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Home , Dada Manifesto, Him (Cummings play), Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Wlad Godzich

Circulations: In and Around Zurich

T. J. DEMOS

The Cabaret Voltaire . . . has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and , to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. —, 1916

Dada remains within the framework of 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 flags of all the consulates. —, 1916

For Roman Jakobson, it is against the background of the “zoological nation- alism” of European nation-states during that the Dadaist rebellion becomes comprehendible and reaches its most subversive intensity. While the antinationalism 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 Zurich Dada in particular. Writing 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 “infantile anti-French attacks of the French Dadaists and the anti-German attacks of the Germans.”1 For him, the Dadaists’ displacement from national identity was symptomatic of its participation 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.: Press, 1987), p. 40.

OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 147–158. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Albert Einstein’s theory, Nikolai Bukharin’s post-Marxist concepts of value—but the recent semiological developments 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-state identity that we confront today (even if they are far from identical). This contemporary crisis is defined by the new coordinates of globalized , its imperial conquest and coerced ideological conformity, which is haunted by its dialectical other: the frequent and sometimes desperate acts of antiglobalization generated within the degrading conditions of political and economic inequality. Similarly, the Dadaist rebellion (especially in Zurich) emerged in critical and sometimes desperate response to the brutal protection of national interests and the cynical manipulations of patriotic energies. Paying attention to Dadaist strategies offers a fascinating story of how the avant-garde once dreamed of resistance to such domination and power. This story begins with what called “the spirit of expatriation,” which motivated him, , and others to pointedly elude military service during World War I and to escape the pressures of nationalization in Europe (and later in America) by immigrating to neutral countries.2 Similarly, the German nationals Hugo Ball, , along with the Romanian Tristan Tzara, and the Alsatian coming from , established the Zurich context in neutral for similar reasons.3 Geopolitical dislocation—from both national geography and nationalist ideology—is fundamental to Dada’s identity. Thus Jakobson saw in the Dadaists the radical potential of the sailor (perhaps thinking of those on the ): “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 antinationalism 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 . 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 find a neutral country called Argentina” (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp [1966], trans. Ron Padgett [New York: Da Capo, 1971], p. 59). Picabia nationalism in the “Cannibal ” 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 expatriation, see my “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of , 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 profiteers 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). 4. Jakobson, “Dada,” p. 34.

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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 suffixes, 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 , the mobility of the readymade, as well as the poetry of , Blaise Cendrars, and Stephane Mallarmé, variously instituted to dissolve languages that had other- wise rigidified or become corrupted. The Dadaists in Zurich were sympathetic. For Hugo Ball, the expat German who retreated to Zurich after witnessing the horrifying front in 1914, language was deeply discredited due to its use as that “justified” 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 dismantled and reconstructed anew, Ball stood on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, dressed in a ridiculous and awkward outfit, 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 reified and corrupted languages instrumentalized by 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 function as a system of positive values, whether naming an object or clearly identifying its subject; rather, its signification 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 signifier from any positive meaning, resituating it within a play of difference, then Dada performed and exacerbated this deracina- tion, and experienced it as politically critical of conventional languages and

5. Ibid., p. 37. 6. 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: 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 accounts. 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 Italy; a hobbyhorse, a children’s nurse, 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 Enunciated 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 identification for listeners. It merges a multinational structure with the thematics of homelessness (its “” 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 unification. The only unity possible, in fact, was that formed around the very homelessness of identity; for the admiral finds nothing to rent. The exem- plary identity of national identification, 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 firmly 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 unification, “forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating . . . the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized . . . language.”10 Heteroglossia, or the multilanguagedness of language, would oppose such centralization by high-

8. This semiological reading of has been advanced by Rosalind Krauss in essays such as “The Motivation of the Sign,” and Yve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” both in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of , 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.

