor in matters juridical. Billig then opens his linen-cupboard, caught up in a fantasy about panty-hose eroticism, finally to end up in the kitchen where he sees the name Anny on a calendar, thinks of the landlady’s daughter who goes by the same name and then of the five-year-old merry owned by one of his friends. The merry, Billig remembers, would on that day race at the horse track in Hoppengarten, and so we rather quickly arrive in its stable near the horse track outside the city. There, someone firmly taps his shoulder ‘as if one was telling him: “In the name of the law”’ (p. 10), but, no, it is his friend Callius, the owner of the merry he is admiring. The suggestion that the law (das Gesetz) is omnipresent during the state of exception is important, not in the least because it is also, and quite literally, internalised in Billig’s own character. Billig’s thoughts, rendered in free indirect speech, run wild until he is overcome by the intense smell of flowers: enter Margot. She immediately makes him forget that the war is in its third year and he projects onto her liberated, ‘utmost primitive instincts’. He ‘is reminded of sensations of which the climax would be murder. “How utterly silly,” Billig said to himself, “how silly of myself”’ (p. 14). Here, Billig again encounters the law internalised: murder is forbidden. Yet murder is at once the external demarcation or limit of singularities in nature: it equals putting a subject beyond death, where there is nothing, not even law. Faced with this ambivalent limit-experience, he ‘found himself without a will of his own, without any impulse to pursue the limits of his individuality’ (p. 14). But then Billig curbs and channels his overwhelming desire into a project: ‘I create my own destiny, I, Dr Billig, who is so honourably chased through the arena of life with a thousand little sensations’ (p. 18). Thus the externalisation of the ‘new’ man is announced. Margot invites him to return to the city in her car. They pass a military train ‘from which soldiers shouted and waved their hats. From the wide plazas the people responded and children chippered with thin little voices an incomprehensible hurrah’ (p. 22). The state of exception and the culture of war backing it up thus get hinted at as they approach Berlin, which Billig senses is a ‘dangerous stimulus’ (p. 22). In Margot’s luxurious quarters close to the Bayerische Platz she slips off to change and returns wearing a silk taffeta gown. The silk ‘covering appeared much obscener than whatever nakedness’ (p. 23): here, again, a limit is posed that incites passion in Billig, and as they begin to make love ‘the humanisation of Dr Billig took place.’ He ‘saw a negro-dance, wilder than the most insane fantasies allow one to imagine. The little Dr Billig was cut loose’ (p. 26, emphasis added). Conspicuously, Billig for the

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first time experiences true love here, comparing it to what is conventionally understood by it and expressing his love in Dionysian terms: ‘In thousands and thousands of beds people were playing husbands and wives . . . Here . . . love cried and stuttered hotter than in any other headmaster’s or cantonal judge’s bed, here was a glow, damn, a glow that was, in a manner of speaking, only common in the Eroscult of the classics’ (p. 26). The first chapter then closes with the affirmation of Billig’s singularity. He has (‘in a manner of speaking’) become part of a league of ‘new’ men as old as antiquity. Covered in a ‘filthy fluid’ (p. 28), he is reborn from the womb of Margot, who thus becomes his adoptive mother and takes over the surrogate role of the landlady. And he is reborn in clear and articulate terms: ‘“I am,” said Billig to himself, “an unprecedented Dr in philosophy. That is firmly established!”’ (p. 28). There we have it then: already in the first chapter Huelsenbeck has Billig ‘humanised’, making him enter (Einstein’s) ‘mythic’ primitivist space, fully desubjectivised, stripped of any markers of collective identity. But the text already moves beyond this ‘zero point’. Astutely, the process of desubjectivisation comes to closure with the suggestion that unbridled passion and desire can be externalised and then channelled into unconditional, lawless love, which in turn can affirm man’s singularity in unprecedented ways. Unprecedented because despite venting his desires, Billig does not outwardly change: he remains, though with an entirely different intonation, Dr Billig, a man who has become conscious of and begins to study (human) nature. Unconditional because we do not know whether Margot experiences her singularity in a similar way or whether their love is reciprocal. (We know in fact very little about her at this stage, other than that she is extremely attractive to Billig, well-off and involved in a swindling business that remains vague at this stage.) And, finally, lawless since unlike the judge and his wife, the intercourse of Billig and Margot does not abide by moral restrictions but only bodily confines. Even the convention of reimbursing Margot for her services is pushed aside. As she goes off to change Billig takes out his wallet but then realises that Margot is priceless; in his mind she thus falls outside the economic spectrum as well. Readers could object at this stage that sexual intercourse and lust are not the same as love. Yet this is of course the point where the novel’s subsequent chapters take us: in a love beyond morality, such objections no longer hold. And in such love, the novel ends up suggesting, resides a way for ‘new’ subjects to co-exist as singularities constructing and deconstructing their identities. While the first chapter makes us witness to the birth of another identity becoming, the subsequent chapters embark on a reflection on communalities. These chapters, as we saw, were in all probability written after

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the November Revolution. Hence, the shift in focus is perhaps again not all that coincidental. These subsequent chapters repeat Huelsenbeck’s thought at this time, looking for a way to represent singularities in communality. They turn to more tried and tested narrative conventions. Whereas the first chapter dips us into a rapidly and chaotically shaped space, the pace slows in the following chapters and on the surface level we are confronted with a narrative that is arguably still worthy of the label experimental. However once we contemplate which conventions Huelsenbeck really draws on, it becomes clear that he extends here his poetic practice of collage and citation into the realm of prosaics in a rather clever fashion. Huelsenbeck in these chapters embarks on a play with generic conventions, just as in his Zurich poem ‘Ebene’. Yet, whereas in ‘Ebene’ and to some extent also in ‘Ende der Welt’ subtle genres such as the nature poem or dithyramb formed the object of play, here Huelsenbeck foregrounds popular genres the reader would have been familiar with. He correctly presupposed, it appears, that genres as a rule also trigger a particular form of communal representation. As Tzvetan Todorov has indeed shown, genres not only follow certain models of writing and horizons of expectation, they also create and reproduce such expectations in readers.157 That Huelsenbeck’s turn to popular genres went at the cost of certain features dominant in the first chapter is only logical, in part because narratological limitations to popular fiction are rigid ones. In his Palimpsestes Gérard Genette already noted that genres cannot be parodied, they can only be imitated.158 And in imitating or ‘citing’ the communal views that come along with genres, Huelsenbeck, as in his other Dada writings, first defines his own counter-hegemonic project in the negative, making clear what it does not amount to. The second (and fourth) chapter(s) can be read as part and parcel of a ‘Krimi’ or crime novel, a genre that was very popular at this time given the high crime rates and exploding underground in Berlin.159 Here we learn how Billig is taken up, with some distaste, into a community of misanthropic war profiteers whose outlook on life is not all that different from his in all but one respect: their lives are driven by the love of lucre; their amoral stances in life are nothing but excuses for financial gain and the accumulation of their already substantial wealth. Hence, these men do not let go of their bourgeois individuality. They buy it. The second chapter is situated within the confines of Margot’s private quarters, where she and a number of her disreputable ‘friends’ set up the grain swindle mentioned earlier. The men involved are characterised in phrenological terms, having ‘the skull typical of a large group of people in Germany’: ‘the first impression was one of outrageous cruelty and meanness, and then you observed in amazement how these men

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Figure 4.1 Illustration by Georg Grosz to Richard Huelsenbeck’s Doctor Billig am Ende: Ein Roman (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), p. 51 © SABAM.

managed to hide their criminal physiognomy under an amiable, almost ideal gesture’ (p. 64). Their criminalisation is given a Huelsenbeckian twist, though, in the depiction of the moustache of one of them: ‘à la Guillaume II’ (p. 48). Resembling the type of Schieber or swindler found on George Grosz’ illustrations to the novel (see Figure 4.1), they bring

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along a communal view, which boils down to one question put to Billig: ‘You’re not a socialist, are you?’ (To which Billig replies: ‘No . . . a fetishist, shall we say’, p. 44.) As they plan their scheme careful attention is paid to constantly changing juridical restrictions and trade legislation decreed by the wartime regime. One of the schemers ensures Billig: ‘This way we are legally, criminally if you want, covered, and we will still earn as go-betweens’ (p. 42). When Margot’s allies look to appoint a co-ordinator of their plans, she puts forth Billig as the ‘manager of the business’ (p. 43). A rampant eating and drinking feast follows, which is brought to a halt when Margot throws everyone except Billig out. Throughout the second chapter Billig is characterised as a somewhat wide-eyed picaresque figure, who fails to identify with the community of scoundrels he is now supposed to lead. Much to his disadvantage, the lubricant of this group, financial gain, comes under attack in the third chapter by a sudden change of trade laws under the state of exception. Billig, subsequently, is used as a scapegoat for the deal gone sour. The trajectory of the crime novel in Doctor Billig am Ende then takes a twist in the fourth and final chapter, where Billig is endowed with the role of a detective who discovers and figures out what happened to the corpse in Margot’s Berlin estate, that is: Margot must have killed him (see Figure 4.2). Here, Huelsenbeck’s play with the genre of the crime novel comes to an end, confirming what the reader may have known all along: Billig’s identity does not find a place in the amoral imaginary of the criminal community. Much like the male liberal reader, his inclination lies elsewhere. Picaresque protagonists in the then popular genre of the crime novel were of course rare. The genre usually foregrounded strong and virile heroes. Yet it is precisely Billig’s characterisation as a picaro in the second chapter, as a dominant narrative nexus, or as what David Hayman calls a ‘nodality’,160 that further allowed Huelsenbeck to launch a second genological trajectory in his narrative, it seems, a narrative thread that accentuates Billig’s inability to identify with the underground ethos of the war profiteers. That the novel at one point hints at its own genological play as ‘criminal romanticism’ highlights that a romance is inserted into the novel as well. Indeed, Huelsenbeck has Billig, as an anachronist idealist, also taking up the defence of ‘medieval’ courtly love as an answer to the ‘modern’ love of lucre of ‘his’ gang of scoundrels. Thus playing with yet another popular genre, that of the so-called ‘Empfindsame Liebesliteratur’,161 the love already highlighted in the first chapter is at times connoted with moral values pertaining to monogamy, politesse and principles of chivalrous honour, culminating in the third chapter’s very own duel with handguns between Billig and a journalist named

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Figure 4.2 Illustration by Grosz to Huelsenbeck’s Doctor Billig am Ende, p. 107 © SABAM.

Opodeldok, who had offended Billig’s character in the presence of Margot. Here, importantly, Billig for the first time actually breaks the law. Even though it is made clear to him that duelling has long been forbidden by law, he ends up shooting (not killing) the journalist. The latter had characterised Billig as an ‘exemplary figure, who under certain

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conditions would be willing to make unsuitably idealist – so-called heroic deeds’ (p. 87, my emphasis). While Opodeldok thus situates Billig’s identity in an idealist imaginary into which Billig is subsequently ‘hurled’ in the fourth chapter, taking up the role of the chivalrous hero in a duel, this imaginary, too, is bracketed. It is not his singularity but his identification with (German) idealism, in short, that has him commit a crime! ‘Life is nonsense anyway . . . At least that is what they taught us in school: long live the idealist Weltanschauung’ (p. 98). Thus the picaresque figure also fails to identify with the communal outlook of German Idealism and love as bourgeois morality prescribes it. With this shrewd genre configuration, Huelsenbeck makes clear that ‘new’ man Billig is a figure who time and again finds himself faced with a ruling imaginary impeding his singularity and forestalling his own identity’s articulation. Stripped almost to the bone in the third chapter, the one positive marker of identity that remains in the final chapter is his Germanness. Here indeed Huelsenbeck brings the reader back to the here and now. Even at the height of Billig’s experience of singularity in the third chapter – I will return to this further on – he says ‘I am a German man’ (p. 76). But especially in the fourth and final chapter, after he has discovered the body, his German patriotism is put forth as a powerful, internalised imaginary that Billig’s passion incessantly conflicts with. As he sees the body and faces death, ‘a limitless negroid cruelty’ (p. 108) takes hold of him, and he begins to imagine emptying a machine gun into a crowd of ‘hundred of thousands naked bitches’ (p. 108). Rage takes over. However, far from coming from himself, this rage is incited by patriotism. Billig takes the corpse as a representative of his ‘people’: by killing him Margot ‘has hit my entire people’ (p. 109). He gets up and plays a patriotic piece on the piano, Sade’s Justine comes to his mind, he calls on God and imagines himself leading a procession, carrying ‘the gramophone and the cinematographic apparatus’ (p. 111). As the novel draws to a close, Dr Billig, the scholar of human nature, also comes to terms with his patriotism, recognising that the murder of which he only saw the result ‘fell outside the frame of the normal’ (p. 121). Thus posing a norm and the impossibility of ever fully transgressing it, Billig ends up reiterating the norm Huelsenbeck’s novel goes against. At this point lacking any alternative to the norm, Billig commutes between two options: ‘O Germany, how I honour thee’ (p. 125), and the desire to live alone on an island where human civilisation has not yet tainted nature. Instead, however, he ends up on the street, in Berlin’s public space. Just before he breaks his skull, the ‘hero’ is given shelter in the warm private room of a young prostitute, who circumscribes the trauma he has witnessed: ‘something has happened to you that goes beyond what a man

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normally experiences’ (p. 124). Quite. When we return to the novel’s third chapter, Huelsenbeck proves to have given shape to a remarkable counter-hegemonic myth of his own, making Billig its exemplum. At the end of the second chapter, Billig begins to wonder whether his love for Margot is reciprocated. He ‘felt that at the height there was a limit he could not cross. “It is each time,” he said to himself, “as if I am giving this woman meanings, which she accepts with a businesslike cool and a certain disdain”’ (p. 53). In the third chapter, we get to know Margot’s feelings, after the chapter’s following opening patches: The common man who lives, does his exams, has children and dies . . . is given little time to look into the depths of life . . . In the depth of your heart you would like to do something good, something different, the world is either too evil or boring to you. And finally you hope to see what keeps you from ridding yourself of this whole pathology of God: the organised stupidity and the organised cruelty (p. 59).

This patch shifts readers’ expectations from the terrain of imposed individuality (central in the book’s opening paragraph) to that of communality. And for the first time in his entire Dada oeuvre, Huelsenbeck hereafter captures public life as it looked under the state of exception: a life dehumanised, a life where citizen-subjects were treated as citizen-animals bereft of agency, intelligence and identity. Fully desubjectivised, they were not given the chance to voice their passions, but were instead perpetually thrown back into nature. Remarkably, his narrative here regains the stamina of the first chapter, but its tone is far more apocalyptic: The streets are full of fog, fantastic heads of old nags bite for human flesh and there sounds the whistling signal of police officers chasing a murderers’ gang . . . It is in the Friedrichstrasse going twelve o’clock at night. People live here as in a high, the war has made these innocent civilians beasts . . . Hundreds of different faces are hundreds of different types comprising and representing hundreds of different lives. Close to the street, seated at white marble café tables, headless family members, a mother who exists only as a big belly, girls of whom only a pair of dancing skinny arms remind us of life. Hats walk alone through premises and order food, a man standing in front of a coatrack talks to an overcoat, tries to persuade it and then walks off deeply saddened. Billig has the gift of enthusiasm. He says: ‘Turn around! Turn yourself around! Bang, explode! . . . I am the official lover of Margot’. (pp. 60–2)

The way in which the reader is brought back to the narrative’s main thread in the third chapter is peculiar, to say the least. First the reader’s internalised desires and passions are addressed (‘you would like to . . .’). Then, these passions are contrasted with those of a repressed plurality of others under the state of exception. Unlike the reader, the latter are depicted as mere bodies, headless bodies no less, that are incapable of

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reflecting on how to construct an identity for themselves, incapable even of reflecting on their own death. Set off against the apocalyptic de-humanised crowd is Billig. A ‘new’ man, he too is desubjectivised. Unlike the other citizens evoked, however, he is driven by love. Love, it is thus suggested, is more than just a bodily affair. It is a vehicle for reflection, through which other identities could be positively articulated. Here indeed ‘for Billig an unusual school of love’ (p. 62) began. With Margot he moves outside the city where she rents a country cottage. While Billig takes care of business, Margot could not care less about the numbers his calculating machine produces. They tend a garden, and Billig comes to realise that when they consummate their love she, too, is genuinely aroused, while she tells him ‘I have only begun to live since I met you’ (p. 68). She recounts to Billig how she travelled throughout Europe, how she sailed the oceans, and worked in Manhattan as a waitress. Her stories take him on a stroll through underground culture. A reader, along the way, is dipped into Berlin slang, meeting among others ‘Cavaliere’ (or heterosexual pederasts as they were called, p. 75). Finally she voices that she too is the product of externalised desire: ‘with my intelligence and my energy I have given shape to my own destiny . . . It is a necessity . . . that remains inexplicable to me that I should sit here on this bench with you . . . You are a little pupil and a little boy – I like you very much . . . You honestly love me – that is hard to believe – you have the fantastic soul of a child’ (73–6, emphasis added). Karin Füllner, in her insightful yet selective analysis of Doctor Billig am Ende, has tended to overemphasise ‘the perspective of Billig’, it seems.162 As the protagonist, Billig is of course the novel’s dominant focal character, but at times we are made witness to thoughts of Margot impossible for Billig to perceive. In the third chapter, in fact, the reader gets to learn something that Billig does not know for certain, namely, that Margot comes to love him as well. The focalisation shifts in the chapter on several occasions from an internal to a sudden zero-focalised state, as again Genette would call it. For instance: ‘“This love,” she thought, “is without conflict, it is natural like a stream or a tree”’ (p. 76). At other times we are made aware of multiple focalisation constituting the text, as we suddenly find ourselves perceiving events through the eyes of Margot: ‘She played chess with him and lost because she wanted to lose. Margot played tennis well, but since she had begun to take an interest in Billig, in this, too, she no longer wanted to triumph over Billig’ (p. 77). The unconditional, lawless and unprecedented love previously experienced by Billig here thus becomes reciprocal. Death, again, as an element external to their singularity proves the limit on which they now both encounter their communality in

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singularity. First Margot sets out this limit for herself, when she recounts how one day she stumbled upon a corpse of a young sailor: ‘Oh – she felt something for this man, this accidental death, one of ten thousands fallen today over the whole world, by coincidence torn out of life – he had to be her friend, and she his mother or lover’ (75–6). As we read on and the couple depart on a trip to the Ostsee, they witness a child’s funeral. Genuinely moved, they place flowers next to the open coffin. The sea, the water’s surface, thereafter becomes the symbol of their unison: ‘Here you feel . . . the connection between death and love, which is a perpetual resurrection. You will have to become aware of your limits when you want to live a whole life’ (p. 78). Margot’s words of advice interconnect with those of the landlady in the first chapter. Billig’s new adoptive mother and lover in one, she lays bare that their seemingly limitless love is indeed limited to a very specific locale: the private space, the confines of the home and the outskirts of the city or polis the narrative has thus far taken as its decorum. (Even the beach evokes qualities of a homely interior: ‘the beach lay in front of them like a polished floor’.) Thus, the third chapter conjures an alternative to life under the state of exception depicted at its beginning: that of a love beyond morality, a love in which subjects share and consummate their singularity with the sole purpose of their own pleasure. As singularities, they come to treat their shared finiteness as a law or endpoint that can never be moved beyond, but whose universality, in stark contrast with the cultural norm or public laws Billig has internalised, incites them to live life to the fullest and to respect one another on the grounds of their contiguity in death. As economic and political concerns after the third chapter begin to infringe on if not bury their communality under the cloak of war and culture, the space between Margot and Billig (quite literally) widens, until nothing of their adjacent singularity remains. Conspicuously, however, we find Margot defending Billig until she disappears from the scene. When Opodeldok ‘offends’ Billig, for instance, she says: ‘Not a bad word about Billig . . . He is worth more than you’ (p. 87). The tragedy of the novel resides in a little clause that gives away how Billig thereafter misinterprets her words. ‘“You are mistaken (about Billig), my dear.” Margot smiled’, onto which an eavesdropping Billig projects: ‘as if she was nevertheless agreeing with Opodeldok’ (p. 87). Read closely, then, a clear logic is at work in this novel, which in schematic terms amounts to an opposition between two limits posed: the imaginary of the Second Reich as it permeates and regulates all public and cultural affairs in Germany versus the natural limit of death, which can apparently only be recognised within the confines of the private space. As the novel shows, however, this opposition is way out

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of balance. For the imaginary of the Second Reich also penetrates deeply into the private realm: it is internalised in Billig, while death precisely remains an external limit. At first sight the novel stops with this powerful opposition. Published in 1921, it allegorically implies that the state of war, even after the installation of democracy, was simply extended. The Kaiser’s spectre kept ruling the public space. At best the novel thereby brings out how at least in private people could come to recognise that as singularities a + b + c + d they might also align themselves in unison as a – b – c – d. Yet with this we are of course reminded of Huelsenbeck’s rather curious twist in his theorisation of simultaneity a year before Doctor Billig am Ende was published: the problem of the ear would be made a problem of the face. Is there such a face, such a ‘literary politician’ in the ever exemplary Doctor Billig am Ende? Of course there is, and she is even quite explicitly characterised as such. Margot, around whom all identities and actions in the novel revolve, is the one character that manages to dissolve the imposed individuality of all characters. She functions as a bridge between the imaginary Billig and others have internalised, and the passions and desires they feel the urge to externalise. As such, she is consequentially characterised as a queen or empress, who stands on the dividing line between the private and the public space. Margot herself accentuates the different roles she plays in both realms, when she warns Opodeldok to ‘Be sensible . . . your critique (of Billig) could in the end also turn against my private relations – which I will not allow’ (p. 91). In the public realm she functions as an agent exposing the lack of singularity in others. One of the few instances Margot actually appears in public is during a party. We hear bourgeois women whispering: ‘There you have that cocotte, o yes . . . my husband once told me she is of very low origin . . . That she is even allowed to walk around here, n’est-ce pas? They should lock her up and cane her’ (p. 79). Just like Liebknecht, just like the Dadaist. As these women voice their wrath, they look at Margot as a figure central to the scene. They are spectators ‘seated like hens on a stick against the wall’. When Margot enters the public space she does not trigger love but fear and anger, provoked ‘out of powerlessness’, impotence not of singularities but of people whose identity is indistinguishable or interchangeable. Rather than reinstate the norm, she thus dislocates and questions it when she appears in public. Indeed, the one repartee the bourgeois women manage to produce about her presence is to remove her, harm her if not (symbolically) kill her. In the public space, then, Margot poses the limit of death. She is a mirror subjectivised beings walk by without seeing a reflection.

