&#&#%7.674' %4+6+%#.6':65 106*'#8#06)#4&' AVANT-GARDE CRITICAL STUDIES 18 Editor Klaus Beekman Associate Editors Sophie Berrebi, Ben Rebel, Jan de Vries, Willem G. Weststeijn International Advisory Board Henri Béhar, Hubert van den Berg, Peter Bürger, Ralf Grüttemeier, Hilde Heinen, Leigh Landy Founding Editor Fernand Drijkoningen† &#&#%7.674' %4+6+%#.6':65 106*'#8#06)#4&' 'FKVGFD[ &CH[FF,QPGU $PVWHUGDP1HZ<RUN1< &RYHULPDJH7LP/RQJ &RYHUGHVLJQ$DUW-DQ%HUJVKRHII $OOWLWOHVLQWKH$YDQW*DUGH&ULWLFDO6WXGLHVVHULHV IURPRQZDUGV DUH DYDLODEOHWRGRZQORDGIURPWKH,QJHQWDZHEVLWHKWWSZZZLQJHQWDFRP 7KHSDSHURQZKLFKWKLVERRNLVSULQWHGPHHWVWKHUHTXLUHPHQWVRI³,62 ,QIRUPDWLRQDQGGRFXPHQWDWLRQ3DSHUIRUGRFXPHQWV 5HTXLUHPHQWVIRUSHUPDQHQFH´ ,6%1 (GLWLRQV5RGRSL%9$PVWHUGDP1HZ<RUN1< 3ULQWHGLQ7KH1HWKHUODQGV CONTENTS Short preface 7 Introduction: der Holzweg der Holzwege 9 I. Manifestos and Evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire Cornelius Partsch The Mysterious Moment: early Dada performance as ritual 37 John Wall and Dafydd Jones The Body of the Voice: corporeal poetics in Dada 66 II. Dada and Language T. J. Demos The Language of “Expatriation” 91 Anna Katharina Schaffner Assaulting the Order of Signs 117 III. Dada Siegt! Martin Ignatius Gaughan The Prosthetic Body in Early Modernism: Dada’s anti-humanist humanism 137 Curt Germundson Montage and Totality: Kurt Schwitters’s relationship to “tradition” and “avant-garde” 156 IV. Thinkers on Stage Stephen C. Foster The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and spiritual materialism 187 Dafydd Jones To Be or Not To Be ... Arthur Cravan: subject, surface and difference 200 V. Philosophy, Theory and the Avant-Garde Joel Freeman Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: toward an ontology of the avant-garde 225 David Cunningham Making an Example of Duchamp: history, theory, and the question of the avant-garde 254 VI. Dada Critical Bibliography Timothy Shipe A Decade of Dada Scholarship: publications on Dada, 1994–2005 287 List of illustrations 322 Contributors 325 Short preface Critically thinking the currency of Dada in the twenty-first century – like Peter Sinfield’s schizoid man – is imperative if Dada is to secure any continuity and relevance beyond its narrow, if not parenthetic, historical moment at the start of the twentieth. Moving towards real- isation of such a project, the present volume was first conceptually outlined as part of a presentation addressing theoretical virtuality in visual culture (instanced, on that occasion, in the 1930s’ drawings and relief constructions of British modernist and Surrealist Ceri Richards – works that made a marked impression on Hans Arp when he visited Richards’s London studio in 1937) during an otherwise fruitless visit to the University of Leeds in late 2002. The following summer, a number of papers addressing Dada and the idea of the avant-garde dir- ectly, and attempting a critical recontextualising of Dada, were pre- sented at the Sixth International Literature and Humanities Confer- ence at Eastern Mediterranean University in Famagusta, signalling how the address of twenty-first century Dada would necessarily and simultaneously come from a range of disciplines within the human- ities. Prompted by Dietrich Scheunemann – to whom, in his absence, this volume is heavily indebted – the guiding principle of Klaus Beekman at Rodopi Verlag served then to direct a body of work that in the twelve months following had diversified and at once clarified the terms, range and ultimately limit of the scope here presented, and which now constitutes part of the ongoing response to the call for a new approach towards a comprehensive assessment of the avant-garde … [which will] confront more clearly the complex and often contradictory nature of the avant-garde’s manifestations and its theoretical discourses … [in the] attempt to provide initial outlines of alternative approaches and put forward first proposals of a revised practice of interpretation. (Scheunemann 2000: 9-10) The birth of two daughters to the Jones household during the two years outlined above not only confirmed the theory that “dada” (and “mama” too) is indeed a developmental milestone linguistically, but proved also a constant reminder that there was a book on Dada press- ing. The book, in turn, owes to individuals whose participation has been both directly and indirectly foundational. I most sincerely wish 8 Short preface to express my gratitude for the ready participation of the individual contributors, and to thank especially Clive Cazeaux, Jonathan Clark- son, Andrew Furey, Manon Gallet, the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa, Dvora Janco, Alun Jones, Geinor Jones, Duncan Large, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Tim Long, Nicola Pearce at DACS, Hywel Pennar, Marieke Schilling, Christopher Short, Julio Sims at the Getty Research Institute, the Société Serneriste and, inevitably, Swansea religious bookseller Gareth Rees, whose pursuit of the internationally mobile Knights Templar inside and outside the precinct of Famagusta made the summer of 2003 a blast. (Incidentally, it’s the books that are religious, not necessarily the seller.) My invariable debt comes last, outstanding as it always will be to my mother and father who are both present in every independent thought. And when the work is done, the best part of the day is to come home to revolutionary joy with Denise, Lleucu and Gwen. DJ Cardiff, 24 April 2006 Scheunemann, Dietrich (ed.). 