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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 enunciative conditions, authorial 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 national 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 redefined 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 rhetorical power—the power to interpellate identity, to forge collective identification—not through its meaning but through its very performance. It resembles a type of political language that Slavoj Zizek defines in this way: In itself it is nothing but a “pure difference”: its role is purely structural, its nature is purely performative—its signification coincides with its own act of enunciation; in short, it is a ‘signifier without the signified’ . . . 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 . 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 flag 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 postnational.14 Hugo Ball was clear: language had failed during 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. , Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). Dada’s traumatic subject is discussed in Hal Foster, “Armor Fou,” October 56 (Spring 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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all over again.”15 The answer, Ball urged, was a necessary retraining of subjectivity: “People will not see that a revolution cannot be ‘made’ except by an accelerated relearning.”16 The Dadaists began relearning language, a method by which they could target the ideological myth of unity at its very origin. This revolutionary need for an “accelerated relearning” helps to explain the otherwise paradoxical didacticism and logical composition of certain projects of Zurich Dada, such as Tzara’s score for L’amiral. Although the performance of the simultaneous poem surely catalyzed spontaneous disruptions and utter confusion in its recital, the score, as reproduced in the journal Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, ironically emphasizes visual order, compositional symmetry between voices and pages, and typographical consistency—so different from Cubism’s focus on the collage’s fissure, or Dada’s various experimentations with typeface, or Mallarmé’s, Apollinaire’s or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s fragmentation and playful spatialization of language across and between pages. While certainly a perverse and critical of the very order 15. Ball, Flight, p. 25. 16. Ibid., p. 78 (emphasis added). Such an idea that Dada was at least partly productive diverges from dominant scholarship that defines Dada (especially in Zurich) as purely nihilistic, traumatized, or deconstructive.

Tristan Tzara. “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer.” Score reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916.

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of traditional representational paradigms under attack (particularly the conven- tional pedagogy of sheet music), Tzara’s score appears to have mimicked them only to discipline a posttraditional subject. Ball practiced “relearning” as well: reading from scripts on music stands carefully placed before him, he ventriloquized authoritarian identities of church and state alike to critical ends. But in contrast to Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which were sometimes performed with up to twenty people at a time (as in his Fever of the Male of 1919), the radicality of Karawane was that it modeled a new identity by practicing a multilanguaged discourse in the speech of the single speaker. Despite its ostensible appeal to a solipsistic abstraction, and despite its primitivizing urge toward an imagined degree zero of language, Karawane spoke in several languages at once: jolifanto combines the French joli (pretty) and éléphanteau (baby elephant); there is the obvious Spanish habla (to talk); the Portuguese falli (close to “speech”); anlogo (near logos or “word” in Latin); bosso (“boss” in Italian, “bump” in Portuguese); and of course Karawane (“caravan” in German). The poem strings together a caravan of multinational words—frequently referring to language itself—in a speech that is hybridized and reflexive.17 Ball’s speech attacks the very ideology of linguistic essentialism, which was the goal of various nationalist projects during the time; for his speech is built on self-difference—releasing the signifier from national homogeneity. At the bottom of his speech, even if at moments regressive, we find neither the kernel of an absolute, singular expressive identity (as in ), nor the originary source of libidinal energy (the id of psychoanalytic biologism), but the Other—a divided logos, or in Ball’s terminology, “anlogos.”18 For many at the time, such a conception of identity—as founded upon difference—was subversive. If the careful deployment of “foreign words consti- tuted little cells of resistance to the nationalism of WWI,” as Theodor Adorno remembered it, then it was because the use of such words introduced difference into purist conceptions of language, disrupting the myth of its natural or organic origins.19 This was precisely the political impact of Ball’s Karawane.

17. My argument would thus counter views of Ball’s Lautgedichte that read them as totally abstract. Anson Rabinbach, for instance, repeats the commonly held view that “the sound poems abandoned the language of signs for an ‘Adamic language’ of innocence, resurrecting a speech that is utterly beyond all war and catastrophe,” in “The Inverted Nationalism of Hugo Ball’s Critique of the German Intelligentsia,” in Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919), (New York: Columbia, 1993), p. xiii. The opposite view would be to read the sound poem as a “synthesis of all languages,” for instance in Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998), p. 112. However, while Ball may have shared such motivations, I believe the poems are more productively understood as experimental constructs built out of multinational linguistic fragments that maintain their difference and particularity, especially in the context of a multilingual community in Zurich, Switzerland. 18. I follow Bakhtin once again, who argued (against Freud) that at the bottom of the subject we find not the Id, but the Other, as explains in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Press, 1998), p. 33. Compare with White, who reads Ball’s sound poems as unfolding from an “inviolable core,” p. 103. 19. Theodor Adorno, “Words from Abroad,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Press, 1991), p. 186.

