Hugo Ball reciting Karawane, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Courtesy Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V., Rolandseck.

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HAL FOSTER

Magical Bishop

It is a celebrated performance but extraordinary still. On June 23, 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball premieres his sound poems or poems- without-words: “My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk,” he tells us in Flight Out of Time, his great diary of 1914–21: Over it I wore a huge coat collar cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside. . . . I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor’s hat. . . . I was carried onto the stage in the dark and began slowly and solemnly: “gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori / gadjama bim beri glassala / glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim / blassa galassasa tuffm i zimbrabim. . . . ” Then I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamen- tation, that style of liturgical singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West. . . . For a moment it seemed as if there were a pale, bewildered face in my Cubist mask, that half-frightened, half-curious face of a ten-year-old boy, trembling and hanging avidly on the priest’s words in the requiems and high masses in his home parish. . . . Bathed in sweat, I was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop.1

In the performance Ball is part shaman, part priest, but he is also a child once again entranced by ritual magic: less pope and blasphemer in one, then, than exorcist and possessed. Such pandemonium (literally: “abode of all demons; place of lawless violence or uproar; utter confusion”) is one aim of the Dadaists.

1. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (1927), trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974).

OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 166–176. © 2003 Hal Foster.

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Yet in this instance it proves too much for Ball: soon after his blackout he with- draws from Dada, eventually to return to the Church. “I could never bid chaos welcome.”

The Bliss of the Epileptic

“Is Dadaism as sign and gesture the opposite of Bolshevism?” Ball asks in his diary on June 7, 1917. “Strange incidents: when we had the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich at Spiegelgasse 1, there lived at Spiegelgasse 6, opposite us, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Ulyanov-Lenin.” A year and a half later in Bern, Ball meets Walter Benjamin, whom he introduces to Ernst Bloch, newly author of The Spirit of Utopia (1918). Benjamin is very impressed by Bloch; at this point his scales of history still tilt in favor of hope. Several years later, at the end of “One-Way Street” (1923–26), a textual montage that works to relay, through imagistic vignettes and abrupt cuts, the shock experiences of industrial war and mediated metropolis, Benjamin writes: “In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new boy under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence.”2 But “mankind” doesn’t get well: the proletariat is soon contained in Germany and disciplined in the Soviet Union, as its “shaking” is brought under different— dictatorial—control. Perhaps this suppression is one reason why the Dadaist miming of “the bliss of the epileptic,” first enacted by Ball in his performance, will recur—intermittently, variously, compulsively—for decades to come.

Ecce Homo Novus

If not the opposite of Bolshevism, Dada does propose a “new man” very different from that of avant-garde artists in revolutionary Russia. The Dadaist “bachelor machine” figures a reification that proceeds from capitalist industry to the individual; the Constructivist “engineer” personifies a rationalization that runs from the individual to communist society at large. “On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel [chimes] of hell,” Tristan Tzara writes in “Dada Manifesto 1918”; “on the other hand: new men.” Here Tzara seems to gloss another Dadaist account of “Der neue Mensch” by Richard Huelsenbeck published in Neue Jugend on May 23, 1917, nearly a year after the Ball performance, an account in which the tottering and the new are one: The new man stretches wide the wings of his soul, he orients his inner ear toward things to come, his knees find an altar before which to bend. He carries pandemonium within himself, the pandemonium naturae ignotae,

2. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume I, 1913–1926, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 487.

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for or against which no one can do anything. His neck is twisted and stiff; he gazes upward, staggering toward redemption like some fakir or stylite; a wretched martyr of all centuries, anointed and sainted, he begs to be crushed, one day to be consumed in the burning heart, racked and consumed—the new man, exalted, erring, ecstatic, born of ecstasy. Ahoy, ahoy, huzza, hosanna, whips, wars of the eons, and yet human, the new man rises from all ashes, cured of all toxins, and fantastic worlds, saturated, stuffed full to the point of disgust with the experience of all outcasts, the dehumanized beings of Europe, the Africans, the Polynesians, all kinds, feces smeared with devilish ingredi- ents, the sated of all genders: Ecce homo novus, here is the new man.3 Perhaps this is what the Angelus Novus, pictured by Benjamin in 1940 as hurled by the winds of history, looked like in 1917, when the high spirits prompted by political upheaval were not yet exhausted, when epileptic bliss had not yet hardened into political catatonia: a portrait of the Angelus Novus as Magical Bishop.