2000. European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, Avant Garde Critical Studies 15. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Introduction der Holzweg der Holzwege Perhaps the falsest of all false paths was the narrow thoroughfare Spiegelgasse. Lenin made his distinction clear, on more than one occasion, between “freedom” as symptomatic of bourgeois-anarchist individualism, and the real freedom he believed would be actualised through revo- lutionary thought breaking out of bourgeois slavery and merging with “the movement of the really advanced and thoroughly revolutionary class” (1967). His distinction drew on Dietzgen’s hostility to the ma- terialist theory of knowledge embodied in “free-thinkers” who, together, constituted a reactionary mass in relation to social dem- ocracy.1 For Lenin, what opposed “free thinkers” were “integral people … who do not separate theory from practice” (1962: 340-41), whose system is inscribed in their practice, even, indeed and perhaps surprisingly argued when such a system is an opiate religious one. To believe that we are free in our liberal democratic society is our delusion; it demonstrates our failure to see our structural accom- modation and containment, and our failure to admit the painful truth, as Lenin understood it, that there can be “no real and effective ‘freedom’ in a society based on the power of money” (1967). The ad- mission, if conceded, is at least productive; to recognise Lenin’s comparison of a living movement with a mechanism is to make the structure visible – and if nothing else this much subsequently redeems the structuralist’s position. Once the structure is visible, we can begin to think our relation to it; if we cease to think that relation, the structure again recedes into invisibility and resumes its unchallenged and effectively uninterrupted repressive exercise. 10 Dada Culture To think – and to think about thinking – is to participate in a common activity, and thought is a public matter that everybody, it is argued, should be required to attend to. Thinking takes the specific instance to construct a generalisation, but the general proves of little consequence unless, as Dietzgen cautions, it is “conceived in its relation to its special [specific] forms” (1906: 357). Thus read, think- ing is a contradictory process, necessarily struggling between general- isation and specialisation, but not necessarily working towards synthesis and resolution (although Dietzgen suggests that it is in the nature of the mind to seek to “harmonise” the contradictions of the world, to relativise and equate them) – precisely the opposite on occasion, to capitalise on contradiction and conflict, and actively to counter any potential synthesis or resolution. It becomes instructive, especially when we attempt to work through the bluffs and counter- bluffs of twentieth-century avant-garde strategies, to return to Dietzgen’s early observation that reason develops its understanding out of contradictions, an observation which, though central to his dialectical thought, can help us move away from too close and strict a conformity with dialectical materialism (which, we note, Dietzgen had identified independently of Marx and Engels) and the not always helpful bog standard form of the dialectic that charts passage from thesis and antithesis to synthesis – in Engels’s words the “continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another” (1940); in Tzara’s words “an amusing mechanism which guides us … to the opinions we had in the first place” (1989: 79). Presented as a way of understanding reality, dialectical materialism is flawed by its privileging of synthetic resolution above antithetic irreconcilability; its more productive potential resides perhaps in capitalising upon the latter, and certainly in its declared resistance to a sense of the eternal, the final, the sacred, with its deliberate insistence on transience and on the absence of absolute boundaries. The “free thinkers” that Lenin, following Dietzgen, singled out and named for criticism were the professors of philosophy, “muddled idealists” who exercised a tortuous idealism and whose very vocation – philosophy