Dada.pdf

Circulations: In and

Around Zurich Dada

T. J. DEMOS

The Cabaret Voltaire . . . has as its sole purpose

to draw attention, across the barriers of war

and nationalism, to the few independent spirits

who live for other ideals.

—Hugo Ball, 1916

D ada remain s w ithin the frame w or k o f

European weakness, it’s all shit, but from now

on we want to shit in different colors so as to

adorn the zoo of art with all the � ags of all the

consulates.

—Tristan Tzara, 1916

For Roman Jakobson, it is against the background of the “zoological nat ion-

alism” of European nat ion-states during World War I that the Dadaist rebellion

becomes comprehendible and reaches its most subversive intensity. While the

antinat ionalism of Dada’s politics has been well charted, its aesthetic negotiation of

such politics has been largely ignored. Returning to Jakobson offers an important

corrective, for his sensitivity toward language led him, early on, to connect the

politics of Dada to structural developments in its artistic practice, largely over-

looked in analyses of Zur ich Dada in part icular. Wr iting presciently in 1921,

Jakobson understood that the linguistic structure of Dadaist artwork registered a

representational paradigm shift, and its rumblings were perceptible in the other-

wise seeming “infant ile ant i-French att acks of the French Dadaist s and the

anti-German attacks of the Germans.” 1 For him, the Dadaists’ displacement from

nat ional ident ity was symptomatic of its participat ion in a larger movement

toward a new “science of relativity,” representing an epistemic transformation in

Western organizations of knowledge at large (he mentions post-Kantian philosophy,

1. Roman Jakobson, recently arriving in Prague from Moscow, wrote “Dada” in 1921; it is reprinted in

Language in Literature , ed. Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 40.

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Albert Einstein’s theory, Nikolai Bukharin’s post-Marxist concepts of value—but

the recent semiological development s of Ferdinand de Saussure, discussed in

Russian Formalism circles, were certainly on his mind). This shift toward relativity

is one key to Dada, and I’m interested in pursuing further how Dada negotiated

geopolitical dislocation through the construction of objects, performances, and

new language systems.

Our look back at Dada glimpses at a complicated set of affairs that resonates

with the contemporary crisis of nation-st ate identity that we confront today (even

if they are far from identical). This contemporary crisis is de Ž ned by the new

coordinates of globalized capitalism, its imperial conquest and coerced ideological

conformity, which is haunted by its dialectical other: the frequent and sometimes

desperate acts of ant iglobalization generated within the degrading conditions of

political and economic inequality. Similarly, the Dadaist rebellion (especially in

Zur ich) emerged in cr itical and sometimes desperate response to the brutal

protect ion of nat ional interest s and the cynical manipulat ions of patr iotic

energies. Paying attention to Dadaist strategies offers a fascinat ing story of how

the avant- garde once dreamed of resistance to such domination and power. This

story begins with what Marcel Duchamp called “the spirit of expatriation,” which

motivated him, Francis Picabia, and others to pointedly elude military service during

World War I and to escape the pressures of nat ionalization in Europe (and later in

America) by immigrating to neutral countries. 2 Similarly, the German nationals

Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, along with the Romanian Tristan Tzara, and the

Alsatian Jean Arp coming from France, established the Zurich context in neutral

Switzerland for similar reasons. 3 Geopolitical dislocation—from both nat ional

geography and nat ionalist ideology—is fundament al to Dada’s identity. Thus

Jakobson saw in the Dadaists the radical potential of the sailor (perhaps thinking

of those on the Battleship Potemkin): “Is this not the reason for the fact that

sailors are revolutionary, that they lack that very ‘stove,’ that hearth, that little

house of their own, and are everywhere equally chez soi?” 4 While the Dadaists

were certainly not all “everywhere equally chez soi ” (except perhaps for Duchamp),

their ant inationalism was both cause and effect of their displacement.

2. Duchamp explained: “You know, since 1917 America had been in the war, and I had left France

basically for lack of militarism. For lack of patriotism, if you wish . . . I had fallen into American patrio-

tism, which certainly was worse . . . I [then] left in June–July 1918, to Ž nd a neutral country called

Argentina” (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp [1966], trans. Ron Padgett [New York: Da

Capo, 1971], p. 59). Picabia parodies nationalism in the “Cannibal Dada Manifesto” of 1920, reprinted

in the Dada Almanac , ed. Richard Huelsenbeck, trans. Malcolm Green et al. (London: Atlas, 1993), p.