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In private, however, her role is quite a different one. A strong ‘personality’, a queen not of the highest but of the lowest class, she literally functions as a nexus in which the singularity of separate subjects condenses, as a prism through which these singularities subsequently enter the public space. Billig in the first chapter projects onto her the role of a subservient, ‘royal mistress, whose temper decides on the course of history, and who turns people against each other’ (p. 26). But as they make love, she becomes ‘my empress, she is the power, long live Margot’. In the second chapter her silk gown is made ‘the flag of Billig’s revolution’ (p. 29), and here she also comes to function as a monarch to her gang of thugs, who ‘in the narrow circle’ (p. 31) around her plot their scheme. ‘Margot ruled the scene as the uncontested queen’; ‘in everything her will is determining’ (p. 39). But her will is always that of others as well. As she discusses business, for example, she seems to transform herself so as to mirror her audience, talking ‘for the first time in a deep manly voice’ (p. 41). Androgynous, she takes over the role of the patriarch and refuses to labour for her own scheme: ‘What really do you want of me – am I the manager of an emporium?’ (p. 43). Letting others work for her, of the highest class in private, she advises Billig to laugh more. ‘Generations of petty bourgeois have placed an indestructible legacy of shame in your soul. You are welcome Billig’ (p. 47). Margot, in brief, functions as a gateway through which others externalise a shared private passion in the public space. She incites them to reclaim the public realm. Needless to say, Margot may well be the greatest aesthetic topos or conventional literary symbol Huelsenbeck draws on his novel.163 The novel here borrows from the Naturalist repertoire the prostitute as a voice or agent for social critique. The latter, according to Eckhard Philipp, fully disappears from the scene in Huelsenbeck, ‘because Billig . . . only notes societal problems in passing, mostly during states of weakness in the absence of lust-objects.’164 Leaving aside that this may be oversimplifying the text’s thickness, I agree with Philipp that it is not Billig but Margot who is the true revolutionary agent in Huelsenbeck’s novel. Her character could be compared to the prostitute figure in numerous (German) vanguard texts posed as an embodiment of everything vitalist and suppressed, the Whore of Babylon announcing the Spenglerian downfall of civilisation. A Spenglerian undercurrent is certainly not absent from Doctor Billig am Ende. The ‘politics of death’ it professes carries clear traces of it. Yet the novel’s peculiarity lies precisely in the fact that it foregrounds a living character like Margot, a prostitute no less, as a symbol of death in the public space. Why indeed does this novel so strictly differentiate between the private and the public? And

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why, moreover, does it have Margot fence-sitting between both spaces? There are two ways of making sense of this constellation. We can either read it against the backdrop of Huelsenbeck’s prior thought, or relate it to its historical and legal context. Let us begin with the first option. Just before we get to learn of Margot’s feelings for Billig in the third chapter, she asks him whether he is ‘more to her than just a new nuance’ (p. 77), a shade in her gigantic representative body. Her body, facial complexion and appearance are shown to us in a very specific way throughout the novel: in grotesque ways Billig only manages to concentrate on certain parts of her. We are made aware of her smile, for instance, which has a ‘resolute look’ (p. 22) in an ‘Asian line’ (p. 14). But as we try to find patches describing her as a whole, she is depicted as being larger than life. ‘These mountains of flesh were like an avalanche’ (p. 26). She is a figure whose ‘relations reach from the smallest, ticket-selling Jews to the trade-mogul who by the increase of dividends creates chaos on the stock market’ (p. 82). Her role is that of a body, then; physically and symbolically, she represents all the men and women she meets (in positive or negative terms). Characterised as a queen, she is of course Huelsenbeck’s own answer to the Kaiser’s rule (and his spectre in democracy). The Kaiser’s absence in this novel paradoxically seconds this. His power is all-pervasive, and yet he might as well be dead. That Margot should straddle the line between private and public in turn interlocks with the divide Huelsenbeck’s discourse thematised from his Zurich phase onward. The divide between ‘privatism’ and disciplinary public rule may in fact be the most persistent distinction in his Dada thought. As the novel time and again makes clear, the love between Margot and Billig falls outside the clutch of public rule. It instead re-opens an ethical space wherein numerous options and choices are at hand, except that of murder or physical harm. That Margot nonetheless commits a murder and Billig engages in crime results from the fact that the nexus they come to share is only experienced within the private space, where it allowed them to cultivate their own identities and thought, live according to their own passions and ‘energies’. Within the public, homogenised culture of war under the state of exception, which reduces citizens to figures on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, crime is by contrast omnipresent. Crime, and in particular sex-related criminal activity, is here made pathological as was commonly done in the work of other avant-gardists as well – we need but think here of Armin Arnold’s famous remark that the whole expressionist generation exemplified a true ‘Sexwelle’.165 Yet in Huelsenbeck’s novel, this has a clear political overtone, in that it is depicted as a symptom of a public space in which it is forbidden to reflect on what people share. This prevents freedom

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and plurality from being externalised. The imposed hegemony is too homogenous and too narrow for people to vent their desires within the norm. Huelsenbeck thus rather dramatically accentuated that crime was the product of an unethical, repressive society, which pushed the people beyond life into death, as it were, where the repercussions of their actions fully ceased to have meaning. There is more to the novel once we engage in its historical decorum: the city of Berlin. Making the reader identify with Billig on several occasions, Huelsenbeck scaffolded a textual surface or stage onto which the Bürger got to project passions and desires he may have acted out on himself in his ‘free’ (private) time. The shifters ‘we’ and ‘you’ in the novel’s opening address may indeed have had an entirely different meaning in 1921. Demographic and urban studies of Berlin suggest that chances must have been rather great that the male (near Victorian) bourgeois reader, too, might have returned from a night spent in the bordello, either as a soldier on the front or as a civilian staying behind. Once we plunge into Berlin legislation about prostitution and read Margot’s role in the novel against the backdrop of its historical, juridical context, however, startling additional contingencies impose themselves.166 In 1917 public legislation about prostitution in Berlin scarcely existed. A 1792 statute dating back to the regime of Friedrich II had confusingly made commerce in sex illegal in the garrison town, while at the same time inscribing it into the law and putting it ‘under government surveillance.’ Prostitution had thus been made into a crime regulated by law. In 1914, for example, 4,000 sex-workers were given official working-cards by the municipal authority, but they were forbidden to verbally solicit customers in public. As the number of war widows and spouses of soldiers in the city increased and foodstuffs became scarcer, Berlin saw the rise of a public sex market the authorities proved incapable of controlling. While the German army at the front distributed sex coupons among soldiers, first provincial youth and ‘finally the children of bourgeois families’ were taken up in an industry wherein ‘prostitution lost its exact meaning when tens of thousands were involved in complex sex attachments, all of a commercial nature.’167 After the Armistice little changed. When the first phase of the Revolution came to a close, repression did not turn against prostitution, but against social dancing within city bounds! Friedrichstadt, one of the quarters Huelsenbeck takes as decorum for his novel, as a consequence saw the rise of secret and private dance parlours. In the streets, thousands of posters read: Berlin, Your Dance Partner is Dead. In April 1919, after it had become clear that the ban on dancing was not effective, city authorities lifted it. Numerous accounts of writers but also of ordinary people report how thereafter the city transformed

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in a gigantic gala or Nachtlokal, the sex industry flooding the metropolis spilling into private flats, hotel rooms and rented halls, while on the streets a veritable sex tourism began to take shape, caused by the inflation in early 1921 after the Repatriation Act. These are troubling and hard facts, yet they cast a somewhat different light on Huelsenbeck’s ever demonstrable novel. Margot, as a ‘literary’ politician, in historical juridical terms was a woman who at once fell inside and outside the law. Her existence in the public space was denied. To the law, she was dead there. Eminently public, however, her dominion was endorsed in the private space. Thus sitting on the fence between the private and the public, she was an agent who was already reclaiming the public space, a citizen-subject whose dubious legal conscription made her a public figure, denying the moral norm, inviting the projection of private passions in public without falling outside the law. Ever mirroring life, Huelsenbeck’s choice for Margot was thus remarkably consistent with his political agenda. Bereft of a voice of his own in the political sphere, he put forth one of the few agents in his time that could, even in legal terms, have voiced his politics, and this in accord with the daily experience of his readership. Rank folly? A prostitute asks Billig near the end of the novel: ‘Do you know the writer Maiander?’ Billig shook his head. ‘My head,’ he thought, ‘it could suddenly break off – it is possible that I would all of a sudden have to see through my belly button –.’ ‘Maiander says,’ the girl continued, ‘Maiander is of the opinion that . . . a whore . . . is a function changing from different perspectives, a real bohemian life’. (p. 122)

Huelsenbeck, so we come to notice in this unique reference to a writer in the novel, may well have thought things through himself. Margot, so he here suggests, was the one positive identity all subjects could indeed identify with. Marketing bodily desire and death at once, her politics were as much those of the Dadaist as his were hers. A scholar once noted that ‘it is difficult to see what Huelsenbeck’s Dada offered the world, short of joyful affirmation of its complete lack of meaning.’168 It would appear that Huelsenbeck, just before he bid Dada farewell and began to travel around the world as a ship’s doctor, eventually to settle in the US, rephrased this remark for us, substituting ‘the world’ with ‘literature’. For it is at least somewhat discomforting to see how literature can always be shown to be more than what has already been made of it. As in the work of Marinetti and van Ostaijen, there is knowledge, practical political knowledge inscribed in Doctor Billig am Ende, which only shows itself when the modernist avant-garde is situated against the background of the merger-institution of literature

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and politics that states of exception and political instability gave rise to throughout Europe. Not only does Huelsenbeck’s novel then allow us to experience some of the darker pages of European political history, making us witness to the birth of mass democracy in Germany. We are also made clear that his novel offered a solution, however peculiar, to the practical political aporia of its time. As such, in Huelsenbeck’s story nothing would appear to be coincidental, except, perhaps, that scholarly readers have so far failed to get their finger behind the eminently political nature of his Dada.

The Law of Literature: By Way of Conclusion

Trauma shows only its after-effects to outsiders. They never fully grasp its causes or core. Perhaps, what we really have before us when we enter the archive of Western European modernist avant-garde writing is a vast collection of texts each testifying in their own way to the trauma of literature in democratically exceptional times. Although I have focused on a mere fraction of avant-garde writers, no doubt many others could have been discussed, who worked within comparable, highly unstable constellations – of the same and other nationalities or regions, politically engaged or not. Democratic instability and war marked many other parts of the continent. This makes it likely that ‘merger-institutions’ emerged elsewhere, repeating in difference what we saw in previous chapters. Perhaps, therefore, the modernist avant-garde is best read as a large ‘lieu de mémoire,’ a memorial site to which we can always return to recall exceptions to the rule of democratic stability in the 1910s and 1920s. Charting the effects of that trauma leads to challenging a number of complacent views about the modernist avant-garde in general, and individual writers in particular. In general, it demonstrates that the avantgarde’s project to reunite art with life coincided with the confines of art being lifted for it by politics. States of exception structurally imposed on literature a near merger with politics as in pre-modern times, or, through sudden depoliticisation in times of revolution, politics put the confines of the literary sphere up for wholesale renegotiation. In both cases democratic instability and literary experimentation clearly interlocked, showing how Anglo-American and Western European modernism converged as well as diverged in the system of democracy. As to the particular, Marinetti’s The Untamables, Huelsenbeck’s The Downfall of Doctor Billig, and Van Ostaijen’s Occupied City have traditionally been read as politicalallegorical works giving way to an anti- or a-politics. When held against the backdrop of their states of exception, however, these works show themselves as producers of concrete, in part ‘useful’ responses to political

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aporia irresolvable within the political sphere. There is knowledge in these texts, practical political knowledge that not only gives us access to deeply-felt crises in European democracy. This effect of knowledge also offered solutions, however peculiar, to political and legal aporia. This, too, should today challenge us, leading us again to general and particular questions about the nature of modern (avant-garde) writing. It is widely acknowledged that the modernist avant-gardes played a vital role in literary theory during the foregoing century. To a large extent we are the inheritors of the avant-garde’s theoretical norms. The reasons for this are well rehearsed. The study of literature on the continent, and English in Anglo-American academia, emerged as distinct disciplines only at the height of modernism with the work of Russian Formalists and New Critics. Deeply influenced by modernist poetics, and laying out the building blocks of that thing we call a literary text, of ‘literariness’, these critics paved the path for a fruitful lineage in theory concerned with literature as text. Structuralists, and later, post-structuralists, too, made it a custom to turn to avant-garde texts, treating them as a literature intensified seeking out the extremes and limits of the medium. Here, too, individual reader responses to singular modernist avant-garde texts were often universalised to put forth claims about writing in general.1 Likewise, when we turn to twentieth-century theories more openly concerned with the context of writing, from neo-Marxists like Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci down to postMarxists today, we constantly encounter references to modernist texts in analyses of literature that continue to shape our gaze on literature as a whole.2 By consequence, what we call a literary text (in context) today is in many respects a naturalised amalgamation of features the avantgarde’s texts forcefully displayed. Unsurprisingly, historical avant-garde writing in recent decades has often been said to voice ‘a poetic that is increasingly our own’, as Marjorie Perloff puts it.3 Many, indeed, have looked for ways in which the historical avant-garde, as an aesthetic project or process, continues to shape present-day culture and literature.4 Consensus dictates, therefore, that the laws of literature are very much the laws set out by the avant-garde. And yet, foregoing chapters at least suggest that we might want to revise our complacent views of that avant-garde. Both avant-garde texts and contexts again emerge as strange, highlighting that scholars looking for continuities may well be doing the exact opposite of what they set out to do. Far from showing us that we have come to terms with the modernist avant-garde, they erase its historicity. Critics here level out their object of enquiry until it comes to resemble the familiar, the contemporary. Repetition in time, of course, always coincides with

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difference, but by unveiling continuities scholars actually understate difference in favour of similarity and identity. Or, as Michel Foucault avers, quoting Nietzsche: ‘This search is directed to “that which was already there,” the “very same” of an image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature.’5 One effect of this reading of sameness is that it tends to depoliticise and take the sting out of the modernist avantgarde. An informed archaeological excavation, in brief, is always to precede genealogy. Only when we recognise how truly strange and exceptional the past was, can we arrive at a better understanding of our own peculiar moment. Indeed, does the altered view of the avant-garde presented in this book not also challenge our understanding of modern art and literature in general? Perhaps. Yet, assuming that the rupture or trauma sustained by modernist writing in states of exception, too, may have (had) its own legacy and continuation, it is a ‘secret’ history, an alternative path or law that we should follow to arrive at a satisfactory response to that question. I readily concede that by venturing onto such a path in these closing remarks, my own response may not yet be satisfactory. But as Lukács, in one of his many lucid moments already observed, there are times when ‘the putting of the question and not the answer given to it’ prove more important.6 Gertrude Stein allegedly complained to Pablo Picasso that the portrait he made of her scarcely resembled her. Picasso replied that this was unimportant, that it would come with time.7 Texts like those of Marinetti, Huelsenbeck and Van Ostaijen, putting forth technically informed knowledge applicable within the language game of politics and law, do not yet quite resemble what we call a literary text today. For, is it not so that we generally assume that literature is a parasite of knowledge produced in other spheres, not a producer of knowledge of possible use in these other spheres? Do we not all agree with Hilary Putnam’s observation that ‘Literature does not, or does not often, depict solutions’?8 At stake here, in other words, is the epistemic status of literature (in front of the law). Although nearly a century old, these texts, in their turn to law as an object of aesthetic play, apparently still challenge what we find acceptable as literature in epistemological terms. In so doing, they recall Duchamp’s ready-mades, works that are ‘“already” made . . . but whose readiness to be “made” into art is delayed by . . . history and whose terms are inassimilable to an artistic terminology.’9 A new terminology, or at least some form of terminological clarity, is thus called for. For what may be required is a different ‘poetics of knowledge’, as Rancière calls it.10 Knowledge, as a set of propositions, is always the effect of discourse. Truth of knowledge is not a given or at least never truly stable.

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Even in the ‘hard’ sciences today, it is commonly recognised that the (Aristotelean) ontic register, which presumes that the world is stable, and that ‘an object of scientific knowledge exists out of necessity’, is rather problematic.11 Knowledge and truth are thus always discursively mediated, time-bound and contingent. This is so in the fundamental sciences, but also in politics, where ontic problems, such as hunger or even mental health, as Foucault shows, form the object of changing discourses and discursive practices.12 This is not to suggest that (the effect of) knowledge cannot be discussed or scrutinised. Yet knowledge is a ‘sticky’ object that can never be fully separated from its discursive shape. Between sensing, seeing or perceiving an object and its representation in language resides an undecidability, a gap, which always guarantees that our ‘knowledge’ of that object can take on various discursive shapes. Once we recognise this rather general assertion, ‘knowledge’ becomes a viable object of discourse. For whereas it goes unquestioned that knowledge or any proposition considered true is an effect produced by discourse, nothing prohibits us from isolating that effect as it is subsequently put into discursive circulation, regardless of authorial intent. Or, as Wittgenstein once phrased it poetically, language may sometimes ‘go on holiday’,13 its primary function being to produce knowledge of practical use, for ‘understanding-with-a-view-to-action’.14 A general way to look at knowledge would be to define it in light of philosophical modernity, the first and largest box in the archive we encountered in the opening chapter. Knowledge is the clock that makes modernity tick, the secular kernel-stone that marks the very impetus of modern Enlightenment thought (or the modern episteme, as Foucault calls it). It is through knowledge of the world that humanity is said to emancipate itself in modernity. In line with the dual tradition in modernity outlined in Chapter 1 – the tension between subjective and collective forms of sovereignty – knowledge in modernity, too, shows itself in dual form.15 On the one hand, in accordance with the penchant for subjective sovereignty, it signifies the experiential, the bodily, the particular or the immanent.16 On the other hand, and in line with modernity’s concurrent penchant for collective forms of sovereignty, it denotes the inter-subjective, the quantifiable, the ‘universal’ or transcendental. Both forms of knowledge, like the two forms of sovereignty, always imply one another. At whatever point we enter the public space, we always find them entangled. Whether knowledge is perceived from the stand-point of the subject or the collective, for example, is basically an ethical issue that always poses itself. Yet it equally goes without saying that it is particularly the second form of knowledge, inter-subjective or transcendental, that gave rise to the rationalisation of the public space,

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to the differentiation of labour according to a set of ‘matured’ systematised forms of knowledge. As modernity set out to emancipate humanity through knowledge, it gradually fell apart in several specialised and differentiated language games, which increasingly began to operate alongside one another in different spheres, such as economics and politics, the academia and art/literature. Now, these different language games of course do not operate fully separately from one another. While they are self-regulatory to an extent, they are not quite self-legitimising to those standing on the outside.17 This makes us sensitive to a specific kind of knowledge not to be confused with spheres’ distinct language games, to the lubricant, as it were, that loosely ties all spheres together in daily practice: cultural knowledge.18 Cultural knowledge is the kind of knowledge discussed in the second box of the archive we browsed through in Chapter 1. On the one hand, it is a selection or collection of cognitive elements to emanate from separate spheres. It houses in particular those elements that are comprehensible for a wider public. On the other hand, it contains what some would call the tenets of ‘civilisation’, that is, the dominant rules dictating our competence as agents in the public space at large. As such, cultural knowledge is a messy, and far from organic or even systematic conglomeration of assertions and experiences that bridge the confines of different spheres. Like hegemony, cultural knowledge is hard to pin down with precision. General assertions about it are not impossible, however. For instance, cultural knowledge tends to create (or reiterate) an arbitrary hierarchy among or within different kinds of language games. For example, it values the ‘hard’ sciences, the study of nature’s ‘primary qualities’, clearly higher than the study of ‘human nature’ or ‘secondary qualities’, as Bruno Latour has argued.19 Moreover, like the smaller language games it ties together, cultural knowledge always has to do not so much with what we know, but with how we know. It is a set of codes or discourses defining our savoir-vivre, savoir-parler and savoir-écouter. It is, therefore, ‘customary knowledge’, as Lyotard calls it in The Postmodern Condition (1979).20 It is in part experiential, but whenever discussed it evidently takes on discursive forms, which are predominantly narrative. For it is in the end onto narrative or syntagmatic, detail-driven or sequential cultural knowledge that different rationalised systems of knowledge or language games, incessantly specialising themselves in a paradigmatic sense, hook themselves. The kind of knowledge produced in separate spheres and cultural knowledge thus have to be distinguished. They are like layers or strata, cultural knowledge being the top layer hovering above and permeating all ‘lower’ or smaller language games. These two layers move at different speeds. Cultural knowledge

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tends to be the slowest of the two. Prevalent cultural knowledge is always a historical residue of predating epistemological breakthroughs in separate spheres. As such, cultural knowledge is also a site of cultural memory,21 a place remembering past events in different spheres of the public space. In a large-scale survey in France in the early 1990s the most common response to the question ‘What is contemporary art for you?’ was ‘Picasso and Duchamp’.22 This makes felt that cultural knowledge is also popular knowledge, which can take years to come to terms with certain events or insights produced in distinct spheres. Within every sphere – the final box of the archive we browsed through in the opening chapter – language games produce spheres’ effect of knowledge by framing their specific propositions. Language games can be seen as discursive cultures of knowledge adopted by epistemic communities.23 They allow epistemic communities to produce propositional knowledge. They dictate how to know what to know, as Gilbert Ryle puts it.24 Or, as Lyotard phrases it, ‘knowledge is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth, extending to the determination and application of criteria of efficiency (technical qualification), of justice and/or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or colour (auditory or visual sensibility), etc.’25 Indeed, language games always come with a ‘mode of life’, as Wittgenstein already argued. They do not just tell us what to know and look for, but also how to do it, among other things by stipulating through what media or instruments we should obtain knowledge, and how to subsequently present information to others. As such, language games allow agents in separate spheres to regard themselves as the embodiment of their own particular knowledge, as an epistemic community. Setting out a number of rules on how to obtain and communicate knowledge, language games add up to a set of discursive practices that are not just prescriptive of judgement; they are also exclusive in determining who can judge. For example, politics imports a lot of practical knowledge from other spheres. This is only logical, since one of the primal rules its language game stipulates is that its agents represent and regulate society. To this aim, it shares several cognitive instruments for obtaining knowledge with other spheres – such as economic and sociological enquiries or scientific data – and has several instruments of its own, including referenda, elections and census reports. But what in the end distinguishes the kind of propositions put forth in politics from those produced in other spheres is its language game, which dictates how to interpret the world and to what avail. In a rather similar way, literature can draw on countless forms of knowledge produced in other spheres. It in fact has to, since

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whereas political agents still have a number of instruments of their own at their disposal, writers fully depend on knowledge produced or experienced elsewhere. Literature has no ‘proper’ object of study – everything can become the object of knowledge in literature. It is, obviously, a site where cultural knowledge is stored, and because of that it is also a privileged source to those studying cultural memory. But it also borrows many insights from specific spheres, and here there are no strict rules. In this respect, literature is indeed a parasite of knowledge produced elsewhere. Its language game only dictates how to write (in a variety of ways), and to what avail: to ‘pleasure’ its readership by showing (though as often masking) how it knows; or, as again Foucault suggested in The Order of Things (1966), to reflect on itself.26 Increasingly so, Foucault argued, literature in the course of modernity becomes intransitive and self-reflexive, an insight that prompted Formalists and New Critics to read texts in isolation. Thus, modern literature knows only how to know. It has no ‘what’, no specific substance of knowledge beyond its own textuality and site of production. However, this is not the same as saying that literature could not add an effect of knowledge or new proposition of interest and use to other language games. As far as knowledge’s production is concerned, the actual knowledge in the end produced, the effect of knowledge to emanate from any sphere cannot be separated from its language game. Nonetheless, when we turn to the side of knowledge’s reception, we can and perhaps should distinguish the effect of knowledge produced in social spheres from their language games’ motivation and (authorial) intent. For, fundamental epistemological breakthroughs, too, very often come about contingently and unintentionally. The rules of language games tend to change and shift gradually. Yet fundamentally new insights, new knowledge, can lead to epistemic ruptures or even ‘revolutions’. As Charles Sanders Peirce already observed in his critical analysis of Descartes’ deductive view of scientific knowledge, new knowledge is not just added to the old. It can also profoundly change our understanding of what we think to know. If a new insight suddenly imposes itself, evidently, this again leads to changes in the rules of the language game. For the only way, really, of ascertaining new knowledge’s ‘truth’, is by treating it as a hypothesis whose validity can only be tested, as Goethe already emphasised, by the provisional assent of the epistemic community sharing the knowledge of the ‘discoverer’.27 Rationalised effects of knowledge can thus not simply be equated with the rules stipulated in language games. Knowledge can be isolated as an effect of those language games, because the effect of knowledge always comes about contingently, and because there is no necessary link between the effect

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of knowledge and its language game. To return to law, politics and the case of Van Ostaijen: his ‘constitutional heterotopia’ shows us that the effect of knowledge produced on the grounds of the language game of literature can on occasion be read as practical knowledge of ‘use’ in politics. Thus, while Van Ostaijen never really belonged to the epistemic community of politics, and did not get to speak its language game, he nonetheless produced political knowledge in his texts. This shows us that there may be no rational link between the kind of language game one ‘plays’ or identifies with and the actual propositional knowledge put forth. This ‘gap’ is essential to highlight, because it is in the end the possibility (no guarantee) that literature can produce an effect of knowledge of technical and practical use to a language game from another sphere that is commonly swept aside. We generally focus on the how, on what literature does with existing knowledge in culture or specific language games. We read it as a seismograph of shifts and changes in (bygone) cultural knowledge, and readily concede that its re-combinations of cultural elements into alternative constellations do on occasion profess alternative ways of organising culturally-coded norms and practices. We read it as a parasite of knowledge when we relate it more specifically to differentiated language games of other spheres. Here, too, we focus on how it treats existing knowledge, on the fact that its aesthetic embedding of knowledge makes us sensitive to aspects of mediation and linguistic representation. Hardly ever do we consider, however, that on this lower level, too, literature’s aesthetic play with knowledge might yield new combinations and insights that add propositional knowledge of practical and technical use. In the case of the avant-garde this is particularly strange, since one of the basic characteristics associated with it is precisely that it ventures into terrains of knowledge hitherto untouched as an aesthetic forerunner or military advance guard. Claiming that the avant-garde did exactly this, I am not proposing that, say, politicians and lawyers read literary texts as documents producing potentially viable laws. That would amount to disregard of the constitutive role of literary representation and mediation. It goes without saying that from the point of reception literature will be literature and politics will be politics. Yet what I am getting at is that as scholars of literature, despite our apprehension of literary strategies of representation and our always possible understanding of knowledge in non-literary spheres – we all claim to be ‘interdisciplinary’ – we tend to preclude the possibility of literary mediation producing propositions and an effect of useful knowledge to other language games, while in actual fact there is no reason, at least in theory, to do so.

