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Hugo Ball Reciting Karawane, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Courtesy Stiftung Hans Arp Und Sophie Taeuber-Arp E.V., Rolandseck

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Hugo Ball Reciting Karawane, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Courtesy Stiftung Hans Arp Und Sophie Taeuber-Arp E.V., Rolandseck Hugo Ball reciting Karawane, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Courtesy Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V., Rolandseck. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684263 by guest on 30 September 2021 Dada Mime 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684263 by guest on 30 September 2021 168 OCTOBER 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684263 by guest on 30 September 2021 Dada Mime 169 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684263 by guest on 30 September 2021 170 OCTOBER 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.
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