55. On Duchamp’s later relation to expatriat ion, see my “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of

Surrealism, 1942,” October 97 (Summer 2001) and “Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise : Between Institutional

Acculturation and Geopolitical Displacement,” Grey Room 08 (Summer 2002).

3. Huelsenbeck explains that “none of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to

get shot for the idea of a nation which is best a cartel of pelt merchants and pro Ž teers in leather, at worst a

cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their

knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets,” in “En Avant Dada: A History of

Dadaism” (1920), in The Dada Painters and Poets , ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1981).

Jakobson, “Dada,” p. 34.

Circulations: In and Around Zurich Dada

149

Dadaist displacement arcs from the geopolitical to the structural. This begins

with the word . Dada: “It is simply a meaningless little word thrown into circulation in

Europe,” Jakobson notes, “a little word with which one can juggle à l’aise , thinking

up meanings, adjoining suf Ž xes, coining complex words which create the illusion

that they refer to objects.” 5 In the stress on circulation, the aleatory, the mutative,

and the contextual, we recognize the intimations of Cubist collage, the mobility of

the readymade, as well as the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars,

and Stephane Mallarmé, variously instituted to dissolve languages that had other-

wise rigidi Ž ed or become corrupted. The Dadaists in Zurich were sympathetic.

For Hugo Ball, the expat German who retreated to Zurich after witnessing the

horr ifying front in 1914, languag e was deeply discredited due to it s use as

propaganda that “just i Ž ed” war. The journalistic and political abuses of language

meant that “The word has been abandoned; it used to dwell among us. The word

has become commodity . . . [and] has lost all dignity.” 6 Believing that language

must be dismant led and reconstructed anew, Ball stood on the st age of the

Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, dressed in a ridiculous and awkward out Ž t, alternately

suggesting a priest’s vestment or a soldier’s armor, and intoned his sound poem

Karawane : “Jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla . . . ” Words and sounds were juggled à

l’aise , separating speech’s signifying units from traditional semantic functions, and

jarring the subject from the norms of identity. 7 In so doing he positioned himself

between a perverse mimicry of the mechanization of uniformed identities within

capitalist orders, no longer comprehensible; a deconstructive dissolution of rei Ž ed

and corrupted languages instrumentalized by reactionary and jingoistic political

mouthpieces; a traumatic repetition of the stunted communicative abilities of the

traumatized trench warrior; and the desire for a new quasi-religious or primitivist

refounding of the word. Whatever the interpretive stress, Ball’s language, at the

level of the word, ceased to funct ion as a system of posit ive values, whether

naming an object or clearly identifying its subject; rather, its signi Ž cation was

halted within a repetitive stuttering (the “ü üü ü” in Karawane ), which splintered

language and forced it to be experienced as mere sound, as syllabic particularization,

bracketed from any clear purpose or instrumentalization. If avant-garde collage

and poetry had already uprooted the signi Ž er from any positive meaning, resituating

it within a play of difference, then Dada performed and exacerbated this deracina-

t ion, and experienced it as politically critical of conventional languages and

Ibid., p. 37.

Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time , trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),

p. 26.

7. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh offers a helpful reading of Dadaist practices in his “Allegorical

Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum (September 1982), p. 44:

“The Dadaist poet depletes words, syllables, and sound of all traditional semantic functions and references

until they become visual and concrete. Their dialectical complement is the liberated phonetic dimension

of language in the Dadaist sound poem, where expression is freed from the spatial image of language, and

the usage of imposed meanings.” Ball’s Karawane works on both levels.

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traditional identities. 8 Performance was key; it located speech in the body, not merely

on a page or within an object, but in a speaking subject, one that would live through

the new conditions of this language.

For Tzara too, Dada begins with the word, “a word that doesn’t mean any-

thing”: Dada, a word found at random in a French-English dictionary, according to

apocryphal account s. Dada, a word that multiplies its meanings across several

languages: the tail of a sacred cow in Kroo; cube or mother in certain regions of

It aly; a hobbyhor se, a children’s nur se, a double affirmative in Russian and

Romanian, as we learn in from Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918.” If Tzara’s word is

“born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community,” then this

is actualized within his simultaneous poem, L’amiral cherche une maison à louer of

1916. 9 Enunci ated in three different languages at once (French, German,

English)—languages of nations at war—the poem tells three unrelated and absurdist

stories, allowing no narrative clarity, semantic sense, or clear linguistic source of

identi Ž cation for listeners. It merges a multinational structure with the thematics of

homelessness (its “protagonist” is an admiral looking for a house to rent). All

languages are ripped up from any dominant position, and instead made to coexist

and interact, each “thrown into circulation,” as Jakobson would say. Collectively

performed at the Cabaret Voltaire, the poem indicates an experimental modeling of

an alternative community, one built around difference and the refusal of social, polit-

ical, or national uni Ž cation. The only unity possible, in fact, was that formed around

the very homelessness of identity; for the admiral Ž nds nothing to rent. The exem-

plary identity of national identi Ž cation, in other words, was left without a home.