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The ways in which (modernist) literature and law are commonly related to one another aptly illustrate that general tendency. Leaving aside the battery of critics who have argued that literary theory, as a (collection of) method(s), can assist legal agents in reading juridical texts,28 we can say that law in literature is generally treated in two directions. The stress can be either on what literature brings to law, or on what law brings to literature. Common sense dictates that there are substantial differences between the language games of literature and law.29 In general, however, agreement has it that literature can be a vital source of information to those dealing with issues in analytical jurisprudence. Literary texts, through cultural knowledge, are often informed by legal issues. By presenting how law is lived and used by fictional characters, literature can also be of use to politicians and legal agents producing or implementing laws. The stress here is on how law is (inter)subjectively experienced in cultural knowledge, as it finds its way into literature, which in turn adds a dimension to law largely alien (or suppressed) in legal texts and practices. Thus, Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice (1995) suggests that literature can give law a moral and ethical lesson or two, because it shows how law is morally and ethically dealt with. The central problems foregrounded here go to issues of justice, morality and ethics. These issues can be approached by reading literary texts in isolation, cut off from their historical context. Kafka’s The Trial, for example, has often been drawn on to refer to very general problems in law. By the same token, issues of justice and ethics in law can be approached historically, testifying to how law was dealt with in a certain period. For example, Kieran Dolin subtly draws on Kafka’s grotesque treatment of Austro-Hungarian law, to isolate the popular modernist view of law as bewildering, evasive, alienating and endless.30 Read alongside legal documents of practices of that same period, texts like Kafka’s become a vital source in the history of law as well. In such cases, literature’s depiction of cultural memory is drawn on. The other way round, moving from law to literature, the focus can be on how legal issues and law enter literature through cultural knowledge, shaping literature and its history. Thus, Brook Thomas, for example, has shown how nineteenth-century American realism’s utopian possibility of organising society through an exchange of promises was informed by the contractual paradigm dominant in politics and commerce at the time.31 Likewise, many have turned to the way in which the work of Kafka and others was directly informed by laws and legal documents of their own time, as many modernists had a sound knowledge of law and its language game. In such cases, scholars move from the general (law in cultural knowledge) into the particular (the propositional language

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game of law). Broadly speaking, however, the exchange of information here is nearly always seen as progressing in one direction only: from law to literature. A parasite of knowledge produced in other spheres – in this case the sphere of politics and law – it is, for reasons common sense dictates, never seriously considered that literature’s propositions might be of interest as alternative laws in themselves. There is one exception, however, that ties in with Foucault’s point marked above. Assuming that modern literature knows perhaps above all itself, that it is outspokenly self-reflective and highly conscious of its own texts and institutional practices,32 (modernist) writing is not uncommonly regarded as a player in legislation about literature itself. In his recent The Art of Scandal (2009), for instance, Sean Latham convincingly brings out how modernist texts and writerly practices of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and others closely interacted with (libel) laws, challenging the way in which literature as a relatively autonomous sphere was conceived in law.33 Latham argues that Joyce’s and others’ romans à clef prompted politicians and courts to revise their legal definition of freedom of speech in literature. In so doing, he shows how the exchange of information between literature and law cut both ways, as literature also directly informed legislation about literature as a functionally differentiated sphere. Literature is read as law, in short, when it comes to legislation about itself. Yet in general it is law in literature that is considered, not literature as law, as a producer of technical legal knowledge of relevance beyond the confines of its own sphere. And precisely the latter is of course where the effect of knowledge, the propositions produced by Van Ostaijen, Huelsenbeck and Marinetti’s writing take us. For, in a way that becomes unnatural and goes against common sense, they suggest that literature can be read as an equal to constitutional and civil law. Literature in the state of exception is pushed back into a near premodern state, we saw. As shown by Robert Ferguson for the American Revolution34 and by Lynn Hunt for the French Revolution,35 literature and politics, as distinct social spheres in democracy, emerged at about the same time. Their respective language games before these revolutions were hard to disentangle and intellectual debate about politics occurred across the confines of spheres known today, not least in literature. It is the brief and traumatic return to that pre-modern moment that might also explain why early twentieth-century avant-garde texts produced such awkwardly apt propositions in political terms. The modernist avant-gardes working in states of exception thereby show that not only in theory but in (historical) practice, too, modern literature’s effect of useful knowledge cannot be cast aside. They further leave us wondering, however, whether such an exceptional historical context is at all

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required to read texts as technical responses to aporia cropping up in other spheres’ language games. Why not, indeed, read texts as cognitive responses to aporia in other differentiated spheres, such as politics, but also the economy, and perhaps even the fundamental sciences? Why not pretend as if literature is something else or more, too, and act like Celan’s ‘Kunstblinde’? Such a reading method, simple as it sounds, would no doubt be experimental and based on trial and error. But it is a possibility, that could in the longer run thoroughly revise how we frame literature’s epistemic status, expanding rather than narrowing down our understanding of literary texts. In fact, that revision may already have begun in contemporary art and literature. Resembling Benjamin’s Jacobins, ‘seizing on the revolutionary potential of the Roman Republic to realize its now-time’,36 the historical avant-gardes, at least as I presented them here, might also have a number of ‘secret’ followers in present-day literature and art. We live in an era in which innovation and experimentation, two notions closely associated with the avant-garde, are often relegated, along with that avant-garde itself, to the confines of the past.37 We live in an age, as Gianni Vattimo observes, wherein everyone knows that ‘TV lies’,38 in which realism has become kitsch, and anti-realism has lost its appeal, in a society so ‘democratised’ that it forces individuality, and, in youth culture, even eclecticism, on subjects. In this state of heightened contingency, there may again be wisdom in the modernist avant-gardes. A decade ago, Hal Foster asked how to ‘tell the difference between a revisionist account written in support of the cultural status quo and a genealogical account that seeks to challenge it?’39 Answers to this question are unavoidably speculative, since there is no certified way of ascertaining in criticism which is which. But we are perhaps not fully left in the dark. In Niklas Luhmann’s words, the contemporary avant-garde is like an ‘oarsman on a rowing boat who never really gets to see where he is heading, merely where he is coming from’.40 That so many artists and writers at present are looking backward should perhaps not come as a surprise given the unstable times we have again entered. Today, therefore, we may wish to enquire whether at least one possible ‘route of escape’ or ‘flight line’ has not been with us the whole time. For, it is perhaps (again) to the status of the aesthetic sphere that we should turn. In the 1960s, for example, small isolated pockets in the neo-avant-gardes, in a genuine act of opposition, gave up the idea of producing ‘mere’ art and began to cook meals for passers-by. Since the 1990s artists have systematically begun to ‘doublecode’ and dress up as non-artists. Going to work as ‘businessmen, advisors, anthropologists, curators, biologists and more’,41 they may well be but the veil covering an aesthetic realm in a ‘state of exception’ in our

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own age. The same could be argued for writers like Kenneth Goldsmith, who advocate what in recent decades has become known as ‘found text’ and ‘uncreative writing’, forms of textual production in which intention and creativity yield pride of place to chance, citation, repetition and (though not always) re-articulation of quoted material. Far from the end of literature, and certainly not a ‘new’ beginning, uncreative writing, too, may be repeating in radical difference what occurred a century ago. The Jacobins of our own age may well be those whose work is showing us the structural apertures and far more subtle deformations the sphere of art and literature is again displaying. Perhaps, at this very moment these artists and writers as well are responding to aporia in other spheres, (un)intentional ‘useful’ knowledge again being one of the effects. In a culture where heightened contingency, risk and democratic stability denote about the same, this, too, might be but a contingency. But it is a possibility.

Notes

Taking Writing to Exception: By Way of Introduction 1. Lion Feuchtwanger, ‘Some Useful “Enemy Allies”; But Anniversary of Nazi Book Burning Finds Them Bound by Red Tape’ in the New York Times of 11 May 1942. 2. I need but recall the outcry provoked by Roger Fry’s exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (1910–11), or the response to the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913. 3. I use the epithets ‘historical’ and ‘modernist’ interchangeably to denote the early twentieth-century avant-garde. The ubiquity of the term ‘historical avantgarde’ of course stems from Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing rediscovery of the avant-gardes in Central Europe, Bürger’s label has come to denote nearly all European avant-garde movements from the first half of the twentieth century. Because of that I will use it here. However, my view of the avant-garde’s relation to modernism differs from Bürger’s. Like Astradur Eysteinsson in The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) I take modernism to be ‘a legitimate concept broadly signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world’ (p. 2). As such, modernism also includes the historical avant-garde, since it, too, clearly attacked traditions. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–91 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 5. For a selective survey of such critical assessments, see Caroline Levine, Provoking Democracy. Why We Need the Arts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 11 and further. 6. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (London: Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1981), pp. 43–7. 7. Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism. The ‘New’ Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 3. 8. Raymond Williams, ‘Introduction: The Politics of the Avant-Garde’ in Visions and Blueprints. Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 1–17.

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9. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, trans. Lisa Liebmann in Artforum, 8:22, 1984, pp. 36–43; and Lyotard’s essay ‘Answering the Question: What is the Postmodern?’ included as an afterword in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 10. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 95. Note that Poggioli defines the avant-garde in much broader terms than I do here, making it include Romanticism as well. He thus claimed that there had never been an avant-garde before the French Revolution and subsequent introduction of modern representational democracy. In this book I enquire into the specific role of the modernist avant-gardes in democracy. 11. It takes Manfred Schmidt over 600 pages, for example, to come to terms with all meanings of democracy, in Demokratietheorien (Opladen: Leske Verlag, 2000). 12. See, among others, Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 15–16. 13. Next to Benjamin’s famous Trauerspiel book, a key text in this context is of course Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). The most significant work of Agamben for my argument is his State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 14. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 15. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years. The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Ransom House, 1979). 16. In January 1920, modernist painter Prosper de Troyer wrote to Marinetti that ‘a young poet from Antwerp, P. Van Ostaijen will be leading the launch of Het Sienjaal – a magazine of the extreme avant-garde’. Quoted in A. De Poortere (ed.), Prosper de Troyer (Diest: Pro Arte, 1941), p. 15, my translation. 17. Rik Sauwen, Paul van Ostaijen. Poéte expressioniste et dadaïste flamand (Brussels: Henri Fagne, 1974), pp. 9–21; and Gerrit Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen. Een Documentatie. Deel 1 (The Hague: Bert Bakker, 1971), p. 308. 18. See Mussolini’s short text ‘Politicanti e soldati’ published in his daily Il Popolo d’Italia on 21 March 1919. 19. For a good overview of the field, see Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Chapter 1: The Trauma of Literature 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 126–7. 2. See the Introduction, pp. 3–4. 3. For Foucault’s conceptualisation of the ‘archive,’ see The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth:

Notes

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Penguin, 1978), pp. 14–15; and the more general theoretical framework that Foucault developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1924] 1987), p. 46. Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide. Essais sur l’indidualisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 125, my translation. Yves Michaud, La crise de l’art contemporain (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), p. 216, my translation. Thierry de Duve (ed.), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada Almanach, trans. Malcolm Green et al. (London: Atlas Press, [1920] 1992), p. 11. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Die Dadaistische Bewegung. Ein Selbstbiographie’ in Wozu Dada. Texte 1916–1936, ed. Herbert Kapfer (Giessen: Anabas 1994 [1920]), p. 34, my translation. Lajos Kassák, ‘Programm’ (Program) in the tenth issue of A Tett (1916); English translation by John Bátki from Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (eds), Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 160. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 4–5. Julian Przybos´, ‘Czlowiek w rzeczach’ (Man among Things) in the first issue of Linia I gwar from 1926; quoted in Endre Bojtár, East European AvantGarde Literature, trans. Pál Várnai (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1992), pp. 130–1. Mykhail Semenko’s poem ‘Poéma majbutneho’ (The Poem of Future), quoted in Bojtár, East European Avant-Garde Literature, p. 132. Vítêzlav Nezval, ‘Kapka inkoustu’ (A Drop of Ink) in ReD, 9, 1928, p. 313; quoted in Bojtár, East European Avant-Garde Literature, p. 131. Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 41–2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 140. Franz Marc, ‘Das geheime Europa’ in Das Forum, 1, 1914–15, pp. 630–6. Etienne Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’ in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduarda Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–57, here p. 33. Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self. Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 2–14. Stéphanie Barron, ‘1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany’ in ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), pp. 9–31. Lenin’s ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ (1905) in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 44–9, here p. 45. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 7–8.

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23. See The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2002), pp. 72–87, here p. 87. 24. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), pp. 14–15. 25. See also Vincent Kaufman, Poétique des groupes littéraires. Avant-gardes 1920–1970 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 26. Boris Groys, ‘The Will to Totality’ in The Age of Modernism: Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal (Berlin: Hatje, 1997), pp. 533–42, here p. 534. Compare John Carrey, Hass auf die Massen. Intellektuele 1880–1939 (Göttingen: Steidl Gerhard, 1996). 27. For more information about the futurists in Fiume, see Michael Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 28. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), ch. 9. 29. Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus. Dada in Zurich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999), passim. 30. See Breton’s ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ (1927) in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), pp. 28–41. Here, of course, Western avant-gardes often parted ways with Central and Eastern European pendants as the latter’s cultures had experienced Western Romanticism and the Enlightenment differently. 31. Charles Altieri, ‘Modernist Innovations: A Legacy of the Constructed Reader’ in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), p. 71. 32. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 11. 33. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 1–11. 34. Aldo Palazzeschi, Man of Smoke, trans. N. J. Perella and R. Stefanini (New York: Italica Press, 2008). 35. Barthes elaborates on the notion of ‘logothesis’, the creation of a singular world through a unique language composed according to laws of its own, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 36. I borrow the term ‘political culture’ from Keith Baker, who uses it to define politics ‘as the activity through which individuals and groups in society articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole. Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which these claims are made. It comprises the subject-positions from which individuals and groups may (or may not) legitimately make claims upon another, and therefore of the identity and boundaries of the community to which they belong. It constitutes the meanings of the terms in which these claims are framed, the nature of the contexts to which they pertain, and the authority of the principles according to which they are made binding.’ Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4.

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37. The concepts ‘myth’ and ‘social imaginary’, which will be used throughout this book, stem from the work of Ernesto Laclau and build on his book, written with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony or Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). Society is discursively kept together, according to Laclau, by a social imaginary, a hegemonic discourse that makes sense of the public space and that sets out a horizon beyond which society begins to disintegrate for the self. An imaginary generally takes on narrative form. It is a mythic space in which actual events fully make room for the symbolic. Social imaginaries are not logical or rational. They are effective because they manage to create a sense of totality and account for dislocational events in the public space. An example Laclau gives himself is the social imaginary of national socialism. Making a scapegoat out of certain social groups and mystifying the portrayal of others, national socialism in no way corresponded to real events, but because it was the only imaginary at hand ‘accounting for’ and setting out an eschatological horizon to overcome the deeply felt crisis in political culture, it gained support. Nazism was originally a myth, that is, it was already in existence (in modified shape) before it turned into a social imaginary. Myths are thus counter-hegemonic discourses, becoming hegemonic when they gain civil society’s support. See Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), p. 55. 38. For more on Micic´, consult Ljljana Blagojevic´, Modernism in Serbia. The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture 1919–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2003, pp. 8 ff; and Stephen A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39. Georg Trakl’s Sebastian im Traum could be mentioned here as well, because it prefigured the monstrosity to come with unprecedented lucidity. For a discussion of Trakl and Schnitzler in this respect, see Pascal Dethurens, Écriture et culture. Écrivains et philosophes face à l’Europe (Paris: Champion, 1997), pp. 21, 28–30. 40. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 326. 41. See Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa. Von der Romantik bis zum Gegenwart (München: Piper, 1992), pp. 272 ff. 42. Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Spirit’ in Paul Valéry: An Anthology, ed. and trans. J. R. Lawler (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 94–107. 43. This tense relationship with mass democracy has been well documented for experimental Anglo-American modernism. Rachel Potter’s Modernism and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) is worth mentioning here, as are Andrew John Miller’s Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2007) and Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). Relatively little attention has gone to this relationship on the continent, though – my analysis of Marinetti being an instigation to close this gap. 44. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture – Art – Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 45. This typology loosely follows the general remarks on the interfaces between politics and art presented by Janet Wolff in Aesthetics and the Sociology

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46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes of Art (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 62–7. The typology has the advantage of avoiding the rather narrow opposition between either intentionally or explicitly political art on the one hand, and an apolitical art on the other. It also avoids equating aesthetic revolution with progressive and established aesthetics with conservative political values. See Karlheinz Barck, ‘Konjunktion von Ästhetik und Politik des Äesthetischen?’ in Ästhetik des Politischen – Politik des Ästhetischen, ed. Karlheinz Barck and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999), pp. 97–118. ‘Negativity’ and ‘negation’ are best not conflated; see Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Yves Alain-Bois and Rosalind Kraus (eds), L’informe. Mode d’emploi (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). Karl-Heinz Hucke, Utopie und Ideologie in der expressionistischen Lyrik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980). Anatole Stern, Europa, trans. Stefan Themerson and Michael Horovitz (London: Gaberbocchus Press, [1925] 1962), n.p. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 227. Mary Ann Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy. Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 8. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 9–20. Ibid. p. 15. Chantal Mouffe criticises Lefort’s concept of the political because it does not take into account the fact that politics, as a selective representation of political culture, is never empty or devoid of transcendental markers, unless situated in a cultural void. She rightly observes that in Western liberal democracy, various forms of liberalism (not just in the European, ‘capitalist’ sense of the word, but also in its Anglo-American sense of pluralism) are most often already presupposed or pre-inscribed in politics. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 3. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). Rancière further reminds us of the disdain for democracy already encountered in modernism, and in intellectual debate at large. See: Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 199. This box is filled by researchers from various regions, each with their own vocabulary. Within Anglo-American modernist studies it is represented by, among others, Andrew Hewitt (see note 75) and Lawrence Rainey, The Institution of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 1994). On the continent, its Critical Theoretical branch (Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas) is condensed in Bürger’s Theory and Aleš Debeljak’s Reluctant Modernity. The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). More recently, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as well has led to a renewed interest in the modernist avant-gardes within the Critical Theoretical tradition. See, among others, Georg Jäger, ‘Die Avantgarde als Ausdifferenzierung des bürgerlichen Literatursysteme’

Notes

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

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in Modelle des literarischen Strukturwandels, ed. Michael Titzmann and Georg Jäger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), pp. 221–44; Gerhard Plumpe, Epochen der moderne Literatur (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995), chapter ‘Avantgarden’. The box’s Bourdieu-inspired branch is represented by a wide array of scholars. The approaches to the modernist avant-garde developed by Jacques Dubois and Gisèle Sapiro, to whom I will return further on, should perhaps be highlighted here. Paul Valéry, ‘Réponse à une enquête’ in Oeuvres complètes. Vol I (Paris: Gallimard (Plèiade), 1957), pp. 1148–9, here p. 1149, my translation. Donald D. Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). I borrow the term ‘sphere’ from Chantal Mouffe’s The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993) and will use it as an umbrella term for ‘institution’, ‘system’ and ‘field’. Mouffe’s notion of spheres is compatible with the sociological (literary) ‘field’ approach of Pierre Bourdieu. See: Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe. The Radical Democratic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 63–4. ‘Language games’ will denote the discourses of spheres such as literature and politics. Not unlike Wittgenstein, I will use the term ‘language game’ to designate the constitution of a signifying order that is reducible to neither its linguistic nor its extra-linguistic aspects. Language games are not rational, but require consent from their users on inscribed judgements. They set out and reiterate rules, which are always abridgements of practices within spheres, inseparable from the specificity of their discursive practices. Hence, when I say ‘language game’ it is to denote the whole of the discursive practices and presumptions at work in the sphere of politics or literature. This leaves some agency to the individual writers’ discourses proper, which obviously took over many presumptions and rules of the literary language game, but which did not coincide with it. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1927] 2002), p. 63. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project?’ in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 38 ff. The term ‘state apparatus’ of course refers to Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 121–73. This is not the place to go into the issue of ‘(over)determination’ in Althusser, but I should point out that Althusser, like Benjamin and Adorno, sits on the fence between the ‘institutional’ and ‘cultural’ approaches discussed here. See, for example, Georg Bollenbeck, Tradition, Avantgarde, Reaktion. Deutsche Kontroversen und die kulturelle Moderne 1880–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1999). Consult Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism. F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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68. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986). 69. See Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas. Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen (Giessen: Anabas, 1989). 70. For accounts of other centres (and peripheries), see Krisztina Passuth, Treffpunkte der Avantgarden. Ostmitteleuropa, 1907–1930 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2003); and Timothy Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Los Angeles: LACMA, 2002). 71. See Christophe Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle. Essai d’histoire comparée (Paris: Seuil, 1996). 72. For Germany, see Dagmar Barnouw, Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). For Italy, see Marzio Barbagli, Disoccupazione Intellettuale e Sistema Scholastica in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulina, 1974), pp. 55–8, 63–4. 73. For a more general survey of the surrealists’ social background, see Norbert Bandier, Sociologie du Surréalisme. 1924–1929 (Paris: La Dispute, 1999). 74. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lehnhardt (Boston: Routledge & Paul Kegan, 1984 [1972]), p. 152. 75. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Aesthetics, Politics and the AvantGarde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 59. 76. Literary sociologist Peter Zima, for example, has argued that the avantgarde’s occasional glimpses at politics were nothing more than a contingent side-effect of history – as if there were other effects – asking ‘whether the social, the revolutionary engagement of the avant-garde was not a coincidence (Zufallserscheinung) of the twenties and thirties’. Peter Zima and Johann Strutz (eds), Europäische Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987), p. 14, my translation. 77. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schiften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), vol. 5, I, p. 292, my translation. 78. Kate Winskell, ‘The Art of Propaganda. Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm’ in Art History, 18:3, 1995, pp. 315–44. 79. Gisèle Sapiro’s main study is Le guerre des écrivains. 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). This book deals with the Second World War, but in more recent publications she has devised a more general framework with which to approach literature in times of war. Michael Einfalt’s main study is entitled Nation, Gott und Modernität. Grenzen literarischer Autonomie in Frankreich, 1919–1929 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), and discusses André Gide, Philippe Soupault, Jean Maritain and Jean Cocteau among others. 80. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), p. 42. 81. Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 12–13. 82. Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 83. See Hugo Ball, ‘Carl Schmitts Politische Theologie’ [1926] in Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983), pp. 100–15. For an analysis of the friendship between these two men, see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt und Hugo Ball. Ein Beitrag