A Gladiator’s Gesture

A key persona of Dada, especially in Zurich and Cologne, is the traumatic mime, and a key strategy of this traumatist is mimetic adaptation, whereby the Dadaist assumes the dire conditions of his time—the armoring of the military body, the fragmenting of the industrial worker, the commodifying of the capitalist subject—and inflates them through hyperbole or “hypertrophy” (another Dadaist term). Such buffoonery is a form of parody that Dada made its own. “What we call Dada is a farce of nothingness in which all the higher questions are involved,” Ball writes on June 12, 1916, less than two weeks before the Magical Bishop performance, “a gladiator’s gesture, a play with shabby leftovers.” The Dadaist does not give up on totality; on the contrary, “he is still so convinced of the unity of all beings, of the totality of all things, that he suffers from the dissonances to the point of self- disintegration.” This is a crucial dialectic, but amid “the dissonances” it is very difficult to maintain, and “self-disintegration” has its own paradoxical attractions. For other creatures mimetic adaptation is a biological technique of survival through camouflage in a hostile environment. With humans, however, it can be pushed to a dangerous extreme, indeed to the point of a pathological “detumes- cence” of the subject, a schizophrenic “devouring” by space (as Roger Caillois puts it twenty years later in 1937).4 Such is the risk of an excessive identification with

3. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. xxxi. 4. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1937), October 31 (Winter 1984), p. 30. For another account of traumatic mimesis in Dada, see Brigid Doherty, “The Trauma of Dada Collage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Fall 1997). Also see Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 149–59.

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the corrupt conditions of a symbolic order. Yet, if maintained as a dialectical strategy, this miming can also expose this order as failed, or at least as insecure. Ball alludes to a tactic of “exaggeration” often in Flight Out of Time: “Everyone has become mediumistic,” he writes on April 20, 1917, “from fear, from terror, from agony, or because there are no laws anymore—who knows?”5 In principle this tactic is not nihilistic so much as immunological: the Dadaist “suffers from the dissonances to the point of self-disintegration” in order to “fight against the agony and the death throes of this age” (June 12, 1916); and his model is not the absolute anarchist so much as “the perfect psychologist [who] has the power to shock or soothe with one and the same topic” (October 26, 1915). As “the organ of the outlandish,” the Dadaist also “threatens and soothes at the same time,” Ball writes on March 2, 1916. “The threat produces a defense.” Here his immunological language is almost apotropaic, and Flight Out of Time is peppered with Medusan metaphors (nine days later, after Huelsenbeck drums out his primitivistic poems, Ball writes: “the Gorgon’s head of a boundless terror smiles out of the fantastic destruction”). To call mimetic adaptation apotropaic, however, is not to say that it is sublimatory: Medusa’s head is not transformed into Athena’s shield; a strong measure of fear, terror, and agony is retained. For Ball this heady mix is best captured in the unruly masks made by Marcel Janco for the Cabaret soirees: “The motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us. . . . [They] simply demanded that their wearers start to

5. As Ball suggests here, the very apprehension that “there are no laws anymore” might also produce schizophrenic effects.

Right: Sophie Taeuber dancing in mask by Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Far right: Janco. Mask. 1919. © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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move in a tragic-absurd dance. . . . The horror of our time, the paralyzing back- ground of events, is made visible” (May 24, 1916).

Sympathy for the Devil

“A wretched martyr of all centuries, anointed and sainted, he begs to be crushed. . . . ” Certainly Huelsenbeck has Ball in mind here, and Ball does commit his dreams of “humiliations and mortifications” to his diary; his entry for November 28, 1915, reads: “At night I am Stephen being stoned. Rocks rain down, and I feel the ecstasy of one who is being mercilessly beaten and crushed by stones for the sake of a little rough pyramid covered with blood.” This is beyond “mediumistic”; it is masochistic—a radical passivity not only as a mode of defense (as Freud might say) but as a form of jouissance (this is one allure of “self- disintegration”). In Masochism in Modern Man (1941) Theodor Reik analyzes the Christ of the New Testament as a masochist who performs both linguistic inversions and ethical subversions in his parables and paradoxes. His analysis reads like a case study of Ball, who practices his own imitation of Christ.6 In fact Ball considers an identification that is even more masochistic: “If one sides with those who suffer, must one not also side with those who suffer so much that they are no longer recognizable? If one now assumes that Satan’s suffering is infinite, then this is a dangerous sympathy” (November 20, 1915). The male masochist is politically ambiguous, to be sure. For Kaja Silverman this figure “magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed.”7 For Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, he epitomizes the subject in complete control for whom all relationships are strictly contractual.8 But these two faces might belong to the same persona. “I can imagine a time,” Ball writes as early as September 20, 1915, “when I will seek obedience as much as I have disobedience: to the full.”