Only the last line was spoken in unison by all in French, “ L’amiral n’a rien trouvé .”

The noisy stakes of Tzara’s linguistic polyglotism are elucidated by Mikhail

Bakhtin. Indebted to Jakobson’s formalism but wanting to overcome a theory of

language based on abstract rules alone (like Saussure’s langue ), Bakhtin located

language’s meaning in the dialogical space of utterance. His notion of language—

like that of Dada—would be Ž rmly located in its social and historical enactment.

Modeled on the multilanguaged, the plural, the autodifferentiating, the shattered,

and the uprooted, it comes close to describing Dada’s linguistic conditions. For

Bakhtin, writing in exile in Kazakhstan during the mid-1930s, the “heteroglossia of

language” challenged the totalitarian Stalinist forces of ideological uni Ž cation,

“forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating . . . the Ž rm,

stable linguistic nucleus of an of Ž cially recognized . . . language.” 10 Heteroglossia,

or the multilanguagedness of language, would oppose such centralization by high-

8. This semiological reading of Cubism has been advanced by Rosalind Krauss in essays such as

“The Motivation of the Sign,” and Y ve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” both in Picasso and

Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992).

9. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” Seven Dada Manifestos , trans. Barbara Wright (New York:

Riverrun, 1981), pp. 4–5.

10. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogical Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 270–71.

Circulations: In and Around Zurich Dada

151

lighting “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions” in and between the

present and the past operative in the same language. It would work to de-essentialize

language and to diversify its enunciat ive condit ions, author ial identities, and

spaces of reception. Is this co-existence of multiple discourses not what Tzara

stages, most obviously in the clash and blurrings between the three different

nat ional languages in L’amiral , each loosened from the traditionally unifying

structure of the poem and released within the heteroglot conditions of simultaneous

recital? If Bakhtin explains that “the word in language is half someone else’s”—due

to the dispersal of authorship through the dialogical moments of production and

reception—then in Tzara’s poem it is only a third one’s own—or even less. 11 For

the three speakers’ words are immediately rede Ž ned in the space of simultaneous

multinational collective speech. The linguistic displacements of exile were dragged

into the public context of the Cabaret.

Dada not only performed the word; the word also became performative. The

sound poems exposed the absence behind conventional political speech (e.g., the

admiral’s), a speech that gains rhetor ical power— the power to interpellate

identity, to forge collective identi Ž cation—not through its meaning but through

its very performance. It resembles a type of political language that Slavoj Zizek

de Ž nes in this way:

In itself it is nothing but a “pure difference”: its role is purely structural,

its nature is purely performative—its signi Ž cation coincides with its

own act of enunciation; in short, it is a ‘signi Ž er without the signi Ž ed’ . . .

behind the dazzling splendor of the element which holds it together

(“God,” “Country,” “Party,” “Class” . . . ) [is a] self-referential, tautological,

performative operation. 12

Dada, I am suggesting, perpetrated this deconstruction. When the admiral speaks,

what emerges is senseless noise, empty stories, verbal blather, a political speech

exposed as logorrhea, like Tzara’s reducing the national � ag to shit.

If certain Dadaists symptomatized the traumatic subject of brutal combat, as

Freud diagnosed it, then they also commenced a productive struggle to retrain a

new identity. 13 And if they exhibited the degradation of communicative experience

in the face of advancing technology, developing capitalism, and modernized warfare,

as Walter Benjamin analyzed it, then they also announced the need for an aggressive

relearning of language that would be posttraditional and postnat ional. 14 Hugo Ball

was clear: language had failed dur ing the catastrophic conditions of war and

nationalism: “There is no language any more,” he explained: “it has to be invented

11. Ibid., p 293.

12. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 99.

13. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).

Dada’s traumatic subject is discussed in Hal Foster, “Armor Fou,” October 56 (Spr ing 1991), and in

Brigid Doherty, “‘See: We are all Neurasthenics! ’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24,

no. 1 (Fall 1997).

14.

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968).

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