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zum Thema “politischer Expressionismus”’ in Zeitschrift für Politik, 35:2, 1988, pp. 143–62. 84. A letter of Benjamin quoted in (translation by) Samuel Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’ in Diacritics, 22:3/4, 1992, pp. 5–18, here p. 5. On the commonalities and differences between states of exceptions in politics and aesthetics, see also Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’ in Critical Inquiry, 25:2, 1999, pp. 247–66. 85. F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 339. 86. F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 234. Chapter 2: The Party and the Book

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

In this chapter I have made use of existing translations as frequently as possible. I refer to a number of translations in abbreviated, parenthetical form. ‘CW’ signals Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, trans. Doug Thompson, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). ‘SW’ refers to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). Because every now and then I found it useful to recall or refer to the original, ‘TIF’ signals Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano de Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 2001). Pier Paolo Pasolini, Descrizioni de descrizioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), p. 186. Quoted in translation from Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism. F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 165. Gottfried Benn, Essays, Reden, Vorträge (Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1), ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), p. 498, my translation. To avoid confusion: I will be referring to the ‘narrator’ and the biographic ‘character’ or ‘implied author’ Marinetti as they emerge from his texts published at the time. His diaries, for example, which did not circulate in the public space, show that he was fully aware of the excessive slaughter and human cost of war, and that he was rather ambivalent toward the violent acts of squadrismo we will encounter further on. See F. T. Marinetti, Taccuini: 1915–1921, ed. Alberto Bertoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987). See Günter Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 1899–1909 (Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995). I thus largely sidestep discussions about the use of this strict bifurcation, which in recent decades has been increasingly debated. See, among others, Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 7; Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Forwarding Address’ in Stanford Italian Review, 8:1–2, 1990, pp. 53–80; and Robert Dombroski, L’Esistenza ubbidiente: Letterati italiani sotto il fascismo (Naples: Guida, 1984), pp. 28–50. Archivo Centrale della Stato, Ministerio dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza, Casello Politico Centrale, busta 3066, fasc.

214

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes 97613, ‘Marinetti’. Quoted in translation from Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics. Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), p. 52. Martin Clark, Modern Italy. 1871–1995 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 172. For an overview of its reception and influence in Germany, see Peter Demetz, Worte in Freiheit. Der italienische Futurismus und die deutsche literarische Avantgarde (1912–1934) (München and Zürich: Piper, 1990); and Carmine Chiellino, Die Futurismusdebatte (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978). For its role in France, consult Jean-Claude Marcadé (ed.), Présence de F. T. Marinetti (Lausanne: Age d’homme, 1985). For a broader perspective, see Claudia Salaris, Marinetti editore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), pp. 88, 118–19. Blum, The Other Modernism, p. 128. Compare Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 218; and Salaris, Marinetti editore, p. 293. Marzia Rocca, L’Oasi delle memoria: estetica a poetica del secondo Marinetti (Napoli: Tempi Moderni, 1989), pp. 40 ff. Eduardo Sanguinetti, Ideologia e linguaggio, ed. Erminio Risso (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001), p. 124. See, among others, Susanne von Falkenhausen, Der Zweite Futurismus und die Kunstpolitik des Faschismus in Italien von 1922–1943 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1979). We will see that the return to more conventional tactics also interlocked with shifts in his political writings, however. Furthermore, many have argued convincingly that Marinetti’s work before, too, never really managed to move beyond symbolism. See, for example, Bruno Romani, Dal simbolismo al futurismo (Florence: Sandron, 1969); and Sergio Turconi, Letteratura e scienzia nella storia della cultura italiana (Palermo: Manfredi, 1978), pp. 831–8. Marinetti’s ties to Bergson’s post-1900 work have been well studied. Marinetti’s adaptation of Bergson’s notions of élan vital, voluntarism and intuition, of time, change and duration, and, derived from these, the notions of simultaneity and interpenetration are discussed at length in Francesca Talpo, ‘Der Futurismus und Henri Bergsons Philosophie der Intuition’ in Der Lärm in der Strasse. Italienischer Futurismus. 1909–1918, ed. Norbert Nobis (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 2001), pp. 59–71; and Noëmi Blumenkranz-Onimus, La poésie futuriste italienne: Essai d’analyse esthétique (Paris: Klinksieck, 1984), pp. 130 ff. As others have shown, Marinetti’s Bergsonianism had a clear political inclination, too. See Fausto Curi, Tra Mimesi e metafora: Studi zul Marinetti e il futurismo (Bologna: Pendragon, 1995), pp. 115–23; Mark Antliff, Reinventing Bergson. Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). At least, to my purposes here, I only need to highlight two tactics. For a more elaborate discussion of Marinetti’s poetic, see John J. White, Literary Futurism. Aspects of the First Avant-Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics and Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 21. Paolo Valesio, ‘“The Most Enduring and Most Honored Name.” Marinetti as Poet’ in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose, ed. Luce

Notes

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

215

Marinetti (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 149–67, here p. 160. Helga Finter, Semiotik des Avantgardetextes: gesellschaftliche und poetische Erfahrung im italienischen Futurismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980); Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 105–40. See Helmut Meter, ‘Maschinenkult und Eschatologie: Zum historischen Ort des Italienischen Futurismus’ in Sprachkunst, 17:1, 1986, pp. 90 ff. Marinetti’s fascination with the occult is well known. Consult Simona Cigliano, Futurismo esoterico. Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Roma: Le Fenice, 1996); Luigi Peirone, Lo strumento espressivo di Marinetti (Genoa: Tilgher, 1976), pp. 22–5; and Sandro Briosi, ‘Le “paradoxe” de la littérature et sa “solution” dans l’avant-garde’ in Vitalité et contradictions de l’avant-garde: Italie-France 1909–1924, ed». Sandro Briosi and Henk Hillenaar (Paris: Corti, 1988), pp. 51–8. In The Untamables, too, mysticism lingers on, as Enrico Cesaretti has shown in Castelli di carta: retorica della dimora tra Scapigliatura e surrealismo (Ravenna: Longo, 2001), pp. 95–8. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), passim; and Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1995), pp. 85 ff. In all probability Marinetti became acquainted with Nietzsche through D’Annunzio. See Vittorio Vetori, Gabriele d’Annunzio e il mito del superuomo (Rome-Arezzo: Castello di Borgo alla Collina, 1981). Compare Gian Battista Nazzaro, ‘L’Idéologie Marinettiène et le fascisme’ in Marinetti et le futurisme. Études, documents, iconographie, ed. Giovanni Lista (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1977), pp. 122–9. Giovanni Papini, ‘Freghiamoci della politica’ in Laberba, 19:1, 1913. I quote this letter in translation from Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 70. Christine Poggi notes a shift during Lacerba’s later years, when it ran at 20,000 copies, 80 per cent of which went to workers. See Christine Poggi, ‘Lacerba: Interventionist Art and Politics in Pre-World War I Italy’ in Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910–1940, ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 17–62. See G. Miligi, Prefuturismo e primo futurismo in Sicilia (Messina: Sicania, 1989), p. 292. Interview by Gubello Memmoli, entitled ‘Con Marinetti in “terza saletta”’ in Giornale d’Italia, 30 October 1913. Quoted from Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 71. Giuseppe Carlo Marino, L’autarchia della cultura: Intellettuali e fascismo (Rome: Riuniti, 1983), p. 181. Marla Stone, ‘A Flexible Rome: Fascism and the cult of romanità’ in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catherine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 205–20. Anti-parliamentarianism circulated widely in political culture at this point. See Carlo Salinari, Miti e conscienza del decadentismo italiano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960), pp. 62–4; and James A. Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 36–54.

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31. See Douglas J. Forsyth, The Crisis in Liberal Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 26. 32. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), pp. 389–91. 33. Patricia Knight, Mussolini and Fascism (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 34 ff. 34. David Forgacs, ‘Fascism, Violence and Modernity’ in The Violent Muse. Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe, 1910–1939, ed. Jana Howlett and Rod Mengham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 5–21, here at p. 5. 35. Georges Sorel, Lo sciopero generale e la violenza (Rome: Il Divenire sociale, 1906), p. 30. Quoted and translated in Forgacs, ‘Fascism, Violence and Modernity’, p. 9. 36. Which is not the same as stating that Marinetti’s work here ‘de-politicised’ war, as Manfred Hinz does in Die Zukunft der Katastrophe. Mythische und rationalistische Geschichtstheorie im Futurismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), pp. 106 ff. 37. Quoted in translation from Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 71. 38. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 17. 39. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford California Press, 1995), p. 8. Compare Judith Butler, ‘Dehumanisation via Indefinite Detension’ in It’s a Free Country: Freedom in America After September 11, ed. Danny Goldberg, Robert Greenwood and Victor Goldberg (New York: RDV Books, 2002), pp. 265–79. 40. For this brief account of the war, I made use of Clark, Modern Italy, pp. 180–200. 41. Giovanni Antonucci, Lo spettacolo Futurista in Italia (Rome: Studium, 1974), p. 47. 42. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, pp. 193 ff. 43. For a discussion of texts that did not get published but found a place in his Taccuini, see Wanda Strauven, ‘A Fourth Dimension in Marinetti’s Poetry’ in On Verbal/Visual Representation, ed. Martin Heuser et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 207–18. 44. F. T. Marinetti et al. ‘L’orgoglio italiano’ (1916) in Mario Sorini, Scritti editi e inediti, ed. Ettore Camesca (Milan: Feltrini, 1980), pp. 9–11. 45. Evidently, Marinetti had always stressed performance over performativity. All I am noting is that only at this point did he begin to publish on his practice as an orator, setting out guidelines for others. 46. Claudia Salaris, Le futuriste: Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia, 1909–1944 (Milano: Edizione della Donne, 1982). 47. See the reprint: L’Italia Futurista. 1916–1918, ed. Maria Carla Papini (Roma: Ed. dell’Ateneo & Bizarri, 1977). 48. I would like to thank Günter Berghaus for pointing these facts out to me. 49. For a recent though by no means exhaustive survey of publications on the Arditi, see Friedrich A. Kittler, ‘The Flower of the Elite Troops’ in Body and Society, 9:4, 2003, pp. 169–89. 50. This report dates from 24 January 1919. Quoted in Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 160.

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51. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, pp. 104–5. 52. Ibid., p. 105. 53. This elaborate phrase was used in a letter from an Assault Unit to Roma Futurista, in which the Unit en bloc declared to join the FPP. See Roma Futurista, No. 5, p. 3, letter entitled ‘I futuristi del 23° reparto d’asalto’. 54. Frank Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics. Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 56, 59. 55. Clark, Modern Italy, pp. 332–3. 56. For a more elaborate discussion of the thorough dislocation of Italian political culture and the biennio rosso, see John Whittam, Fascist Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 29 ff; and Guiseppe Maione, Il biennio rosso: autonomia e spontaneità operaia nel 1919–1920 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975). 57. See Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 8–9. 58. See Enzo Santarelli, Fascismo e neofascismo: Studi e problemi di ricerca (Rome: Riuniti, 1974), pp. 3–50; Niccolò Zapponi, ‘La politica come espediente e come utopia: Marinetti e il Partito Politico Futurista’ in F. T. Marinetti futurista: Inediti, pagine disperse, documenti e antologia critica, ed. S. Lambiase and G. B. Nazzaro (Naples: Guida, 1977), pp. 221–39; and Günter Berghaus, ‘The Futurist Political Party’ in The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde, 1906–1940, ed. Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 153–82. A brief yet interesting historical account can also be found in Emilio Settimeli, ‘Storia del partito politica futurista’ in Oggi e domani, 23:3, 1931, p. 27. 59. Piero Aregno, ‘Futurismus und Fascismus. Die italienische Avantgarde und die Revolution’ in Fascismus und Avantgarde, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980), pp. 83–91. 60. See Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 133. 61. The essay in fact ends after citing a list of five signifieds – ‘Esercito’, ‘Clero’, ‘Aristocrazia’, ‘Borghesia’, and ‘Proletariato’ (TIF: 361–3) – put forth by the Futurist Volt, who defines them almost as lemmas in a dictionary. They were used in much the same way at this point in Mussolini’s speeches. See the discussion of Mussolini’s discourse in Walter L. Adamson, ‘The Language of Opposition in Early Twentieth-Century Italy’ in Journal of Modern History, 64:1, 1992, pp. 22–52; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 119 ff. On pre-fascist futurism’s influence on the later cultural politics of Mussolini’s Minister of Culture, see Claudia Fugo, The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), passim. 62. See TIF: 475, emphasis added. This is a literal and I believe better translation than the one by Thompson, which reads: the ‘concept of the Nation’ was ‘as indestructible as that of the political party’ (CW: 341). 63. The literature on the relationship between futurism and fascism is vast. Indispensable remains Renzo de Felice’s Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883– 1920 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1965). For a selective survey of more recent work, see Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity’ in Art Bulletin, 84:1, 2002.

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64. For which, in the field of economy, he turned to Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879). See TIF: 426–30. 65. See TIF: 349. 66. See TIF: 419–20; 425–6. 67. Possibly, because Marinetti also began to argue for reclaiming ‘the deadlands of illiteracy’ (le zone morte dell’analfabetismo, TIF: 380). This stands in line with his ‘post-Marxist’ non-essentialism: the rulers would or could come from all ‘classes’. 68. See TIF: 406–7. 69. Ferruccio Vecchi, Arditismo civile (Milan: L’Ardito, 1920), p. 54. Quoted in translation from Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, p. 150. 70. See Emilio Gentile, ‘Il futurismo e la politica’ in Futurismo, cultura e politica, ed. Renzo de Felice (Turin: Ed. della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988), pp. 105–59, here p. 139. 71. R. W. Flint, ‘A Note on The Untamables’ in SW: 246–8, here p. 246. 72. Benedetta Cappa, ‘The Untamables di F. T. Marinetti’ in L’Impero, 54:1, 1923. 73. See TIF: 924 74. Franco Gisuti’s unpublished PhD Italian Futurism as a Sociolinguistic Phenomenon (University of Michigan, 1981) as quoted in White, Literary Futurism, p. 221. 75. With neologisms like ‘grande carezza verdombrardente del bosco’ in TIF: 811, and ‘panpantomimepan’ and the verb ‘friggeride’ (frylaughing) in F. T. Marinetti (ed.), I nuovi poeti futuristi (Roma: Poesia, 1925), p. 283. 76. I borrow this term from Norman Friedman’s essay ‘Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept’ in PMLA, 70, 1955, pp. 1160–84. 77. See Bruno G. Sanzin, Marinetti e il futurismo (Trieste: Sanzin, 1924), pp. 29–31; Enrico Falqui, ‘La poesia futurista’ in Novecento letterario, 9, 1968, pp. 7–43; Luciano De Maria (in TIF: xxxi); Enrico Crispolti, Storia e critica del futurismo (Roma: Bulzoni, 1986), p. 185. 78. See TIF: 918. 79. Here I disagree with Cinzia Sartini Blum (The Other Modernism, p. 127) when she interprets The Untamables as an overt return to the ‘existential and socio-political pessimism of the pre-futurist’ and his post-symbolist writing tactics. I do agree with Gian Battista Nazzaro, Sergio Lambiase and Enrico Cesaretti, who uphold that the book cannot simply be read as a return to Marinetti’s pre-Futurist or post-symbolist poetic. See Lambiase and Nazzaro, F. T. Marinetti, Futurista, p. 155; and Enrico Cesaretti, ‘Back to the Future: Temporal Ambivalences in F. T. Marinetti’s Writings’ in Italian Modernism. Italian Culture Between Decadentism and AvantGarde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Morini (Toronto: University Press of Toronto, 2004), pp. 257–60. 80. See Blum, The Other Modernism, pp. 12–14. 81. Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto’ (1913) in Modernism and Music, trans. Stephen Somervell, ed. Daniel Albright (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), pp. 177–83, here pp. 181–2. 82. Ibid. p. 181. 83. Rocca, L’Oasi delle memoria, pp. 40 ff.

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84. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and S. Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. 81. 85. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 231–2. 86. Earlier on, near the Lake, the Untamables see how ‘the stars in freedom hurtled and fell over the lake lying in dissolved oily moonlight’ (SW: 207, emphasis added) – the stars in freedom here coming fascinatingly close to the words-in-freedom of the ‘Futurist Paper Revolutionaries’. This visual event, too, then, is already prefigured or ‘remembered’ in the Lake of Liberty. This would be another illustration of art not being mere ‘distraction’: already in the Lake, futurist words are uplifting and empowering the spirits of the indomitables. 87. See Giovanni Lista, Futurism (Paris: Terrail, 2001), p. 19. 88. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 99. 89. In an open letter to critic Silvio Benco of 1922, he recounted what happens in the chapters up to the ‘revolution’ in terms similar to my own interpretation. But then he falls prey to contradiction, or at Nietzschean tautology, stating that Humanity strives for Goodness, but Goodness is not Humanity (or at least not Human enough). See SW: 247–8. 90. Salaris, Marinetti editore, p. 293. 91. See Luciano de Maria’s remark in TIF: lxxxiii. 92. On this issue, see Gert Sørensen, ‘The Dual State and Fascism’ in International Fascism, 1919–1945, ed. Gert Sørensen and Robert Mallet (London: Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 25–41. Compare Agamben’s succinct analyses in State of Exception, pp. 16–17, 48 and 83. 93. Benito Mussolini, ‘Il discorso dell’ascensione’ (1927) in Opera Omnia. Vol. 34, ed. Eduardo and Duilo Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1956), p. 127. 94. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 87. Chapter 3: The Paper State All translations of Van Ostaijen’s work in this chapter are mine. I refer to his collected works or Verzameld Werk, four volumes edited by Gerrit Borgers (and published by De Sikkel/Daamen/G. A. Van Oorschot in Antwerp/The Hague/Amsterdam), parenthetically in abbreviated form: ‘VW, I’ referring to Volume I, Poëzie: Music-Hall, Het Sienjaal, De Feesten van Angst en Pijn (1952); ‘VW, II’ to Volume II, Poëzie: Bezette Stad, Nagelaten Gedichten (1952); ‘VW, III’ to Volume III, Proza: Grotesken en ander proza (1954); ‘VW, IV’ to Volume IV, Proza: Kritieken en Essays (1956). Also note that his poetry volume Bezette Stad, discussed at length in this chapter, is not paginated. I therefore refer parenthetically to quoted poems’ titles whenever necessary. 1. Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’, trans. Jerry Glenn in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 173–85, here p. 175. 2. For a comprehensive survey of Van Ostaijen’s indebtedness to expressionism and other currents in European aesthetics, consult Paul Hadermann,

220

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes Het vuur in de verte: Paul van Ostaijens kunstopvattingen in het licht van de Europese avant-garde (Antwerp: Ontwikkeling, 1970). See Paul Hadermann, ‘From the Message to the Medium. The Poetic Evolution of Paul van Ostaijen’ in The Low Countries, 1, 1993, pp. 254–61; Elsa Strietman, ‘Occupied City: Ostaijen’s Antwerp and the Impact of the First World War’ in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 128–41; Kristiaan Versluys, The Poet and the City. Chapters in the Development of Urban Poetry in Europe and the United States, 1800–1930 (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 1987), passim; and Theo D’haen, ‘Paul van Ostaijen’s Modernism: A Paint that Encompasses All of Man’s Consciousness’ in Neophilologus, 74:4, 1989, pp. 481–500. Marc Reynebeau, Dichter in Berlijn. De ballingschap van Paul van Ostaijen (1918–1921) (Groot-Bijgaarden: Globe & De Prom), p. 122; Geert Buelens, Van Ostaijen tot heden. Zijn invloed op de Vlaamse poëzie (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2001), p. 108. Van Ostaijen’s ‘Zelfbiografie’ (Autobiography) as reproduced in Vlaanderen, 122:20, p. 371. Erik Spinoy, Twee handen in het lege. Paul van Ostaijen en de esthetica van het verhevene (Kant, Lyotard). Unpublished doctoral dissertation (Leuven University, 1994), passim. Buelens, Van Ostaijen tot heden, passim. Thomas Vaessens, Circus dubio en schroom. Nijhoff, Van Ostaijen en de mentaliteit van het modernisme (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 1998), pp. 83, 165–6. Michel Huysseune, ‘Paul van Ostaijen of de dubbelzinnige avant-gardist’ in Ons Erfdeel, 33:5, 1990, pp. 709–14; Marc Reynebeau, ‘“Alsof wij altijd maar dezelfden blijven.” Over Paul van Ostaijen’ in De Vlaamse Gids, 81:3, 1997, pp. 14–21. Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). On the politics of Plato, see Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 61–2. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art over the Great Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Cambridge University Press, 1935). Consult Joseph Chytry, The Aesthetic State. A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Peter Nicholls, Modernisms. A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 142. Compare Vivian Liska, ‘Vorhut und Nachträglichkeit. Die Unzeitgemässe des deutschen Expressionismus’ in Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden, ed. Cornelia Klinger and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), pp. 133–44; and Bernd Hüppauf and John Milfull (eds), Expressionismus und Kulturkrise (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983). Geert Buelens, ‘“The collectivists go collectively backwards.” Paul van Ostaijen, Expressionism, the November Revolution and (Inter)nationalist

Notes

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

221

Politics’ in Historical Avant-Garde. Poetics and Politics, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Leuven: Peeters and Alpha Copy, 2005), pp. 61–81. See Ludo Wills, Flamenpolitik en activisme. Vlaanderen tegenover België in de eerste wereldoorlog (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1974); and Antoon Vrints, Bezette Stad: Vlaams-nationalistische collaboratie in Antwerpen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 2002). Adriaan De Roover, Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerpen: Desclée de Brouwer, 1958), p. 2; and VW, IV: 509–12. I thank Geert Buelens (University of Utrecht), Kris Humbeeck and Matthijs de Ridder (University of Antwerp) for pointing this out to me. For more details about this politicised climate, see Buelens et al. (eds), De Trust van de Vaderlandsliefde (Antwerpen: AMVC Letterenhuis, 2005). Wies Moens, ‘De dichter Paul van Ostaijen en de studenten der Gentse Vlaamse Universiteit (1916–1918)’ in Vlaamsche Arbeid, 23:3–4, 1928, pp. 175–7, here p. 175. That is, ‘Nasionalisme en het nieuwe geslacht’ (Nationalism and the New Race, in De Goedendag of July 1916), ‘Voorgeschiedenis van de Vlaamse Beweging’ (series of articles in Ons Land in 1917) and ‘Het tragiese van de Vlaamse Beweging. Enige Kanttekeningen’ (Notes on the Tragic Fate of the Flemish Movement, anniversary issue of De Goedendag of 1916). Benedikt Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). ‘Active army’ (line 3) could also be read as ‘activist army’, thus referring to the group of young political activists Van Ostaijen was part of. See Gerrit Borgers, ‘Verantwoording van de uitgave’ in Paul van Ostaijen. Verzamelde gedichten, ed. Gerrit Borgers (Amsterdam: Prometheus, Bert Bakker, 1996), pp. 509–610, here p. 522. Van Ostaijen’s poem ‘Guldensporenstoet,’ dated 1915, like ‘Ridderstijd’ from Music Hall deals with the same subject. Oskar Kokoschka, ‘On the Nature of Visions’ (1912) in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor Miesel (London: Tate Publishings, 2003), p. 99. Marc Reynebeau, ‘Geschapen als activistisch mannequin. Het politieke avontuur van Van Ostaijen’ in Spiegel der Letteren, 39:2, 1997, pp. 161–81, here p. 174. Van Ostaijen published in Het Vlaamsche Nieuws, De Goedendag, Ons Leven, Het Vlaamsch Leven and Aula, the periodical of the by then Dutchspeaking University of Ghent. The more moderate De Vlaamse Courant should be mentioned as well. Sophie De Schaepdrijver, De groote oorlog. Het koninkrijk België tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Altlas, 1997), p. 280. Reynebeau, ‘Geschapen als activistisch mannequin’. Buelens, Van Ostaijen tot heden, pp. 84–7. From Kurt Hiller’s ‘Vom Aktivismus’ (1917), quoted in Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 40, my translation. Anna-Maria Musschoot, ‘Poésie Pure. Een confrontatie Karel van de Woestijne – Paul van Ostaijen’ in Nieuwe Taalgids, 69:3, 1976, pp. 192–204. Kandinsky’s monograph as quoted in Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 55, my translation.