Scham-man

If Ball presents the Dadaist as Shaman in Zurich in 1916–17, Max Ernst figures the Dadaist as Scham-man in Cologne in 1919–20. To accompany his notorious “Dada—Early Spring” show in April 1920, Ernst publishes a little journal titled Die Schammade. The title is one of the slipperiest of his many neologisms. Hans Richter, the veteran of Zurich Dada, hears both Schamane (shaman) and Scharade

6. “For him there was no course other than to be a penitent,” writes his wife Emmy Hennings in her 1946 Preface to Flight Out of Time (p. lvi). But such is his doubleness that she also compares Ball to the Grand Inquisitor. 7. Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity,” Camera Obscura 17 (May 1988), p. 51. Her argument is elaborated in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). On masochism in Francis Picabia see George Baker, Lost Objects (New York: Columbia University dissertation, 2000). 8. See Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989).

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(charade) in the term, a reading perhaps closer to Ball than to Ernst—though here they are close enough. Werner Spies tell us that Schammade is a bucolic melody, and that “the phrase Schammade schlagen . . . means to sound the drum or trumpet signal for retreat.”9 This melancholic surrender suits the pose of masochistic passivity, but a further combination is possible as well—of Scham, which means both “shame” and “genitals” (a telltale association that must have interested Freud), or Schamhaar, which means “pubic hair,” with Made, which means “maggot.”10 This reading of the neologism renders a nasty image of maggoty pubes, of wormy penises and rotten vaginas, a Medusa’s head with limp snakes, perhaps with a hint of “maggoty shame” as well. Such a phallic “scam” or “sham” is a common ploy in Dada, and Die Schammade names it for Ernst.

The Hat Makes the Man

Ernst stages phallic crises in many of his Dadaist collages and assemblages, most of which are made of discarded things (old printer plates and catalog pages in the collages, wooden odds and ends in the assemblages). With titles like Hypertrophic Trophy and Phallustrade, these rickety figures mock any pretense of phallic autonomy, let alone any fantasy of modernist autogenesis. Exhibited in the “Dada—Early Spring” show, Phallustrade (now lost) was made up mostly of doll parts, apparently along the lines of the four unsteady stacks of semianimate hats in the famous collage The Hat Makes the Man (1920). “Phallustrade” is another provocative neologism: a contraction of “phallus” and “balustrade,” it is later used by Ernst to model his conception of collage as “the unexpected meeting of two or more heterogeneous elements.”11 Might this be how he remembers his Dadaist works—as a parade of penile stick figures, of phallic imposters? Consider The Hat Makes the Man: the “men” here are both mechanical (they resemble four pistons) and commodified (they are nothing but hats). A quasi- schizophrenic inscription on the collage reads: “seed-covered stacked-up man seedless water-former well-fitting nervous system also tightly-fitted nerves” (in German) and “the hat makes the man, style is the tailor” (in French). Perhaps Ernst pictures the crazy evolution of a new kind of man, with a new sort of nervous system, constructed out of standard parts and commodity images, a mass ornament of one. Certainly he pushes mimetic adaptation to a parodic extreme: here man has indeed become a mad hatter; the only true readymade, he is now a mere appendage to his own creations, a mere effect of the automatisms of production and consumption.

9. Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. John William Gabriel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 79. 10. Ursula Dustmann suggests “maggoty shame” in Max Ernst in Köln, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Cologne: Rheinland Verlag, 1980), p. 118. 11. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1948), p. 16.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684263 by guest on 30 September 2021 Top. Max Ernst. The Hat Makes the Man. 1920. Left: Ernst. The Punching Ball or The Immortality of Buonarroti. 1920. © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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Negative Expressionism

The Dadaist Shaman or Scham-man is not without forerunners. For Ball Dada is “a synthesis of the romantic, dandyistic, and demonic theories of the nineteenth century” (May 23, 1917). “The great isolated minds of the last epoch have a tendency to persecution, epilepsy, and paralysis,” he writes on November 3, 1915. “They are obsessed, rejected, and maniacal, all for the sake of their work. They turn to the public as if it should interest itself in their sickness; they give it the material for assess- ing their condition.” Ball sees Nietzsche, the subject of his dissertation, as the great precedent of this mimetic performance; for Benjamin it is Baudelaire, who had the “physiognomy of a mime” and an “empathy with inorganic things.”12 Theodor Adorno turns this particular intuition into a general thesis: “Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated,” he writes in Aesthetic Theory (1970). “Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes.”13 Both Benjamin and Adorno read this “dandyistic and demonic” genealogy through the optic of Dada. In Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) Adorno writes of Stravinsky: “Musical infantilism belongs to a movement which designed schizophrenic models everywhere as a mimetic defense against the insanity of war; around 1918, Stravinsky was attacked as a Dadaist.”14 And in a scattered note on “Negative Expressionism,” Benjamin writes of the Russian Eccentrics, a troupe of avant-garde actors who liked to mimic circus performers: “Clown and natural peoples—sublation of inner impulses and of the body center. . . . Dislocation of shame. Expression of true feeling: of despair, displacement. Consequent discovery of deep expressive capacity: the man remains seated as the chair on which he sits is pulled out from under him. . . . Connection to Picabia.”15