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33. See also Erik Spinoy, ‘“Bourgeoisie”, “massa” en “volk”. Een kader voor de (re)constructie van Van Ostaijens ontwikkeling’ in Ons Erfdeel, 49:5, 1996, pp. 663–72, here p. 669. 34. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Band 1: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, Teil 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920), p. 204, my translation. 35. See Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 47. 36. For a more elaborate discussion of the poetry book in this light, see Erik Spinoy, ‘Paul van Ostaijen’s “The Signal.” A Politics to End all Politics’ in Historical Avant-Garde: Poetics and Politics, ed. Sascha Bru et al., pp. 33–48. 37. Van Ostaijen seems to have made this distinction himself after the war, thereby siding with the bifurcation later proposed in Wolfgang Paulsen, Expressionismus und Aktivismus (Bern: Gotthelf, 1935); and Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). 38. Georg Meyer, Bibliographie zur deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977). 39. See Gerald D. Feldman, Eberhard Kolb and Reinhard Rürup, ‘Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1917–1920)’ in Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 13:2, 1972, pp. 84–105. 40. Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism. Art and the November Revolution, 1918–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 4. 41. Gerrit Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen. Een documentatie, Vol. 1 (The Hague: Bert Bakker, 1971), p. 218; Paul De Vree, ‘Paul van Ostaijens Berliniale’ in De Tafelronde, 11:1, 1966, p. 17. 42. Firmin Mortier, ‘Een getuigenis over Paul van Ostaijen’ in Gierik, 49–50:13– 14, 1995/6, p. 19. 43. On the steadfast institutionalisation and politicisation of post-war German expressionism, consult Thomas Zacharias (ed.), Tradition und Widerspruch: 175 Jahre Kunstacademie München (München: Prestel, 1985); Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); and Hubert van den Berg, ‘From a New Art to a New Life and a New Man. Avant-Garde Utopianism in Dada’ in The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906– 1940), ed. Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 133–50. 44. During his stay in Berlin Van Ostaijen had few contacts with so-called Flemish ‘post-activists’. Nonetheless, and despite his critique after the war of the ‘Frontpartij’ – a political party that arose from Flemish soldiers’ frustration caused by their blatant mistreatment in the trenches – he remained loyal to Flanders. With former activist Firmin Mortier, for example, he made an attempt to gain support for the Flemish cause in Germany. He further accepted to work free of charge for certain Belgian periodicals, and declined for various political reasons offers to contribute to other magazines such as Het Roode Zeil (The Red Sail), Lumière, Ça ira, Sélection and (temporarily) Ruimte (Space). His work in Berlin, too, can thus be read through the prism

Notes

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

223

of pro-Flemish politics. Above all, it brings out how from here on close ties were forged between nationalist and outspokenly communist ideas, a combination by no means unique within post-war Flemish political culture. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 130. Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism, p. 6. Compare Jürgen Schebera, ‘Explosion artistique et contestation’ in Berlin 1919–1933. Gigantisme, crise sociale et avant-garde: l’incarnation extrême de la modernité, ed. Lionel Richard (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1991), pp. 81–100. See in particular Van Ostaijen’s ‘Rond het Vlaamse probleem. (Enige Kanttekeningen)’ in the socialist periodical De Nieuwe Tijd, 36:4, 1921. Paul van Ostaijen, De poes voldeed. Essays en kritieken, ed. Geert Buelens and Tom Lanoye (Amsterdam: Ooievaar, 1996), pp. 189–90. Jef Bogman, De stad als tekst. Over de compositie van Paul van Ostaijen’s Bezette Stad (Rotterdam: Van Hezik-Fonds, 1990), p. 116. Karl Kautsky, Demokratie oder Diktatur (Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1918), pp. 24, 47–54. Rosa Luxemburg, Politische Schriften, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), p. 196. Quoted in Han Foppe, ‘“Je woedende brief heb ik ontvangen.” Over brieven van Bob van Genechten aan Paul van Ostaijen’ in Bzzlletin, 66:7, 1979, p. 32, my translation. On these patches, consult Bogman, De stad als tekst, p. 119; and Erik Spinoy, ‘De wegen van de intellectueel. Paul van Ostaijen en de massa’ in Onze Alma Mater, 50:4, 1996, pp. 482–501. Quoted in Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 253. Ibid., p. 255. In his essay ‘Rond het Vlaamsche Probleem’, quoted above, p. 125. Quoted in Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 406. This journal appeared for the first and last time on 15 February 1919. Georg Muche, Blickpunkt. Sturm, Dada, Bauhaus, Gegenwart (München: Albert Langen and Georg Müller, 1961), p. 163, my translation. See Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community. The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 204–5. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Radical Democracy or Liberal Democracy?’ in the Socialist Review, 20:2, 1990, pp. 57–66, here p. 58. Van Ostaijen, De poes voldeed, p. 174. On the relation between Kant’s philosophy and Van Ostaijen, see Spinoy, Twee handen in het lege. Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 80, my translation. Van Ostaijen came close to Cendrars’ ‘literary cubism’. On his indebtedness to constructivism, see the entry ‘Modernisme’ by J. Fontijn and I. Polak, in G. J. van Bork and N. Laan (eds), Twee eeuwen literatuurgeschiedenis. Poëticale opvattingen in de Nederlandse literatuur (Groningen: Wolters/ Noordhoff, 1986). Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 221, my translation.

224 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes See Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 290. Quoted in ibid., p. 247. Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 232, my translation. Quoted in Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 377. One of the most obscure texts Van Ostaijen produced in this period is entitled ‘Eind goed al goed’ (All’s well that ends well, 1920). Responding to a critic who had accused him of exclaiming little more than a subjective aestheticism, Van Ostaijen claimed to be en route toward an ‘unconscious vision’ shared by everyone (VW, I: 103). Hence, the ‘subjective’ in his aesthetics of writing always meant the ‘intersubjective’. Quoted in Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 377. Wilson’s speech can be freely consulted on the internet. Geert Buelens, ‘“Wat is uwe hoop die gij nauwelijks durft zeggen.” Oorlog, nihilisme en modernisme in Bezette Stad’ in De Stem der Loreley, ed. Geert Buelens and Erik Spinoy (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), p. 139, my translation. I am, of course, not the first to draw attention to the constructive impetus marked alongside the seemingly all-pervasive destructive programme of the volume. See, for example, Paul de Vree and H.-F. Jespers, Paul van Ostaijen (Bruges and Antwerp: De Galge, 1967), p. 152. Robert Snoeck, much like an ornithologist, has traced all references to popular songs, films, products and booklets in Van Ostaijen’s poetry book back to their historical context. He required three volumes to do so: Robert Snoeck, Paul van Ostaijen en zijn Bezette Stad. Vols 1–3 (Ghent: Snoeck, 1975, 1984). As Herman Uyttersprot has observed, the orginal line (‘naar’ or ‘to’) should be read as a hypotactic ‘maar’ or ‘but’. See Herman Uyttersprot, Over Paul van Ostaijen (Ghent: Willemsfonds, 1972), p. 162. It is interesting to note by the way that the poet experienced quite some difficulties in writing the closing section for the volume, because this suggests that before reaching this point he might have felt he had created something that did not deserve closure. See Reynebeau, Dichter in Berlijn, pp. 193, 201. Jacques Derrida, Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 33, my translation. This is eloquently illustrated by Maurice Gilliams in his discussion of the poem ‘Folies Bar’ here. See Maurice Gilliams, Een bezoek aan het prinsengraf (Lier: Colibrant, 1952), pp. 66–7. This is a reference to Nielsen’s role in the film Die Börsenkönigen (1918). This is an allusion to Nielsen’s role in the film Der Tod in Sevilla (1913). I hereby disagree with Vaessens, Circus dubio en schroom, pp. 165–6. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec in Diacritics, 16:1, 1986, pp. 22–5, here p. 23. The lines of the page could be related to a patch in Van Ostaijen’s grotesque prose piece ‘De kudde van Claire of de maagdelike boemelaarster,’ in which ‘the loneliest person’ is characterised as ‘he who is in the midst of music, champagne and tangos’ (VW, III: 307). Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 23. Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 236, my translation. Compare E. M. Beekman, ‘In illo tempore: Van Ostaijen’s proza’ in Vlaanderen, 122:20, 1971, pp. 372–9; and Erik Spinoy, ‘Kritische filosofie en politiek bij de late

Notes

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

225

Van Ostaijen. Over de groteske De Trust van de Vaderlandsliefde’ in De stem der Loreley, pp. 210–38. Quoted in Hadermann, Het vuur in de verte, p. 165. Ibid. p. 125 ff. Van Ostaijen, De poes voldeed, p. 190. Quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, p. 14. Van Ostaijen was, nonetheless, a regular at the Café des Westens and other infamous artist bars. He was also full of plans in Berlin but none of these was realised. Worth mentioning is his failed attempt in 1919 to start a periodical entitled Der Blaue Reiter II with Heinrich Campendonk (former member of Der Blaue Reiter group), and his plan to erect a group with Fritz Stuckenberg, Arnold Topp and Georg Muche that would oppose the splintered and in his mind economically as well as politically corrupted post-war artists’ movements in Berlin. The prospect of the latter, in fact, kept him in Berlin until 1921. (See Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, pp. 144–54.) He was also found willing to function in Adolph Behne’s Arbeitsrat für Kunst. Interestingly, one of the reasons for this was that Behne played with the ‘possibility of mass production’ of artworks (VW, IV: 82). On this aspect of Behne’s Rat, see also Eva Kolinsky, Engagierter Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), p. 46. Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde. Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2. Compare Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Zwischen Revolutionärer Epoche und sozialem Prozess. Bemerkungen über den Ort des Expressionismus in der Literaturgeschichte’ in Bernd Hüppauf and John Milfull (eds) Expressionismus und Kulturkrise (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), pp. 55–83. Quoted in Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen, Vol. 1, p. 273. Chapter 4: The Secret Politician

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993), p. 209. 2. Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zürich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999), p. 199, my translation. 3. Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 19. A political reading of Huelsenbeck’s Dada was also common amongst fellow writers. Kurt Schwitters’ reading is especially worth noting and can be consulted in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, [1951] 1981), p. 60. 4. Karin Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck. Texte und Aktionen eines Dadaisten (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), passim. 5. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, ‘Berlin Dada’ in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1979), p. 153. 6. Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Politics’ in Dada. Studies of a Movement, ed. Richard Sheppard (Buckinghamshire: Alpha Academic, 1980), pp. 58, 63.

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7. Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans. The Politics of German Expressionism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), p. 195. 8. Reinhart Meyer and Katharina Boulanger, Dada in Zürich und Berlin, 1916–1920: Literatur zwischen Revolution und Reaktion (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1973), p. 210, my translation. 9. Andréi B. Nakov, ‘Dada ist eine Geisteshaltung’ in Der Deutsche Spiesser ärgert sich. Raoul Hausmann 1886–1971, ed. Eva Züchner (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1994), pp. 33–54. 10. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 218. 11. For an overview, see Sascha Bru, ‘“Schliesslich . . . Don’t Forget.” Richard Huelsenbeck, Cultural Memory and the Genericity of (Dada) Historiography’ in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 85:2, 2005, pp. 1319–33. 12. Georges Hugnet, L’Aventure Dada (1916–1922) (Paris: Galerie de l’Institut, [1932] 1957), p. 47, my translation. 13. William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969); and Lucy R. Lippard, Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), p. 45. 14. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 52. 15. See Arturo Schwarz’s 1970 pieces in the Print Collector’s Newsletter, 1:2, pp. 40–3; and 1:3, pp. 61–4. Correct mention of his involvement in the Rat is from here on of course frequently made. Yet a well documented study of its impact on Huelsenbeck’s writings is lacking to this day. 16. Richard Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende der Freiheit. Autobiographische Fragmente, ed. Ulrich Karsthaus und Horst Krüger (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1984), p. 154, my translation. 17. Alain Badiou, L’Etre et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 18. In his still unpublished diary of 1912–13, twenty-year-old Huelsenbeck reports to have participated in an anti-war meeting in 1912 in Paris, where he was studying literature at the Sorbonne. His prose debut ‘Chauvististen hier und da’ (Chauvinists Here and There, 1913), appearing in the Munich journal Revolution, returned to this meeting. The text voiced a pacifist parody of French and German pre-war nationalist rhetoric. Yet as in his diary of that same year especially, German nationalism formed the object of mirth. Huelsenbeck’s diary, notably, envisioned the downfall of ‘the old German empire . . . withered and failed like it did a hundred years ago’ (from Huelsenbeck’s diary as preserved in ‘Autobiographie 1. Kap.’ in Huelsenbeck-Nachlass Marbach, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Konvolut autobiographisches, p. 9, my emphasis and translation). His diary hereby made a revealing comparison between the pre-war German Reich and Germany roughly a century before. For here he referred to the period in German history often called ‘Vormärz,’ that is, the period leading up to the 1848 Revolution. The comparison highlights that a vague, revolutionary myth took shape in Huelsenbeck at an early stage. Its goal: to overthrow the anti-democratic, aristocratic Reich. 19. Richard Huelsenbeck, Azteken oder die Knallbude. Eine militärische Novelle (Giessen: Anabas, 1992), p. 54, my translation.

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20. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Disziplin der Gegenwart’ in Die Aktion, 4:22, 1914, pp. 472–3, my translation and emphasis. 21. Karl Otten, ‘Die Expressionistische Generation’ in Ahnung und Aufbruch. Expressionistische Prosa, ed. Karl Otten (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1957), p. 12. 22. These words are quoted from an article entitled ‘Zur Frage der Polizeistunde in der Stadt Zürich’ in the Schweizerische Wirte-Zeitung of 12 March 1914, my translation. 23. For a more elaborate discussion of local Zurich politics, see Debbie Lewer, ‘From the Cabaret to the Kaufleutensaal. Mapping Zurich Dada’ in Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game From Nothing, ed. Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), pp. 45–59. 24. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dada, Or the Meaning of Chaos’ in Studio International, 183:940, 1972, p. 27. 25. Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende, p. 119, my translation. 26. The documents referred to here are reproduced in Raimund Meyer, ‘Dada ist gross, Dada ist schön. Zur Geschichte von “Dada Zurich”’ in Hans Bolliger et al., Dada in Zurich (Zurich: Arche, 1985), pp. 14, 21, 67. 27. Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende, p. 118, my translation. 28. Ibid., p. 69, my translation. 29. In Zurich the writer occasionally visited the restaurant Weisses Schwänli, for instance, where Fritz Brupbacher, editor of Der Revoluzzer and regular visitor of Cabaret Voltaire, organised half clandestine political discussions among dissonant political groups. Ball, Max Oppenheimer and Emmy Hennings, who also attended these meetings, leaned toward an internationalist communism. Huelsenbeck’s position by contrast remained vague. Looking back on the so-called ‘Schwänlianer’ later on, he did note that their choice to discuss classics as Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoi, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Heinrich Heine and J. W. von Goethe (the latter being two of Huelsenbeck’s own favourites as a teenager) made their rhetoric ridiculous. (Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1920), p. 10.) 30. Richard Huelsenbeck, Verwandlungen (Giessen: Anabas, 1992), p. 20, my translation and emphasis. 31. See, for example, Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas. Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen (Giessen: Anabas, 1989), p. 105. 32. As Huelsenbeck (Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, p. 4) later wrote: ‘Ball, like all of us, was an “enlightener” . . . who expected the salvation of mankind to come from the mind and the intelligence rather than metaphysics.’ Already on 26 March 1915 Ball and Huelsenbeck had organised a ‘political evening’ in the Berlin Café Austria. Neither Ball’s nor Huelsenbeck’s lecture is preserved. As to Huelsenbeck’s text, we know that it discussed Spanish politics at a time when parliamentary democracy in Spain went through a severe crisis. As to Ball, we know that his talk dealt with the Russian idea of ‘Revolution’. ‘We can assume’, notes Richard Sheppard, that he ‘presented the revolutionary Russian proletariat as motivated by a radicalized and politicised version of the ‘Humanitätsideal’ – the values of classical humanism’. See Richard Sheppard, Dada – Modernism – Postmodernism (Evanstan, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 308.

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33. Worth noting is that Huelsenbeck studied German literature and art history at the Universities of München and Münster, and literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne. His Zurich poetic can be connected to the strict German tuition and aesthetic education he received in secondary school. See Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (ed.), Der Junge Huelsenbeck. Entwicklungsjahre eines Dadaisten (Giessen: Anabas, 1992). 34. From a 1916 ‘Presseandeutung’ of Huelsenbeck’s hand, reproduced in Raoul Schrott, Dada 15/25: postscriptum oder die himmlischen Abenteuer der Hr.n Tristan Tzara (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1992), p. 61, my translation. 35. This phrase is of course borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 36. The small stage was usually bare, but it nonetheless remained a stage, ‘a dividing line between the actor and the audience’ (Annabelle H. Melzer, ‘The Dada Actor and Performance Theory’ in The Art of Performance, ed. Gregory Battock and Robert Nickas (New York: Dutton, 1984), p. 39). This dividing line would be crossed later on during Berlin performances. Compare note 143. 37. T. J. Demos, ‘Circulations. In and around Zurich Dada’ in October, 1:105, 2003, p. 154. 38. Leah Dickerman, ‘Dada Gambits’ in October, 1:105, 2003, p. 11. 39. Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, pp. 92–4. 40. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time. A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield and trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 55. 41. Huelsenbeck thus fully embraced the practice of performing poetry as a means to get Dada’s message across inside the intimate confines of the Cabaret. Accompanying the reading of his poems in Cabaret Voltaire by beating a drum, he has gone down in history as the Zurich ‘Dada drummer’, parodying militaristism and calling for mutiny – the drum, as in Heinrich Heine’s Zeitgedichte (Poems for the Times), functioning as a ‘teaching method’ about (moral and spiritual) revolution (quote from Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesammtsausgabe der Werke (Düsseldorf: Hoffman and Campe, 1964), vol. 6, p. 191, my translation). That Huelsenbeck valued the performance of texts highly is also illustrated by his stress (which was to last in Berlin) on the significance of ‘simultaneous poems’ (such as the famous ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’), a genre written in cooperation and performed on stage by various authors at the same time. Huelsenbeck regarded the performance of a simultaneous poem as a Gesamtkunstwerk, since it was often accompanied by paintings placed on the stage, and as an art form that gave body in real-time to another, polyphonic community. Yet once outside the Cabaret, in the public space where mainly texts could circulate and where the disciplinary imaginary of the Bürger ruled, Huelsenbeck suggested that the performativity of texts required alternative textual strategies. In this chapter I look into the performativity side of his work. In so doing I hope to qualify the dominant view that his poetry was very often just ‘an acoustic substratum for the physical expression and movement of its interpreter’ (Eckhard Philipp, Dadaismus. Einführung in den literarischen Dadaismus und die Wortkunst des Sturmkreises (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1980), p. 247, my translation).

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42. Thus with the exception of his poetry volume Schalaben, Schalabai, Shalamezomai, written in 1914 but published in 1916. 43. ‘Ebene’ originally appeared in Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (Zurich: Cabaret Voltaire, 1916), pp. 7–8. This poem appears to have been of significance to Huelsenbeck. In the expanded 1920 edition it again opened the volume. It was published separately in the fifth issue of Der Dada in 1920, reprinted in Huelsenbeck’s anthology Dada. Eine literarische Documentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), and, conspicuously, was one of the poems Huelsenbeck read during the first Dada soirée in Cabaret Voltaire, as Tristan Tzara noted. (See Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres Complètes. Tome I (1912–1924), ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 562.) The lines I omit here are mostly repetitions. The poem appears in my own translation, though I did take notice of Malcolm Green’s English version of it in his anthology Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 44. A ‘chauceur’ was a figure from French popular legend, an invisible demon who allegedly attacked people in their sleep and tried to suffocate them while sitting on their chest. 45. Roman Jakobson, ‘Dada’ in Roman Jakobson, Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 34. 46. Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1920), passim; and his 1916 essay ‘Die Arbeiten von Hans Arp’, later to appear in Dada, 3, 1918, p. 9. 47. Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt!, p. 18, my translation. 48. Ibid., p. 21, my translation. 49. Lewer, ‘From the Cabaret to the Kaufleutensaal’, p. 48. 50. Quote from Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia. The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 27. A further similarity between Kandinsky and Huelsenbeck that has so far been overlooked is that like Kandinsky in his early religious painting of 1910–12, which was inspired by early Christian Bavarian paintings, Huelsenbeck’s poetry drew heavily on (Christian) religious symbols and tropes. On the latter, consult Hans-Georg Kemper, Vom Expressionismus zum Dadaismus (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1974), pp. 94–109. 51. See Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 113–16. 52. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 210. 53. See, among others, Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 166 ff; and Van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus, p. 406. 54. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 10. 55. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik in Werke, Volume I, ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke (Berlin: Medusa, 1980), p. 256, my translation. 56. David Pan, Primitive Renaissance. Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 137 57. Georges Didi-Hubermann, ‘L’anachronisme fabrique l’histoire: sur l’inactualité de Carl Einstein’ in Etudes Germaniques, 53:1, 1998, pp. 52 ff.

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58. Naturally, Einstein’s discussion, of which I render but part here, pertained first and foremost to the plastic arts. However, whereas his ‘mythic’, primitivist space in his own account dealt primarily with forms and shapes, it is quite possible to extend it to include language’s components as well. In this respect we could redefine the primitivist as language in its ‘raw’ material form before it is inscribed in discourses or narratives that aim to make ‘sense’ of the world. 59. Bernhard Zimmerman, Dithyrambos: Geschichte einer Gattung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). 60. ‘Presseandeutung’ of Huelsenbeck’s hand reproduced in Schrott, Dada 15/25, p. 61, my emphasis and translation. 61. On these intertextual parallels, consult Karl Riha and Waltraud WendeHohenberger (eds), Dada Zürich. Texte, Manifeste, Dokumente (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), p. 88; and Geert Buelens, ‘Dada and, Dada in & Dadaists on the First World War’ in Arcadia: International Journal of Literary Studies, 41:2, 2006, pp. 275–95. 62. Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada. Die Geschichte des Dadaismus (Hannover: Paul Steegemann, 1920), p. 5. This volume has been translated by Ralph Manheim as En avant Dada. A History of Dadaism, in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, pp. 21–48. Subsequent quotes refer to this translation. 63. Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 56. 64. Ibid., p. 30. 65. Huelsenbeck suffered a mental collapse shortly before his return to Germany. Two texts lay bare the reasons for his psychological breakdown, texts that also evince the crux of his thought: literature would be political or not at all. In a letter dated late 1916, Huelsenbeck, after an absence of three months from the Dada circle, sent his greetings to Tristan Tzara on a postcard, ‘despite all political complications’. Hinting at the ever-troubled relationship between both men – which would later gain rather silly proportions as they began squabbling over who had really come up with the word Dada – that brief addendum marked Huelsenbeck’s unease over Tzara’s political indifference (correspondence quoted from Lisbeth Exner and Herbert Kapfer (eds), Weltdada Huelsenbeck. Eine Biografie in Briefen und Bildern (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1996), p. 17, my translation and emphasis). 66. Few texts of Huelsenbeck’s have been as debated as this one. Some have interpreted it as a weak version of a Dada Nietzsheanism (Meyer et al., Dada in Zürich and Berlin, p. 101; Kemper, Vom Expressionismus zum Dadaismus, p. 109). Martin Halliwell, by contrast, reads in it a strong Nietzscheanism (in Modernism and Morality. Ethical Devices in European and American Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 75–6). Richard Sheppard, Allen Roy and Richard Murphy read it as a regression towards expressionism (Sheppard, ‘Dada and Politics’, p. 56; Allen Roy, Literary Life in German Expressionism and the Berlin Circles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 239; Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde. Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 63). Füllner, however, points out that the essay presents an attack on expressionism, and on Kurt Hiller in particular, and that it can

Notes

67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

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thereby not be read as expressionist. She also argues that Huelsenbeck’s later refutation of the text was not so much caused by its content but by its possibly misleading title (Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, pp. 149–51). Whereas I tend to agree with Füllner and Halliwell in this debate, in what follows I propose to just read the text. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’ in Neue Jugend (first issue of the new series), p. 2, my translation. For Einstein’s political convictions in this period, consult Klaus H. Kiefer, ‘Carl Einstein and the Revolutionary Soldiers’ Council in Brussels’ in The Ideological Crisis in Expressionism. The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, ed. Rainer Rumold and Otto Karl Werckmeister (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990), pp. 97–113; and Cristoph Braun, ‘Carl Einstein und die Novemberrevolution’, in Carl-Einstein-Kolloquium, ed. Klaus H. Kiefer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996), pp. 55–61. Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, p. 2, my translation. Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada Almanach (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920), p. 6. Subsequent quotes from this volume refer to its English translation: Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanach, ed. and trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press). The present quote is from p. 11. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Die Dadaistische Bewegung. Ein Selbstbiographie’ (1920) in Richard Huelsenbeck, Wozu Dada. Texte 1916–1936, ed. Herbert Kapfer (Giessen: Anabas, 1994), p. 34, my translation. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Zürich 1916. Wie es wirklich war’ in Die neue Rundschau, 6, 1928, p. 613, my translation. Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and Jefim Golyscheff, ‘Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?’, in Der Dada, 1, 1919. (Manifesto glued in; my translation). Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt!, p. 40, my translation. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dadaistischen Manifest’ (1918) as translated in Huelsenbeck (ed.), The Dada Almanach, p. 46. For an elaborate discussion of Huelsenbeck’s ties to Friedlaender, consult Hubert van den Berg, The Import of Nothing. How Dada Came, Saw and Vanished in the Low Countries (1915–1929) (New York: G. K. Hall, 2002), pp. 81–94. Huelsenbeck (ed.), The Dada Almanach, p. 46. This poem appeared in Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag, Abteilung Dada, 1920), pp. 28–9. My translation, after Ralph Manheim is in Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, p. 226. An earlier version of the poem was published in the second issue of Der Dada in 1919, in which a more elaborate punctuation made it move even closer to syntactic convention. Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Expressionism’ in Publications of the English Goethe Society, 49, 1979, p. 61. On the influence of Goethe on this poem, see Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, p. 111. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Vorwort zur Geschichte der Zeit’ in Club Dada: Prospekt des Verlags Freie Strasse [Die freie Strasse, 7/8, 1918], p. 4, my translation.

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83. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Schieber-Politik’ in Der Blutige Ernst, 4:1, 1919, p. 10; and ‘Gesang der Vaterlandsfreude’ in Richard Huelsenbeck, Deutschland muss untergehen! Erinnerungen eines alten dadaistischen revolutionärs (Berlin: Malik, 1920), p. 13. 84. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 32. 85. Ibid., p. 42. 86. On this aspect of Huelsenbeck, consult Herbert Kapfer’s ‘Nachwort’ in Huelsenbeck, Verwandlungen, pp. 46–53. 87. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 392. 88. Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, p. 3, my translation; note that ‘Bürger’ is actually translated as ‘citizen’ in a quote of this passage in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 391. 89. Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, p. 3. 90. In a 1919 prose piece that appeared in the journal Der Blutige Ernst he defined the particularities of the German bourgeois in pathological terms, which seemed to characterise not just the petit-bourgeois but the (Berlin) citizen as such. ‘Moral inferiority’, ‘the Kantian “du sollst”’, nervousness ‘in an Adlerian sense’, and signs of degeneration and cretinism, Huelsenbeck claimed, marked that in the private domain the German Bürger was suffering from a mental illness to which only the Dadaist ‘anti-physician’ could provide a cure. Huelsenbeck thus increasingly deepened the opposition between Dada and bourgeois, while at the same time highlighting that it was the citizen he addressed. This might explain why he took in a rather singular position among Berlin Dadaists when it came to the political left. Many Berlin Dadaists ultimately drew near if not publicly sided with Marxism or communism, considering the proletarian as an alternative to the bourgeois. Huelsenbeck kept at a distance from communist politics, however, and unlike others never joined the communist party or KPD. In Huelsenbeck not so much economic class but political identity got questioned. (The prose piece quoted here in my own translation is Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Die Panacee’ in Der Blutige Ernst, 1, 1919, p. 13.) 91. This event proved a silent coup d’état. Huelsenbeck, by then experienced as an impresario, quite cleverly prepared it. The first two texts he published back in Germany were not Dada pieces (‘Schwebende’ and ‘Die Dichter der Maria’), for example, but rather expressionist sounding (though in part parodying) poems in Die Aktion, Franz Pfemfert’s expressionist journal which before the war had taken its editorial lead from Hiller’s aesthetic programme. On 22 January 1918 he subsequently invited several respected expressionists including Theodor Däubler to read from their work. Unannounced, Huelsenbeck read his speech, thus making expressionists complicit in Dada’s German birth. 92. In an anonymously published press release in the Vossische Zeitung of 27 January 1918. 93. As Huelsenbeck’s ‘Der neue Mensch’ completed the list. 94. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 44. 95. In his introduction to The Dada Almanach, p. 13. 96. Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, p. 3.

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97. See a letter of his to Tzara in Exner and Kapfer (eds), Weltdada Huelsenbeck, p. 19. 98. Publishing Dadas proved difficult in 1917. From the start Huelsenbeck found an ally in Wieland Herzfelde’s journal Neue Jugend, however. The journal, ever since its first issue in 1916, had taken an interest in Zurich Dada, even publishing a poem of Huelsenbeck. Neue Jugend took its name from a journal that existed before the war so as to avoid receiving too much attention from the German censor. When internal editorial struggles arose, it moved to the presses of the Malik Verlag, and was then banned after just a few issues that critically addressed present-day politics. According to Herzfelde it thereafter appeared illegally, led by his brother Helmut (John Heartfield). See Wieland Herzfelde, Aus der Jugendzeit des Malik-Verlages. Zum Neudruck der Zeitschrift Neue Jugend (Berlin: Rütten & Loehung, 1967). 99. It would lead me too far to enlist all encounters of Dadas with authorities. (For an overview of most of them, consult Hanne Bergius, ‘Dada Triumphs!’: Dada Berlin, 1917–1923 (New York: G. K. Hall, 2003), passim.) One case is worth mentioning here, however. When Carl Einstein and a number of Dadaists, including the brothers Herzfelde and George Grosz, launched the satirical political journal Die Pleite (Bankruptcy) – Einstein allegedly proposed the title so that when the review was forbidden the papers would headline ‘the state has abolished bankruptcy’ – it was rather quickly done away with by the state; its editors in the meantime often spent time in prison without having charges pressed against them. 100. Either by Dadaists themselves (including Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter (in Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996)), or by the numerous (often popular) introductions to the movement which I will not enlist here. 101. Huelsenbeck (ed.), The Dada Almanach, p. 46. 102. Ibid., p. 113. 103. Ibid., pp. 47–9. 104. Although the origin of Dadaism is generally associated with the anti-war protest movement, there is to my knowledge no encompassing study that actually documents the ties between Dada and the Great War. The particular value of Huelsenbeck to our understanding of these ties is that he candidly praised the war as one of the conditions of possibility for Dadaism’s programme, and this neither by foregrounding Dada’s internationalism nor its alleged pacificism, but precisely by articulating war and the state of exception with his seemingly anti-literary poetic in Berlin. 105. Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans, p. 173; see also Van den Berg, Anarchismus und Dadaismus, p. 448. 106. K. Ansell Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 102. Chantal Mouffe renames this paradox the ‘paradox of democracy’. The ‘paradox of tolerance’, or ‘liberal paradox’ as it is also sometimes called, signals that pluralism in (liberal) democracy is both taken as sanctuary and subject to legislation, power struggle and relativisation. It arises whenever a conflict between individual rights and communal concerns surface. It basically resides in the impossibility of ever fully balancing out these two

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107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116.

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes ends of the spectrum: subjects have rights, but as citizens they are part of civil society or the public space where communal concerns and the liberal ‘good life’ form the object of debate, limits have to be set to what is allowed and what falls under crime. As is well known, this paradox in more recent times has been the subject of rather heated disputes between political philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. One of the principal issues in this debate was the (im)possibility of ‘neutrally’ or rationally articulating an equilibrium between the common good and individuals’ rights. On the issue, Huelsenbeck’s Nietzschean stance, which presupposed the complexity and plurality of power struggles in the public space, draws near to Foucault. For more on this paradox, consult Amartya Sen, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’ in Journal of Political Economy, 1:78, 1970, pp. 152–7; Brian Barry, Liberty and Justice. Essays in Political Theory 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chapter 4; and John L. Sullivan et al., Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). Sheppard, ‘Dada and Politics’, p. 56. Ibid., emphasis added. Huelsenbeck (ed.), The Dada Almanach, pp. 12, 13; the first quote is from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, cited by Huelsenbeck on p. 12. Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende, pp. 170–87. Kurt Hiller, Leben gegen die Zeit (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), pp. 133–4. Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende, pp. 176–7, 184. See, for instance, Siegfried Jacobsohn, ‘Antworten’ in Die Weltbühne: Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst, Wirtschaft, 14, 1918, p. 558. Hiller and Huelsenbeck met at an early stage. Texts written by them appeared simultaneously in journals – in 1913 in Revolution, in 1914 in Die Aktion, the latter taking Hiller’s thought as a programmatic model. In 1915 they also met during a ‘Memorial Ceremony for Fallen Poets’, which was organised by Huelsenbeck and Ball. At times referring to anarchism, at others to revolutionary socialism and even to Catholicism, his political inclination before the war is not easily pinned down when read from a contemporary perspective (see his ‘Autobiographie. 1. Kap.’, p. 9). When compared to the pacifist expressionism of Hiller, however, vagueness makes room for consistency. Hiller characterised his pre-war convictions ‘more or less’ as a ‘communist-aristocratic, Christian-Dionysian synthesis’ (in Geist werde Herr. Kundgebungen eines Aktivisten vor, in und nach dem Kriege. Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920), p. 13, my translation). In Hiller, just as in Huelsenbeck’s diary of 1912–13, Nietzschean anarchism not only aligned itself with communism, the latter was also aristocratic; anarchism in turn aligning itself with Christian elements. Huelsenbeck’s pre-war diary, by way of references to Rousseau and close ties to Peter Kropotkin’s 1904 Modern Science and Anarchism and Gustav Landauer’s Call to Socialism (1911), clearly evinces that he was well in tune with German political counter-culture and philosophy. Activism found one of its earliest expressions in Heinrich Mann’s 1910 Geist und Tat. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mann desired that the French Revolution of 1789 would find its match in Germany, that

Notes

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

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its ‘spirit’ (Geist) found a body in Germany, too. Hiller as well drew on the distinction between spirit and body, between political ideas and the agents that should embody and act these ideas out, when he proposed to organise and group the cultivated intelligentsia as the revolutionary body, a (Fourierist) elite troop that was to point the way. This was to occur ‘without adherence to any particular party’. (See the ‘Note’ repeated in the first issues of Die Aktion, here 1:1, 1911, column 24.) The underlying (Webernian) assumption here was that the bourgeoisie, which had been the catalyst of previous revolutions, had proven inapt in Germany. On the eve of World War One, the Wilhelmine aristocracy and not the bourgeoisie still ruled the country. This left the working class and the class of intellectuals and artists, which according to Hiller still required to be organised. Hiller’s aristocratic and Christian-messianic stance clearly favoured the latter, and it expressed a staunch Romantic belief in art being a site from which alternatives could be launched uncompromised. The manifesto is reproduced in facsimile in Exner and Kapfer (eds), Weltdada Huelsenbeck, p. 16, my translations. Huelsenbeck’s continued attacks on Hiller in later years were of course strategic. Naming Hiller was shorthand for naming an entire generation of German expressionists. Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans, pp. 61–2. Kurt Hiller, ‘Logokratie oder ein Weltbund des Geistes’, in Ziel, 4, 1920, p. 226. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are from Taylor. Günther Martens, ‘Nietzsches Wirkung im Expressionismus’ in Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, ed. Bruno Hillebrand (Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1978), p. 45. See the ‘Richard Huelsenbeck papers, 1910–1978’ (accession n° 910082, folder 10) in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. One of the names mentioned in their correspondence is that of their mutual friend Leo Matthias, to whom the Rat geistiger Arbeiter owed its actual erection. It was Matthias who on 9 November first approached ‘Hauptmann’ Beerfelde with Hiller’s proposal to have a third Council (next to those of Workers and Soldiers) in the Reichstag in charge of culture (letter of Hiller in above mentioned archive of 27/IX 1944). Letter of Hiller in above mentioned archive of 19/VII 1944. Letter of Hiller in above mentioned archive of 26/IX 1944. Huelsenbeck, Reise bis ans Ende, p. 219. Hiller, ‘Logokratie oder ein Weltbund des Geistes’, pp. 231–2. Kurt Hiller, ‘Ein deutsches Herrenhaus’, in Ziel, 2, 1918, p. 338. Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans, p. 80. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 303. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 40. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 17. The Constitution can be consulted on numerous websites on the internet. Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, p. 175. Quoted in Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 26–7.

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136. Huelsenbeck, Deutschland muss untergehen!, p. 5. Subsequent references to this text will occur parenthetically in the main text, mentioning page numbers only. 137. Paul Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7 ff. 138. See, for example, the poem ‘Seele Blau’ in his 1920 edition of Phantastische Gebete. 139. See Malcolm Green’s note in The Dada Almanach, p. 139. 140. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 39. 141. Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt!, p. 36, my translation. 142. In particular when it came to the Munich Räterepublic (see Rudolf Herz and Dirk Halfbrodt, Revolution und Fotografie. München 1918–1919 (Berlin: Nishen, 1988), pp. 132–4). For a general discussion of the phenomenon, consult Christopher J. Middleton, ‘“Bolshevism in Art”: Dada and Politics’ in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4, 1962/1963, pp. 408–30. 143. These figures testify to the gradual restoration of the relative autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, while also showing the degree of politicisation: as performances often got out of hand, the previous dividing line between audience and performer in Cabaret Voltaire was now often crossed, not just by Dadaists, but also by their audience. The Dada Tournee, like the futurist serate, most often led to rows and on occasion to fights with audience members on stage. 144. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 42. 145. Huelsenbeck, ‘Der neue Mensch’, p. 3. 146. Quoted in Richard Sheppard (ed.), Zürich – Dadaco – Dadaglobe: The Correspondence between Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Wolff (1916–1924) (London: Hutton, 1982), p. 6. 147. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 42. 148. Van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus, passim. 149. Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada, p. 32. 150. Karl Riha, ‘Nachwort’, in Richard Huelsenbeck, Doctor Billig am Ende (Frankfurt: Makol, 1973), p. 181. 151. My reading of the novel differs from previous interpretations by specialists. (These include Philipp, Dadaismus, pp. 220–54; Günther Martens, Vitalismus und Expressionismus. Ein Beitrag zur Genese und Deutung expressionistischer Stilstrukturen und Motive (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971), pp. 82 ff; Van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus, passim; and Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, pp. 224–38.) Despite their differences, these specialists agree that as the exponent of a politics of his own Huelsenbeck’s novel ends up reinstating an irrational, vitalist or natural realm that is arguably not politically credible. 152. Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, p. 213. 153. Both Füllner’s study of Huelsenbeck and Van den Berg’s encompassing Avantgarde und Anarchismus have highlighted this as well. 154. Walter H. Sokel, ‘Die Prosa des Expressionismus’ in Walter H. Sokel, Expressionismus als Literatur. Gesammelte Studien (München: Wolfgang Rothe, 1969), p. 169. 155. Richard Huelsenbeck, Doctor Billig am Ende (München: Kurt Wolff

Notes

156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166.

167. 168.

237

Verlag, 1921), pp. 5–6, emphasis added. Subsequent references to the novel contain only page numbers in the main text; all translations are mine. William Nelles, Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative (Frankfurt: Lang, 1997), ch. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degree (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 91–2. To get a grasp of this genre’s conventions, a number of sources proved helpful, including Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel, ‘Kriminalroman und Trivialliteratur’ in Texte zur Trivialliteratur. Uber Wert und Wirkung Massenware, ed. Dieter Seifert et al. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1971), pp. 104–23; and the essays gathered in Warren Chernaik and Robert Vilain (eds), The Art of Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 2000). David Hayman, Re-forming the Narrative. Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). For a historical discussion of this genre in Huelsenbeck’s day, see Hainer Plaul, Illustrierte Geschichte der Trivialliteratur (Leipzig: Edition, 1983), pp. 120–9; 220–7. Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, p. 226, my translation. See the reference article of Hanne Bergius, ‘Berlin als Hure Babylon’ in Die Metropole. Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jochen Boberg et al. (München: Beck, 1986), pp. 102–19. Philipp, Dadaismus, p. 236, my translation. Armin Arnold, Prosa des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972), p. 22. I draw on a number of sources here: Regina Schulte, Sperrbezirke: Tugendhaftigkeit und Prostitution in der bürgerlichen Welt (Hamburg: Europaïsche Verlagsanstalt, 1994), esp. ch. 4; Lynn Abrams, ‘Prostitutes in Imperial Germany, 1870–1918: Working Girls or Social Outcasts?’ in The German Underworld. Deviants and Outcasts in German History, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 357–9. Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic. The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2000), pp. 15–16. Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans, p. 194. The Law of Literature: By Way of Conclusion

1. For an overview of this text-oriented tradition’s indebtedness to the modernist avant-garde, see my article ‘Modernism Before and After Theory’ in The Oxford Handbook of Literary Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming. 2. For a selective survey of some of these context-oriented approaches’ indebtedness to the modernist avant-garde, see my essay ‘A Map of All Possible Paths. Modernism After Marxism’ in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), vol. 1 of 2, pp. 107–24. 3. Marjorie Perloff, Twenty-first Century Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 8.

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4. See, among others, Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment. Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Wolgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, ‘Projekt Avantgarde’ in Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation. Die Europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), pp. 1–17. 5. Michel Foucault, Essential Works, 1954–84. Volume II: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. James D. Faubian (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 151. 6. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (London: Hillway, 1950), p. 146. 7. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Sussex: Hassocks, 1978), p. 33. 8. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 86. 9. Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp. Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 76. 10. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hasan Melehey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. xii. 11. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1962), 6.4.150. 12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). 13. Wittgenstein, as quoted in J. L. Aranguren, Human Communication (New York: World University Library, 1967), p. 35. 14. Ibid., p. 36. 15. See Scott Lash, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Lash does not fail to place the avant-gardes on the side of a rationality driven by uncertainty, transcience and experiment (pp. 45–7). 16. As Pierre Saint-Amand points out, many philosophes, for example, displayed anathema to sociability and collective forms of sovereignty, while, like the avant-garde, being unable to fully escape the clutches of given and ruling (forms of) reason. See Pierre Saint-Amand, The Laws of Hostility. Politics, Violence and the Enlightenment, trans. Jennifer C. Gage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 17. Indeed, already for Georg Simmel the task of epistemology lay in uncovering legitimacy, in identifying ‘the basic theoretical elements, the relationship between the theory and its immanent aims, and the status of the theory in relation to other theories’: Georg Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epsitemological Essay, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, [1892] 1977), p. xi. 18. The term ‘cultural knowledge’ is used today in a variety of disciplines and contexts, ranging from linguistics to economics and knowledge management. I use it in the way the linguist Harald Weinrich does. Weinrich’s basic presupposition is that language is cultural, and that literature can be read as an archive of cultural knowledge (see Harald Weinrich, ‘Les Temps et les personnes’ in Poétique, 39, 1979, pp. 338–52).