Mussel-man

For Benjamin the ultimate purpose of mimetic adaptation is “to survive civilization,” to remain seated after the chair is pulled out.16 Such is the ultimate

12. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 55. 13. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 21. Benjamin: “The unique importance of Baudelaire resides in his being the first and the most unflinching to have taken the measure of the self-estranged human being, in the double sense of acknowledging this being and fortifying it with armor against the reified world” (The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 322). 14. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), p. 168. 15. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–91), p. 132; thanks to Michael Jennings for the translation of this fragment. For a rich account of this genealogy, which Benjamin extends to Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, see Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002). 16. In a 1931 fragment on Mickey Mouse, Benjamin writes: “In these films, mankind makes

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goal of the Dada mime as well, and finally it is why Ball and Ernst practice the buffoonery of “the bashed ego.”17 More desperate than the cynical reason of Duchamp and Picabia, the bashed ego resists in the “form of unresisting accommodation.”18 For many critics this is the political limitation of Dada: it advances a critique that flaunts its own futility, a defense that knows the damage is already done. After Ball designates the Dadaist “as the organ of the outlandish,” he adds: “But since it turns out to be harmless, the spectator begins to laugh at himself about his fear” (March 2, 1916). Yet this catharsis is not purging; it is sickening, and it only compounds the hopelessness; paradoxically, however, it is this very hopelessness that gives the bashed ego its critical edge, its unaccommodated negativity.19 “The farce of these times, reflected in our nerves, has reached a degree of infantilism and godlessness that cannot be expressed in words” (February 10, 1917). Not even “a man without qualities,” the Dadaist is a man without a man; the opposite of the Super-Man, he is an Un-Man.20 The Dadaists virtualized this figure of dehumanization as a form of defense—against world war, brutal industrialization, nationalist madness, repressive government. They could not have foreseen that such dehumanization would be realized in the concentration camps.21 In many

preparations to survive civilization” (Selected Writings: Volume II, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 545). He uses similar lines in “Karl Kraus” (1931) and “Experience and Poverty” (1933). 17. I associate the strategy of mimetic adaptation (or better: mimetic exacerbation) with this challenge of Marx: “petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing them their own song” (Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction,” in Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964], p. 47; translation modified). It is also akin to “the kynical irony” that Peter Sloterdijk ascribes to Dada in Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]); I borrow the term “bashed ego” from him (see pp. 391–409). 18. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 441. 19. This catharsis is less Aristotelian than Barthesian: “What liberates metaphor, symbol, emblem for poetic mania, what manifests its power of subversion, is the preposterous” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], p. 81). 20. Benjamin was also fascinated by this figure; see Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, pp. 80–90. 21. In If This Is a Man (1958) Primo Levi reports that “the old ones” at Auschwitz used the term Muselmann “to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.” Levi calls them “the drowned”: “an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of nonmen who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them. . . . ” Levi continues: “They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.” See If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Wool (London: Abacus, 1987), pp. 94, 96. T. J. Clark comments on this passage vis-à-vis modernism in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 407. Sadly, given present circumstances, Muselmann means Muslim. In The Truce (1963) Levi does not leave this figure anonymous, but that is little relief: “Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralyzed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive,

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ways the camps render the figure of the Dadaist mime null and void, but perhaps not entirely so. Perhaps an artist like Andy Warhol suggests what a postwar version of this figure might be, a version refitted to consumer society. In the early 1960s, about the same time that Warhol produced his “Death in America” images, Marcel Broodthaers wrote his Pense-Bête poems, the title of which alone points to an affinity with the Dadaist mime. Broodthaers worked to make reification at once literal and allegorical, and to mime a preemptive embrace that might also be a reflexive defense. His “La Moule” (the Mussel) reads: “This clever thing has avoided society’s mold. / She’s cast herself in her very own. / Other look-alikes share with her the anti-sea. / She’s perfect.”22

full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgment, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish” (Ibid., p. 197). 22. See October 42 (Fall 1987), pp. 26–29. Broodthaers was a student of reification also in the sense that he was a student of Lucien Goldmann, who was in turn a student of Georg Lukàcs. In Pense-Bête “La Moule” is paired with “La Méduse” (the Jellyfish): “She’s perfect / No mold / Nothing but body / Pomegranate [grenade] set in sand. / Kiss of lips unspoiled. / Bride. Always a bride, in dazzling terms. / Crystal of scorn, of great price at last, gob of spit, wave, wavering.”

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