Notes

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19. Bruno Latour, Nous n‘avons jamais été modernes. Essai d‘anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 20. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 19. As Lyotard further observes, cultural knowledge is owned by none, spoken by all. He, too, sees it as a narrative mode. 21. ‘Cultural memory,’ and its study ‘mnemohistory’ are terms that generally attributed to the archaeologist Jan Assmann. See, among others, his Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 22. Yves Michaud, La crise de l’art contemporain (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 23–36. 23. See Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures. How Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 24. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ in Collected Papers, Vol. 2 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 212–25. 25. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 18. 26. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 299–300. Like others sitting on the fence between structuralism and post-structuralism, Foucault was very much inspired by modernist avant-garde writers when he put forth this claim. 27. I am referring here to Peirce as discussed in W. B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), p. 35. The reference to Goethe is Peirce’s. 28. See, for example, Ronald Dworkin, ‘How Literature is Like Law’ in Law and Literature: Text and Theory, ed. Lenora Ledwon (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996), pp. 29–46. 29. See Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 30. Kieran Dolin, A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 6. 31. Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 32. As sociologists of knowledge have often argued, avant-garde works, in their critique of the literary institution, questioned the laws of the language game of literature as an institution. See, for example, Aaron L. Panofsky, ‘From Epistemology to the Avant-Garde. Marcel Duchamp and the Sociology of Knowledge in Resonance’ in Theory, Culture, Society, 20:1, 2003, pp. 61–92. See also Tyrus Miller, ‘Avant-Garde and Theory: A Misunderstood Relation’ in Poetics Today, 20:4, 1999, pp. 549–79. 33. Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal. Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 34. Robert Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 10. 35. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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36. Sven Lütticken, ’Secrecy and Publicity. Reactivating the Avant-Garde’ in New Left Review, 17 (Sept–Oct), 2002, pp. 129–48; here p. 129. 37. I am, of course, not referring to polemical analyses of the historical avantgarde meant to introduce a ‘new(er)’ avant-garde, so eloquently charted in Paul Mann’s Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). I am referring to the many scholarly critics who in recent decades have called the bankruptcy of the avant-garde’s project or process, including Eric Hobsbawn, Roland Barthes and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. See Roland Barthes, ‘Whose Theater? Whose Avant-Garde?’ in Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 69 ff; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘The Aporias of the Avant-Garde’ [1962] in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 16–41; Eric Hobsbawm, Behind the Times. The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 38. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 9. 39. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 1. 40. Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 12, my translation. 41. Lütticken, ‘Secrecy and Publicity’, p. 143.

Index

Abrams, Lynn, 237n166 Adam, Paul, 42 Adamson, Walter L., 217n61 Adorno, Theodor, 24, 28, 31, 157 aesthetics avant-garde, 17–18 Blaue Reiter, 145 education, 30 fascism, 2 of horror, 46 Kandinsky, 110 modernity, 11 politics, 68–9 ugliness, 46 see also de-aestheticisation African art, 146 Agamben, Giorgio, 4, 5, 36, 216n39 Die Aktion, 138, 232n91 Albert I, 92, 132 Albertine Statute, 55 allegory, 23 Althusser, Louis, 211n65 Altieri, Charles, 18 anarchism, 13, 14 Anderson, Benedikt, 221n21 anti-art movement, 158 anti-clericalism, 49–50 anti-parliamentarianism, 215n30 anti-realism, 203 Antliff, Mark, 214n13, 217n63 Antonucci, Giovani, 56 Antwerp, 89, 115 apocalyptic works, 23 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 89 applied arts, 109 Arbeitsrat für Kunst, 103

archive, 10, 206–7n3 Arditi, 58, 65, 72, 216n49 L’Ardito, 66, 67 Arendt, Hannah, 26 Arnold, Armin, 189 Arp, Hans, 142 art as action, 45 applied, 109 autonomy, 31–2 experimental, 172 as ideoplastiek, 113 as institution, 28–9, 133 and life, 134 public space, 11 subjectivity, 15 art-for-art’s-sake, 33 Asholt, Wolfgang, 238n4 Auden, W. H., 20 Augustine, Saint, 23 Austro-Hungarian empire, 53, 60 avant-garde aesthetics, 17–18 ante-modern, 3 Berlin, 2, 30–1 and democracy, 3, 11, 14 discourse/politics, 26–7 experimentation, forced, 40 historical, 13, 205n3 institution, 32–3 literary theory, 194 marginalisation, 19, 32–3 Marinetti, 10 mass politics, 22 modernism, 3, 6, 13–14, 29, 193, 205n3

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avant-garde (cont.) modernity, 11–19 myths, 24–5 national culture, 29–30 political culture, 20 politics, 9–10, 30, 33 professional sphere, 30–1 as project/process, 194, 240n37 readers, 18 social autonomy, 30 sovereignty, 31 splitting, 27–8 avant-gardists Croatia, 21 early 20th century, 205n3 employment, 31 European, 1 political/apolitical, 13 Avanti!, 52, 64 Baader, Johannes, 157 Badiou, Alain, 137 Baker, Keith Michael, 208n36 Bakunin, Mikhail, 142 Balibar, Étienne, 15, 110 Ball, Hugo Cabaret Voltaire, 139, 140 humanism, 141 and Schmitt, 37, 212–13n83 sound poetry, 142 subjectivisation, 148 World War I, 159 Barbagli, Marzio, 212n72 barbarogenius, 21 Barck, Karlheinz, 210n46 Barnouw, Dagmar, 212n72 Barth, Emil, 169 Barthes, Roland, 208n35, 240n37 Bataille, Georges, 2 Bauhaus, 109 Bauman, Zygmunt, 15 beauty/sublime, 29 Beerfelde, Hans-Georg, 161–2, 168 Béhar, Henri, 229n43 Behne, Adolph, 103, 225n93 Belgium democracy, 91–2 Dutch language, 87–8, 92 education, 87–8, 92, 101 martial law, 92

state of exception, 101, 115, 131–2 as synecdoche, 115–16 universal suffrage, 101, 106 voting, 106 World War I, 90, 92–3 Benco, Silvio, 219n89 Benjamin, Walter Arcades-Project, 32 economic rationalisation, 28 Jacobins, 203 literature/politics, 24 The Origin of the German Mourning Play, 5, 37 and Schmitt, 37, 38, 213n84 state of exception, 4 wrapping of objects, 32 Benn, Gottfried, 41 Benson, Timothy O., 207n10, 212n70 Berg, Hubert van den, 208n29, 222n43, 225n2, 231n76 Berghaus, Günter, 212n69, 213n4, 214n6, 216n37, 217n58 Bergius, Hanne, 212n69, 227n31, 233n99 Bergson, Henri, 14, 45, 81–2, 214n13 Berlin avant-garde, 2, 30–1 Dada, 34 dancing ban, 190–1 legislation, 190–1 sex tourism, 191 Van Ostaijen, 90–1 Bezette Stad (Van Ostaijen): see Occupied City biennio rosso, 64, 65, 82 Bildung, 141, 147, 148, 157, 176 Bismarck, Otto von, 138 Bissolati, Leonida, 48 Blanchot, Maurice, 17 Blaue Reiter aesthetic, 145 Der Blaue Reiter II, 225n93 Blum, Cinzia Sartini, 218n79 Blumenkranz-Ominus, Noëmi, 214n13 Der Blutige Ernst, 154, 232n90 Boccioni, Umberto, 49 Bogman, Jef, 223n49 bohemia, 31, 141 Bois, Yve-Alain, 23 Bollenbeck, Georg, 211n66 Bompardi, Luigi, 44

Index Borms, August, 96 Boselli government, 55 Botai, Giuseppe, 72 Boulanger, Katharina, 226n8 Bourdieu, Pierre, 29, 34, 211n57 bourgeois, 28–9, 156 Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 2, 174 Bredekamp, Horst, 213n84 Breton, André, 12, 17, 18, 31 Briosi, Sandro, 215n19 Brooker, Peter, 237n1 Brunclair, Victor, 114 Brupbacher, Fritz, 227n29 Büchner, Georg, 87, 132, 138 Buelens, Geert, 220n4, 224n75, 230n61 Bürger, Peter, 28–9, 33–4, 133, 205n3 the Bürger, as type, 139–40, 148, 156, 170–1, 176–7 Butler, E. M., 90 Butler, Judith, 216n39 Cabaret Voltaire, 139–40, 145, 227n29, 228n41, 236n143 Calinescu, Matei, 13 Campendonk, Heinrich, 225n93 capitalism, 3, 31–2 Cappa, Benedetta, 218n72 Carli, Mario, 72 Carrà, Carlo, 49 Carrey, John, 208n26 catachresis, 46, 54, 111 Cavaliere, 185 Celan, Paul, 87, 89, 132, 203 Cendrars, Blaise, 89, 111–12, 223n66 censorship, 5, 140, 158, 168 Cesaretti, Enrico, 215n19, 218n79 Cetina, Karin Knorr, 239n23 Charle, Christophe, 212n71 chauceur, 142, 229n44 Chiellino, Carmine, 214n8 Chytry, Joseph, 220n13 Cigliano, Simona, 215n19 cinema, 125, 126 citizen-politicians, 171 citizenship, 15, 55–6, 155–6 citizen-subject civil society, 160, 233–4n106 and democracy, 131 desubjectivised, 184 Germany, 167

243

and sovereignty, 15 state of exception, 37 writers, 15 civil society, 5, 160, 233–4n106 Clark, Martin, 214n7 Club Dada, 156–7, 173 common good, 26, 160 commonalities, 178–9 communism, 172 Communist Party France, 17 Germany, 103, 170 Italy, 85–6 community/state, 122 Conscience, Hendrik, 94, 95–6 constructivism, 6, 14, 109–10 contingency, 25, 34 Le Corbusier, 10 Corra, Bruno, 58 creative indifference, 111, 152 crime, sex-related, 189–90 crime novels, 179 Crispolti, Enrico, 218n77 Critical Theorists, 24, 210n57 Croce, Benedetto, 43 Cubism, 146, 223n66 cultural knowledge, 197–8, 238n18 cultural memory, 113, 198, 239n21 culture national, 29–30 nature, 149 and politics, 2, 19–27 popular, 116, 117, 123–6, 127 see also political culture Curi, Fausto, 214n13 Dada Tournee, 30, 157, 172, 236n143 Dadaism bohemia, 141 and bourgeois, 156 citizen-politicians, 171 freedom, 11, 151 Germany, 5, 6, 34, 156–7, 158–9 grotesque, 141 Huelsenbeck, 11, 135–6, 151, 154–5, 159 and Marxism, 150 negating, 29 nothingness, 18 origins of, 1, 6, 233n104

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Dadaism (cont.) practical politics, 140–1 revolution, 112 sound poetry, 147 Dadaists clashes with authority, 233n99 as politicians, 171–2 Zurich, 139–40, 156 dancing ban, Berlin, 190–1 Dante Alighieri, 72 Däubler, Theodor, 232n91 de Campos, Alvaro, 16 de Man, Paul, 19 de-aestheticisation, 45, 50–1, 54 death, 185–6, 188, 191 Debeljak, Ales˘, 211n57 Decadentism, 46, 75 de-individualisation, 110 democracy avant-garde, 3, 11, 14 Belgium, 91–2 citizen-subject, 131 contingency, 25 empty space of, 165, 168 Europe, 21 Foucault, 234n106 founding moment, 25 individual rights, 14 Lefort, 165–6 liberal, 3, 14, 32, 164–5, 210n54 libertarian, 166 literature, 11–12 modern, 25 modernism, 210n55 paradox of, 233–4n106 parliamentary, 105 practical politics, 3, 39 radical pluralism, 109–10 Rat geistiger Arbeiter, 169 representational, 90, 131 Schmidt, 206n11 and totalitarianism, 2 Van Ostaijen, 131–2 as work of art, 71–2 see also mass democracy Demos, T. J., 228n37 Derrida, Jacques, 122, 219n1 Descartes, René, 199 desemanticisation, 116, 117, 118, 125, 142

desire bodily, 117, 163, 191 personal, 141 destruction as creation, 142 desubjectivisation, 45, 46, 75, 176–7, 184 D’haen, Theo, 220n3 Dickerman, Leah, 228n38 dictatorship of the majority, 130 dictatorship of the proletariat, 103, 105 Didi-Hubermann, Georges, 146 différance, 3, 21 difference, 14, 195 Dimock, Wai Chee, 239n29 discourse, 26–7, 28, 195–6, 211n61 disincorporation, 165 dithyramb, 147, 179 Döblin, Alfred, 174 Doctor Billig am Ende (Huelsenbeck) see The Downfall of Doctor Billig Dolin, Kieran, 201 Dombroski, Robert, 213n5 double-nouns, 47, 73 Downes, Paul, 236n137 The Downfall of Doctor Billig (Huelsenbeck) address to male reader, 174–5 allegory, 138, 193 apocalyptic, 184–5 Berlin, 190 Billig, 175, 177–8, 183–4 counter-hegemonic, 183–4 Dada poetic, 174–92 death, 185–6 decorum, 190–1 duel, 181–3 focalisation, 176–7, 185 genres, 179–80, 181–2 Grosz, 180, 182 humanisation, 177–8 law, 7, 8 literature and ethics, 159 logic of opposition, 186–9 love, 185 manual for readers, 176 Margot, 175–6, 177–8, 186, 187–9, 191 narrative threads, 181–2, 184–5 narrator, 175 political context of, 176, 178–9

Index practical politics, 191–2 readers appealed to, 184–5 state of exception, 184–5 synposis of plot, 175–6 war, 155 Drucker, Johanna, 215n17 dualisms, 14 Dubois, Jacques, 211n57 Duchamp, Marcel, 2, 8, 11, 195 Dutch language, 87–8, 92 Duve, Thierry de, 11 Dworkin, Ronald, 239n28 Eagleton, Terry, 24 Ebert, Friedrich, 103, 169 Eccitatorio, 69–70 economic rationalisation, 28 education aesthetics, 30 Belgium, 87–8, 92, 101 Marinetti, 70 Egbert, Donald E., 211n59 Einfalt, Michael, 34–5, 212n79 Einstein, Carl, 146, 147, 150, 178 élan vital Bergson, 214n13 Marinetti, 46, 54, 57, 59, 67, 68, 72, 82 see also vitalism Empfindsame Liebesliteratur, 181–2 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 240n37 epiphenomenalism, 105 epistemology, 238n17 see also knowledge Eroscult, 178 eros/thanatos, 129 Esprit Nouveau, 30 ethics, 141, 159, 189 eugenics, 68 Europe blank map of, 117–18 democracy, 21 Nielsen as icon, 125 surrealist map, 15, 16 transgression within, 115 World War I, 21 ex-combatants, 60, 64 Exner, Lisbeth, 230n65 experimentation, 4, 6, 31, 40, 172 expressionism, 1

Arnold, 189 Blumenpoet, 144 fascist, 162 German, 23, 24, 34, 91, 133–4, 222n43 Hiller, 97, 105, 143, 162–3, 230–1n66 humanitarian, 101, 162 livelihoods, 109 O-Mensch, 150 Van Ostaijen, 6, 91–2, 94–102, 219–20n2 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 205n3 Facta, Luigi, 86 Fähnders, Walter, 238n4 Falqui, Enrico, 218n77 family, 60, 70 Fasci di Combattimento, 65–6 fascism, 1, 2, 17, 50 Feidel-Merz, Hildegard, 228n33 Feininger, Lionel, 103 Felice, Renzo de, 217n63 Ferguson, Robert, 202 Feuchtwanger, Lionel, 1 Fiat, 56 Finter, Helga, 215n17 Fiume colony, 18 Flamenpolitik, 92, 93, 96 Flanders see Flemish state Flemish Council, 96 Flemish identity, 93–5, 97, 99 Flemish state literature, 87–8, 93 nation, 97 nationalism, 92 nation-state, 97–8 post-activists, 222n44 see also Van Ostaijen, Paul Flint, R. W., 79 focalisation, 176–7, 185 Forgács, David, 53 Forgács, Eva, 207n10 Formalists, 194, 199 Forsyth, Douglas, J., 216n31 Foster, Hal, 203, 211n67, 240n37 Foucault, Michel archive, 10, 206–7n3 cinema, 126 democracy, 234n106

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Foucault, Michel (cont.) discourse, 196 heterotopic space, 125, 126 on Nietzsche, 195 The Order of Things, 199, 239n26 self-reflexivity, 202 FPP (Partito Politico Futurista), 42, 58, 60–1, 69, 70 France Communist Party, 17 modernists inter-war, 34–5 surrealism, 16 unanimism, 88 Frank, Leonhard, 88, 150–1 freedom Breton, 12 Dadaism, 11, 151 forced, 69 political culture, 171 Romanticism, 11 free-word collages, 58 see also words in freedom Freikorps, 103, 112 Friedländer, Samuel, 111, 152 Friedrich II, 190 Fry, Roger, 205n2 Füllner, Karin, 185, 225n4 futurism, 1, 6 Arditi, 58 de-aestheticisation, 50–1 Fiume colony, 18 FPP, 60–1 Italy, 12, 30, 34, 41 Marinetti, 44–5, 54–5 novels, 19–20 politicisation of literature, 57–8 politics, 61–2 women artists, 58 writings, 45–6, 54–5 Futurist Democracy, 66, 71, 82 Gebauer, Gunter, 209n44 gender factors, 13, 60 Genette, Gérard, 179, 185 Gentile, Emilio, 218n70 George, Henry, 218n64 German Communist Party (KPD), 103, 170 Germany Activism, 88

censorship, 158, 168 citizens’ rights, 155–6 citizen-subject, 167 Dadaism, 5, 6, 34, 156–7, 158–9 expressionism, 23, 24, 34, 91, 133–4, 222n43 Idealism, 18, 31–2, 183 liberal/libertarian democracy, 166–7 mass democracy, 192 political culture, 104, 171 Reichstag, 39–40, 103, 138, 162 Russian Revolution, 155–6 spies, 134 state of exception, 4–5, 40, 102, 104, 131–2, 154–5, 166–7 Third Republic, 104 unification of, 137–8 and Vatican, 92 World War I, 159–60 see also November Revolution; Second Reich; Weimar Republic Ghent University, 95 Gilliams, Maurice, 224n81 Giolitti, Giovanni, 51, 52 Giolittismo, 51 Giornale d’Italia, 43, 48 Gisuti, Franco, 73 Goebbels, Joseph, 15 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 147, 153, 199 Golden Spurs, Battle of, 94, 95 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 204 Golyscheff, Jefim, 231n73 Goodman, Nelson, 238n7 Gordon, Mel, 237n167 Gramsci, Antonio, 52, 85–6, 194 Gregor, James A., 216n30 Grimm, Reinhold, 217n59 Grosz, George, 152, 156, 180, 182 grotesque, 129–30, 141, 201 Groys, Boris, 208n26 Guilbaux, Henri, 147 Habermas, Jürgen, 29, 234n106 Hadermann, Paul, 219–20n2, 220n3 Halliwell, Martin, 230n66 Hardt, Michael, 14 Hausmann, Raoul, 151, 157 Hayman, David, 181 Heine, Heinrich, 228n41

Index Hennings, Emmy, 140 Hermand, Jost, 217n59 Herzfelde, Helmut, 156, 233n98 Herzfelde, Wieland, 233n98 heteroglossia, 125 heterotopia, 132, 200 heterotopic space, 125, 126 Hewitt, Andrew, 31–2, 210n57 Heym, Georg, 23 Hillenaar, Henk, 215n19 Hiller, Kurt expressionism, 97, 105, 143, 162–3, 230–1n66 and Huelsenbeck, 163–5, 234n114 liberal democracy, 164–5 Logokratie, 165, 166 Marxism, 164–5 pacifism, 234n115 Rat geistiger Arbeiter, 102, 137, 161–2 in Der Sturm, 88 universal suffrage, 165 Hillis Miller, J., 214n15 Hinz, Manfred, 216n36 historical materialism, 107 Hobbes, Thomas, 48, 155, 160 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1, 223n44, 240n37 Hoddis, Jakob van, 23, 153 Hölty, Ludwig Christian, 148 homo sacer, 155–6, 216n39 homosexuality and law, 163 Horkheimer, Max, 157 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 6–7 Azteken oder die Knallbude, 137, 138 Berlin work, 137–8, 149–61 the Bürger, 156, 170–1 ‘Chorus Sanctus’, 142 city life, 152–3 on communism, 172 conscripted into army, 161 Dada Almanach, 161, 231n70 Dada siegt!, 151, 171–2 Dada Tournee, 157 Dadaism, 11, 135–6, 151, 154–5, 159 Deutschland muss untergehen!, 137–8, 168, 169, 170–1 diary, 226n18 ‘Disziplin der Gegenwart’, 138

247

‘Ebene’, 142–5, 147, 149, 154, 179, 229n43 En avant Dada, 148, 161, 173 ‘Ende der Welt’, 152–4, 173, 174–5, 179 ‘Erste Dada Rede in Deutschland’, 156 face (Gesicht), 173 ‘Gesang der Vaterlandsfreude’, 154 high art, 157 and Hiller, 163–5, 234n114 humanism, 141 ‘Die Latrine’, 167 memoirs, 137, 161 mental collapse, 230n65 modernity, 171 ‘Der neue Mensch’, 149–51, 157–8, 160, 173, 230–1n66 pacifism, 163 performance, 141–2, 228n41 Phantastische Gebete, 142–5, 152, 158, 169 and Poe, 135–6 policed environment, 140 political culture, 137–8 politics, 8, 38, 86, 136–7 post-revolutionary writings, 172–3 pre-Dada, 138, 147 professional qualifications, 31 as prototype, 136 Rat geistiger Arbeiter, 102, 137 readership, 30 ‘Der redenende Mensch’, 148 review of politicians, 169 Schalaben, Schalabai, Shalamezomai, 229n42 ‘Schieber-Politik’, 154 secrets/rumour, 136–7 university studies, 228n33 Verwandlungen, 140 vitalism, 145–6, 149 volunteering for army, 159–60 work in political context, 154 on writer’s task, 165–6 Zurich work, 144–6, 148–9 see also The Downfall of Doctor Billig Hugnet, Georges, 136–7 humanism, 13–14, 141 humanitarian expressionism, 101, 162

248

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Hunt, Lynn, 202 Huxley, Aldous, 35 Huyssen, Andreas, 212n68 Idealism, German, 18, 31–2, 183 identity collective, 108, 109 commonalities, 178–9 difference, 195 fluid, 151–2 and law, 160 identity-politics, 75, 96 immanence, 13, 14 Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), 103, 169 Gli Indomabili (Marinetti): see Untamables industry and war, 144 institutions art, 28–9, 133 avant-garde, 32–3 Bürger, 29 literature, 27–32, 133 merger-institution, 38 stability/instability, 33 see also spheres international law, 116 irredentists, 53 Iser, Wolfgang, 18 L’Italia Futurista, 58, 63 Italy biennio rosso, 64, 65, 82 citizenship, 55–6 Communist Party, 85–6 dual state, 132 ex-combatants, 60, 64 futurism, 12, 30, 34, 41 language question, 42 law/legislative power, 55–6 legal framework, 53–4 liberals, 49–50 literature/press/politics, 42–3 as nation, 58 political culture, 65 post-WWI, 56 Revolution concept, 66 Socialists, 52, 64 state, 58–9 state of exception, 54–64, 86 universal suffrage, 51, 59

Versailles, Treaty of, 63–4 World War I, 55 see also Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Jacobins in literature, 203, 204 Jacobsohn, Siegfried, 234n113 Jäger, Georg, 210–11n57 Jakobson, Roman, 144 Janelli, Guglielmo, 48 Jarry, Alfred, 42 Jedermann sein eigner Fussball, 167 Jena Romantics, 3 Jespers, Henri-Floris, 224n76 Joyce, James, 202 Jung, Franz, 156 Junker aristocracy, 137–8 Kafka, Franz, 7, 8, 89, 201 Kahn, Gustave, 42 Kandinsky, Wassily, 98, 99, 110, 114, 145, 229n50 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 110 Kapfer, Herbert, 230n65 Karsthaus, Ulrich, 226n16 Kassák, Lajos, 12 Kaufman, Vincent, 208n25 Kautsky, Karl, 107 Kemper, Hans-Georg, 229n50 Kennedy, Ellen, 212–13n83 Kiefer, Klaus H., 231n68 Kiel uprising, 102 Kleinschmidt, Hans J., 225n5 Klinger, Cornelia, 220n14 Knight, Patricia, 216n33 knowledge cultural, 197–8, 238n18 customary, 197 from discourse, 195–6 embodiment, 198 language games, 199–200 practical politics, 133, 191–2, 194 reception of, 199 scientific, 196, 199 sociology of, 239n32 spheres and layers of, 197–8 transcendental, 196–7 and truth, 196 Kokoschka, Alfred, 95 KPD (German Communist Party), 103, 170

Index Krauss, Rosalind, 23 Kristeva, Julia, 22 Kropotkin, Peter, 234n115 Krüger, Horst, 226n16 Kulturkritik, 157, 159 Lacerba, 48, 49, 58, 215n25 Laclau, Ernesto, 209n37 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 3, 9 Lambiase, Sergio, 218n79 Landauer, Gustav, 234n115 Lang, Fritz, 76 language games cultures of knowledge, 198–9 discourse, 28, 211n61 knowledge, 199–200 law, 200, 201–2 literature, 201 modernity, 197 Occupied City, 8 political stability, 38–9 politics, 62, 68, 87 Reichstag, 40 Lash, Scott, 238n15 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 88, 101 Latham, Sean, 202 Latour, Bruno, 197 law on duelling, 182–3 grotesque, 201 homosexuality, 163 and identity, 160 international, 116 language games, 200, 201–2 and legislative power, 55–6 libel, 202 and literature, 7, 8, 201 Occupied City, 7 prostitution, 190–1 state of exception, 177 lawlessness, 119, 178, 185 Lefort, Claude democracy, 165–6 empty space, 31–2, 37 le/la politique, 25, 39–40, 210n54 Lenin, V. I., 15, 172, 173 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 227n29 Levine, Caroling, 205n5 Lewer, Debbie, 227n23 Lewis, P. Wyndham, 2

249

libel law, 202 liberal democracy, 32, 164–5, 210n54 liberalism, 3, 49–50 libertarian democracy, 166 Libyan War, 51 Liebknecht, Karl, 103, 115, 170, 172, 173 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 11 Lippmann, Walter, 28, 134 Liska, Vivian, 208n31, 220n14 Lista, Giovanni, 215n22 literary theory, 194 literature de-aestheticised, 45 democracy, 11–12 ethics, 141, 159 experimentation, 6, 31 as institution, 27–32, 133 in isolation, 199 language games, 201 law, 7, 8, 201 materialisation of, 46–7 modernism, 201 politicisation of, 57–8 politics, 1–2, 8, 19–27, 30, 38, 136 representation, 200 state of exception, 37–9, 193–4, 202–3 trauma, 193 use/exchange value, 114 logocentrism, 13 Logokratie, 165, 166 logothesis, 20, 208n35 Long, Rose-Carol Washton, 229n51 love, 178, 185, 189 Luhmann, Niklas, 203, 210n57 Lukács, Georg, 28, 162, 194, 195 Lunn, Eugene, 223n60 Lütticken, Sven, 240n36 Lützeler, Paul Michael, 209n41 Luxemburg, Rosa, 103, 107, 170 Lyotard, Jean-François, 3, 197, 198, 206n9, 239n20 Lyttelton, Adrian, 217n57 Ma, 12 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 87 McHale, Brian, 219n88 machinism, 30 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 109

250

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Maione, Guiseppe, 217n56 Mann, Heinrich, 88, 163, 164, 234–5n116 Mann, Paul, 240n37 Mannheim, Karl, 24 Mappi Mundi, 15, 16 Marc, Franz, 14 Marcadé, Jean-Claude, 214n8 Marcus, Greil, 226n10 Marcuse, Herbert, 28 Maria, Luciano de, 218n77 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 6–7 active service, 56 additive word formations, 73 aesthetic of writing, 45 Al di là del comunismo, 40, 66, 69 ‘Après les mots en liberté’, 73 avant-garde, 10 and Bergson, 214n13 La Conquête des étoiles, 78 ‘La declamazione dinamica e sinottica’, 56–7 Democrazia Futurista: Dinamismo politico, 66, 67, 70 devaticanisation, 69 ‘Il discorso di Firenze’, 66, 69 double-nouns, 47, 73 education, 70 élan vital, 46, 54, 57, 59, 67, 68, 72, 82, 150 on futurism, 44–5 futurist writings, 45–6, 54–5 on Giolitti, 51 ‘In quest’anno futurista’, 53 language games/politics, 68 law, 41–2, 44, 62–3 literary production in wartime, 56–7 literature/politics, 41–2 Mafarka le futuriste, 47 ‘Manifesto dell’aeropoesia’, 73 ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, 41, 45, 72–3 materialising texts, 46–7 militarism, 53 Le monoplan du Pape, 47 Montagne + vallate + strade x joffre, 47, 58 narrator/author, 213n3 I nuovi poeti futuristi, 73

8 anima in una bomba, 73, 74 onomatopoeia, 13 L’orgoglio italiano, 57 poetics, 47, 54 political influences, 50 politics, 8, 38, 44, 62–3 post-symbolism, 46 professional qualifications, 31 programme of FPP, 48–9, 55, 58–63, 68 readership, 30 renovation of Italian culture, 20–1 Roi Bombance, 78 secret police file, 42–3, 61–2 standing for election, 48, 52–3, 64–5 stars, 83–4 student supporters, 65–6 ‘Vecchie idee a braccetto da separare’, 66–7, 68, 74 vitalism, 150 on Will to Power, 128–9 words in freedom, 46–7, 67, 73 on World War I, 54, 55–6 Zang tumb tumb, 13, 47, 73 see also Untamables Marino, Giuseppe Carlo, 215n28 marriage, 60 Martens, Günther, 236n151 martial law, 37, 92, 128, 129, 130, 131 Marx, Karl, 14, 108 Marxism and Dadaism, 150 epiphenomenalism, 105 Hiller, 164–5 historical materialism, 107 and surrealism, 28 masking, 135–6 mass democracy, 51–2, 192, 209n43 Matthias, Leo, 235n123 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 11 Melzer, Annabelle H., 228n36 memory, 81–2 see also cultural memory Menke, Christoph, 210n47 Meter, Helmut, 215n18 Meyer, Georg, 102 Meyer, Reinhart, 226n8 Michaud, Yves, 207n6, 239n22 Micicˆ, Ljubomir, 21 Mill, John Stuart, 22

Index Miller, Andrew John, 209n43 Miller, Toby, 207n19 Miller, Tyrus, 239n32 misogyny, 20 modernism Anglo-American/European, 1–2, 4, 209n43 avant-garde, 3, 6, 13–14, 29, 193, 205n3 democracy, 210n55 experimental, 87 literature, 201 World War I, 41 modernity avant-garde, 11–19 Huelsenbeck, 171 language games, 197 rationalisation, 27–8 Moens, Wies, 221n19 montage, 118 monumental images, 113–14 Mortier, Firmin, 222n44 Motherwell, Robert, 6 Mouffe, Chantal, 209n37, 210n54, 211n60, 233–4n106 Müche, Georg, 109, 225n93 Müller, Richard, 169 Müller-Funk, Wolfgang, 220n14 Murphy, Richard, 133 Musschoot, Anna-Maria, 221n31 Mussolini, Benito Avanti!, 52 dual state, 132 and Marinetti, 65–6 Partito Nazionale Fascista, 85 politicanti, 8 Prime Minister, 86 Roman Catholics, 69 romanità, 50 mysticism, 114 myth, 20, 24–5, 146, 209n37 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3, 9, 228n35 narrator/readers, 47 naturalism, 146 nature/culture, 149 Nazism, 1, 17, 209n37 Nazzaro, Gian Battista, 215n22, 218n79 Negri, Antonio, 14

251

Nelles, William, 176 Neue Jugend, 233n98 New Critics, 194, 199 new man, 149, 150, 176–7 see also Huelsenbeck’s ‘Der neue Mensch’ Nezval, Vítêzlav, 13 Nicholls, Peter, 215n20, 220n14 Nielsen, Asta, 123–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm dithyramb, 147 Foucault on, 195 new man, 149 Œuvres Complètes, 48 sovereignty, 14 Will to Power, 48, 128–9 Nitti government, 65 Nobis, Norbert, 214n13 Noske, Gustav, 103, 169 nothingness, 18 November Revolution Huelsenbeck, 136, 161–7, 169 state of exception, 4–5, 39–40 Van Ostaijen, 91, 102, 112, 132, 169 Novembergruppe, 103 Nussbaum, Martha, 201 objectification, 114 occupation, state of, 36 Occupied City (Van Ostaijen) ‘De Aftocht’, 115, 122, 127 ‘Asta Nielsen’, 123–6 ‘Bar’, 126–7 Dedication, 115, 118 desemanticisation, 118 ‘De Generaal’, 127–31 Inward Circles, 118–19, 121–3 language games, 8 law, 7 ‘Music Hall’, 88, 93, 101, 121–4 and November Revolution, 102, 169 political context, 193 poster poem, 119–20 proletarian dictatorship, 103, 105 state forms, 90, 106, 110 typography of, 89, 114, 116–17 O-Mensch, 150 onomatopoeia, 13 Oppenheimer, Max, 227n29 Orlando government, 55

252

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Otten, Karl, 138 Owen, Wilfred, 148 pacifism, 100, 163, 234n115 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 19–20, 25, 27 Pan, David, 229n56 Panofsky, Aaron P., 239n32 panoptic perspective, 125 Papini, Giovanni, 48 Paret, Peter, 235n135 Paris, 2, 30–1, 42 parole in libertá, 46–7, 67, 73, 219n86 Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), 85 Partito Politico Futurista, 42, 58, 60–1, 69, 70 Partito Popolare Italiano, 64 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 41 Passuth, Krisztina, 212n70 patronage, state, 30 Paulsen, Wolfgang, 222n37 Pearson, K. Ansell, 233n106 Pechstein, Max, 103 Péguy, Charles, 140 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 199 Perloff, Marjorie, 194 Pessoa, Fernando, 16 Pfemfert, Franz, 232n91 Philipp, Eckhard, 188, 228n41 picaresque, 181, 183 Picasso, Pablo, 195 Pinthus, Kurt, 88 Plato, 90, 91, 129 Die Pleite, 233n99 Plumpe, Gerhard, 211n57 Poe, Edgar Allan, 135, 136 poetry as ideoplastiek, 113 scholastic, 116 as wordart, 108 Poggi, Christine, 215n25 Poggioli, Renato, 3–4, 9, 206n10 political culture, 208n36 avant-garde, 20 formal-aesthetics, 22 freedom, 171 Germany, 104, 171 Huelsenbeck, 137–8 Italy, 65 narrative/ethical/organisational, 22, 23

politicians, 71, 171–2 politics aesthetics, 68–9 authority, 3 avant-garde, 9–10, 30, 33 and culture, 2, 19–27 discourse, 26–7 futurism, 61–2 Huelsenbeck, 136 language games, 62, 68, 87 Lefort, 25, 37, 39–40, 210n54 literature, 1–2, 8, 19–27, 30, 38, 136 marginalisation, 19 mass, 22 spheres, 28 see also practical politics politics of death, 188 Il Popolo d’Italia, 66 popular culture, 116, 117, 123–6, 127 Posner, Richard A., 239n29 poster poem, 119, 120 post-Marxists, 194 postmodernism, 2–3, 206n9 postmodernity, 2–3 post-symbolism, 27, 42, 46 Potter, Rachel, 209n43 Pound, Ezra, 2 practical politics Dadaism, 140–1 in democracy, 3, 39 Huelsenbeck, 136–7 knowledge, 133, 191–2 primitivism, 149, 150, 153, 178 private/public spheres, 177, 186–9 privatism, 148, 151, 189 production, modes of, 105 professional sphere, 30–1 proletarian dictatorship, 103, 105 proletariat, 107 prostitute figure, 188–9, 191 prostitution, 190–1 Proust, Marcel, 31 Przybosˆ, Julian, 12 public space, 11, 186, 196–7, 198 publishing policy, 30 Putnam, Hilary, 195 Rainey, Lawrence, 210n57 Rancière, Jacques, 25, 195, 210n55 Rat geistiger Arbeiter

Index democracy, 169 evicted from Reichstag, 162, 166–7 Hiller, 102, 137, 161–2 Huelsenbeck, 102, 137 Matthias, 235n123 Van Ostaijen, 103 readers avant-garde, 18 as bodies, 46 desubjectivised, 45 Huelsenbeck, 30 intuitition/syntax, 47 Marinetti, 30 morality, 118 and narrator, 47 pleasure, 199 subjectivised, 175 writing-subject, 114 Reichstag, 39–40, 103, 138, 162 Renaissance, 13–14 repatriation, 60 Repatriation Act, 191 repetition, critical, 155, 167 representation democracy, 90, 131 literature, 200 political, 22 revolution, 112 Reynebeau, Marc, 220n4, 221n25 Richter, Hans, 233n100 Riha, Karl, 236n150 Risorgimento, 84 Rocca, Marzia, 43–4 Roma Futurista, 63, 66, 67 Romains, Jules, 88 Roman Catholics, 64, 69 Romani, Bruno, 214n12 Romantic-Idealist strand, 101, 157 Romanticism, 3, 11, 18 Rorty, Richard, 234n106 Rosenkranz, Karl, 46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51, 234n116 Roy, Allen, 230n66 Rubiner, Ludwig, 88 Ruimte, 108 Rumold, Rainer, 231n68 Russian Formalism, 194 Russian Revolution, 155 Russolo, Luigi, 49, 79–80, 143 Ryle, Gilbert, 198

253

Sade, Marquis de, 155, 183 Saint-Armand, Pierre, 238n16 Salandra government, 55 Salaris, Claudia, 84–5 Salinari, Carlo, 215n30 Salvat-Papasseit, Joan, 87 Sanguinetti, Eduardo, 44 Santarelli, Enzo, 217n58 Sant’Ellia, Antonio, 14 Sapiro, Gisèle, 34–5, 211n57, 212n79 Schaepdrijver, Sophie De, 221n27 Scheidemann, Philip, 103, 169, 171 De Schelde, 128 Scheler, Max, 98–9 Schickele, Rene, 88 Schiller, Friedrich von, 171 Schmidt, Manfred, 206n11 Schmitt, Carl, 4, 5, 37, 38, 212–13n83, 213n84 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 213n5 Schnitzler, Arthur, 21 scholastic poetry, 116 Schrott, Raoul, 228n34 Schulte, Regina, 237n166 Schwarz, Arturo, 226n15 Schwitters, Kurt, 225n3 scientific knowledge, 196, 199 sculpture, 113 Second Reich, 138, 166, 169, 187 secrets, 135, 136 Semenko, Mykhail, 12 Sen, Amartya, 234n106 Settimelli, Emilio, 58, 217n58 sex-workers, 190 Shattuck, Roger, 5 Sheppard, Richard, 161, 225n6, 227n32, 236n146 Sherry, Vincent, 36 Sienjaal, 108 Simmel, Georg, 135, 238n17 Sloterdijk, Peter, 155 Snoeck, Robert, 224n77 Social Darwinism, 68, 129–30 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 103, 169 social imaginaries, 20, 209n37 Socialist Party of Italy (PSI), 52, 64 Sokel, Walter H., 222n37, 236n154 Sorel, Georges, 53 Sorelli, Giulio, 14

254

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

sound poetry, 142, 147 sound-art, 79–80 sovereignty avant-garde, 31 citizen-subject, 15 collective, 14, 17, 47–8 Derrida, 122 Nietzsche, 14 state of exception, 37, 38 subject, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 20, 127 Spackmann, Barbara, 213n5 Spartakists, 103, 106 Spengler, Oswald, 21, 188 spheres and institutions, 27–9 and knowledge, 198–200 and language games, 28, 38–9, 198–200 political sphere/literary sphere, 38 and systems, 27–9 spies, 134, 139–40 Spinoy, Erik, 220n6, 222n33 stability, 35–6 Stadler, Ernst, 23 La Stampa, 52 stars, 83–4, 219n86 state community, 122 Italy, 58–9 Van Ostaijen, 90, 106, 110, 122, 126–7 state of exception as anachronism, 37 Belgium, 101, 131–2 censorship, 5 citizen-subject, 37 declaration of, 35–6 The Downfall of Doctor Billig, 184–5 Germany, 4–5, 40, 102, 104, 115, 131–2, 154–5, 166–7 Italy, 54–64, 86 law, 177 lawlessness, 119 literature in, 193–4, 202–3 sovereignty, 37, 38 Van Ostaijen, 128–31 Stein, Gertrude, 2, 195 Stern, Anatole, 23–4 Stone, Marla, 215n29

Stramm, August, 88, 101 Strauven, Wanda, 216n43 Strietman, Elsa, 220n3 structuralists/post-structuralists, 194 Stuckenberg, Fritz, 225n93 Der Sturm, 30, 34, 88, 101 Sturzo, Luigi, 52 subject as body, 56 freedom of, 11 sovereignty, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 20, 127 Van Ostaijen, 109 subjectivisation, 148, 175 subjectivity, 15, 108, 152 sublime, 3, 29, 46 suffrage reform, 52 see also universal suffrage suffragettes, 45 surrealism, 1, 6 dream-séances, 26 France, 16 informe, 23 map of Europe, 16–17, 117 and Marxism, 28 Nezval, 13 Swift, Jonathan, 74 Switzerland, 136, 139–49, 140 see also Zurich Tailhade, Laurent, 42 Talpo, Francesca, 214n13 Taylor, Seth, 226n7 La testa di ferro, 66 A Tett, 12 thanatos/eros, 129 theodicy imagery, 94 Theweleit, Klaus, 78 Thomas, Brook, 201 Timms, Edward, 205n8 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 22 Todorov, Tzvetan, 179 Tolstoi, Leo, 227n29 Topp, Arnold, 225n93 totalitarianism, 2, 17 Trakl, Georg, 209n39 transcendental knowledge, 196–7 transgression, 115 Tratner, Michael, 209n43 trauma, 193

Index La Tribuna, 52 Trotsky, Leon, 107 truth/knowledge, 196 Turconi, Sergio, 214n12 typographic innovation, 89, 114, 116–17 Tzara, Tristan, 11, 173, 229n43, 230n65 ugliness, 29, 46 Unamuno, Miguel de, 21 unanimism, 88 universal brotherhood, 103 universal suffrage, 51, 59, 101, 106, 165 The Untamables (Marinetti) as allegory, 43–4, 72–86, 193 characters, 74–5 critiqued, 218n79 forced freedom, 69 free-word style, 47, 72, 73, 219n86 law, 7, 8 narrative/allegory, 79–80 narrator, 73 Paper People, 75, 82–4 and political writing, 66 rioting, 80–1 River People, 76–8, 82–4 sound-art, 80 stars, 219n86 topographical detail, 78 USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party), 103, 169 utopian tradition, 90 Uyttersprot, Herman, 224n78 Vaessens, Thomas, 220n8 Valéry, Paul, 21, 27 Valesio, Paolo, 46 Van Gogh, Vincent, 88 Van Ostaijen, Paul ‘De Aftocht’, 115, 122, 127 associative strand, 88 ‘Asta Nielsen’, 123–6 ‘Banale Dans’, 119 Bankruptcy Jazz, 111, 127 ‘Bar’, 126, 127 ‘Bedreigde Stad’, 118 in Berlin, 90–1, 102–14, 113, 132–4, 222–3n44, 225n93

255

‘Het beroep van de dichter’, 110 constitutional heterotopia, 200 de-individualisation, 110 democracy, 131–2 Dutch language, 87–8 Eerste boek van Schmoll, 88 ‘Eind goed al goed’, 224n72 ‘Et Voilà’, 108–9 experimentation, 88–9 expressionism, 6–7, 91–2, 94–102, 219–20n2 ‘Expressionism in Flanders’, 97–8, 105, 113, 130 De Feesten van Angst en Pijn, 88 Flemish identity, 93–4 ‘De Generaal’, 127–31 ‘Gulden Sporen’, 94, 101, 113 ‘Huis, Stad, IK’, 119 identity-politics, 96 ‘Inward Circles’, 118, 121–3 on Kautsky, 107 ‘Een kort opstel over koloniale politiek’, 104–5 ‘De kudde van Claire’, 224n86 mandarin poetic, 99, 109, 111 ‘Mobile’, 126 montage, 118 Music Hall, 88, 93, 101, 121 mysticism, 114 ‘Nasionalisme en het nieuwe geslacht’, 93–4 ‘De nieuwe zending’, 96 ‘De Obus over de Stad’, 119 ‘Open brief aan den heer Camille Huijsmans’, 107 pacifism, 100 poetry, 88, 113–14 politics, 8, 38, 86, 93 poster poem, 119, 120 Rat geistiger Arbeiter, 103 ‘Rond het Vlaamse probleem’, 105–6 Het Sienjaal, 88, 93, 95, 99–102, 107–8, 113 state, 90, 106, 110, 122, 126–7 state of exception, 128–31 subject, 108, 109 tenses, use of, 95 ‘To a mother’, 101 utopian tradition, 90

256

Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Van Ostaijen, Paul (cont.) ‘Voorgeschiedenis van de Vlaamse Beweging’, 93 ‘Wat is er met Picasso?’, 110 ‘Het werk van Paul Joostens’, 130 writing as film director, 118 writing in occupied state, 36 see also Occupied City Variétés, 16 Vatican, 92 Vattimo, Gianni, 203 Vecchi, Ferruccio, 218n69 Verhaeren, Émile, 42 Versailles, Treaty of, 63–4, 104 Versluys, Kristiaan, 220n3 Vetori, Vittorio, 215n21 Victor Emmanuel III, 51, 54 violence, 53 vision, subjective, 114 vitalism, 14, 62, 81, 145–6, 149, 150 see also élan vital Vree, Paul De, 222n41 Vrints, Antoon, 221n16 Walden, Herwarth, 34, 133–4 war, 46, 54, 144, 159–60 Ward, Ian, 206n19 wealth distribution, 105 Weber, Max, 28, 98 Weber, Samuel, 213n84 Wegner, Philip E., 220n10 Weimar Republic birth of, 2, 7, 91, 166–7 Constitution, 132, 167–8 pressure groups, 104 Weinrich, Harald, 238n18 Weinstein, Joan, 222n40 Weiss, Peg, 229n50 Werckmeister, Otto Karl, 231n68

Werfel, Franz, 88, 101 White, John J., 214n14 Whittam, John, 217n56 Wilde, Oscar, 202 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 138, 168 Williams, Raymond, 205n8 Wils, Ludo, 221n16 Wilson, T. Woodrow, 63, 115–16, 126 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 196, 198, 211n61 Wolff, Janet, 209–10n45 women artists, 58 words in freedom, 46–7, 67, 73, 219n86 world map, 16–17 World War I Ball, 159 Belgium, 90, 92–3 Europe, 21 Germany, 159–60 Italy, 55 Marinetti on, 41 modernists, 41 states of exception, 36 writers/citizen-subjects, 15 writing-subject, 114 Wulf, Christoph, 209n44 Zacharias, Thomas, 222n43 Zapponi, Niccolò, 217n58 Zenit, 21 Zima, Peter, 212n76 Zola, Emile, 227n29 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 225n3 Zurich Cabaret Voltaire, 6, 139–49, 145, 227n29, 228n41, 236n143 Dadaism, 139–40, 156