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Dada’s renunciation of conventional language in its sound poems entailed a withdrawal from traditional social formations, most visible in Dada’s “public performance of privatism,” as Leah Dickerman suggestively terms it. Placing Dada within a larger historical framework of the modernizing movement from “community” to “society,” Dickerman suggests that “it is the loss of community, rather than simply its nonexistence, that lies at the core of Dadaism.”20 This points to a profound “solipsism” evident in Dadaist practice. While particularly relevant to certain aspects of Dada, especially ’s (un)homely Merzbau, the solipsistic impulse, I believe, is only part of the story in Zurich. What appears to be the radical element of Dada is precisely the publicness of its performances as constitutive of a new form of community—one constituted by national difference and linguistic diversity. However, I do not mean to discard the asocial and intro- verted core Dickerman identifies, for while Ball’s language performs multinational difference, it nevertheless resists the subsumption of speech into a transparent, universal melting pot language, or a utopian . It is undeniable that there is something intensely private and opaque about Ball’s speech that resists communication, just as his strange costume projects an image of alterity. I would argue that this solipsistic element highlights the singularity of identity, which refuses to collapse into any unified and essentialized (but nevertheless “imaginary”) community of nationalism.21 Indeed, “born out of a mistrust for the community,” Dada suggests a heterogeneous community, one composed of identities that reject compliance, that “respect all individualities in their folly of the moment,” as Tzara’s insisted.22 Dada’s artistic models, needless to say, represented an assault on reactionary avant-garde formations (such as ) and on the (post-)avant-garde participation in the nationalization of the arts in France, Germany, and the during the beginning of World War I.23 Although Ball was initially enthusiastic about Marinetti’s “parole in libertà,” in the end he “abhorred” their content, which he deemed offensively jingoistic.24 And while Ball may have shared Futurism’s interest in typographic experimentations, fractured speech, and the negation of syntax and punctuation, his linguistic model was fundamentally

20. Leah Dickerman, “Dada’s Solipsism,” Documents 19 (Fall 2000), p. 18. 21. In his analysis of group psychology in 1921, Freud discussed nationalism as a pathological (protofascist) consolidation of the ego with the ego ideal of the leader, bringing about a weakening of individuality and independence and a strengthening of group binding. Dada performs the reversal of such a group formation. See Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959). 22. Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” p. 13. Recently Jean-Luc Nancy has theorized the relation between a linguistic model of divided logos and the formation of a desubstantialized community, in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which informs my reading of Zurich Dada. 23. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–25 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 24. Hugo Ball, “Die Reise nach Dresden,” Die Revolution 3; cited in John Elderfield, “Introduction,” in Ball, Flight, p. xviii.

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opposed to Futurism’s reinvention of language as onomatopoeic, as in Marinetti’s like Bombardment of 1915, in which the words “Bum Bum Bum” and “Tang Tumb Tumb” drop like bombs on the page. Marinetti desired that such words explode the distinction between sign and referent in order to capture the semantic and phonetic immediacy of a nationalized language best achieved in the sounds and experience of warfare.25 In this case, language was pushed toward the self- same, where sign slid into referent and language into its imaginary national origin. Ball’s aesthetic, conversely, reveals the impossibility of such a desire. No doubt because the Dadaist group formed during the war, rather than in the naive excitement preceding it, its members were all too aware of the ideological uses of patriotism as a unifying cloak for governmental manipulations with capitalist and imperialist motivations to fall for Futurism’s appeal. Confronting the reality of warfare, Ball easily chose Bakunin’s over Sorel’s nationalism. For instance, he noted in his journal one of many “important points” gleaned from Bakunin’s The Commune and the Idea of the State: “The state is like a gigantic slaughterhouse or a cemetery; there, in the shadow and on the pretext of represent- ing the general interest, all the real aspirations, all the living forces of a country give themselves willingly to the slaughter.”26 Like Ball, Jean Arp was also “disgusted by the butchery of World War I” and by the megalomaniacal “” behind it.27 As a bicultural Alsatian who had left Paris for Zurich to escape French nationalism, Arp desired to void from his collages any trace of nationalist subjectivity and its instrumentalized reason, which he viewed as utterly debased by the war. The collages, Arp explained, were “a denial of human egotism . . . ” through which “Our brothers’ hands, rather than serving as our own, had become enemy hands.”28 If Arp employed chance, the grid, or a paper cutter in his construction process, it was to evacuate not only egotism but also the potential enactment of rational, and thus suspect, volition in the authorship of his work.29 Similarly, Arp turned to collaborative projects, as in the Duo-Collages of 1918 made with Sophie Taeuber, to investigate what he called “the problem of anonymity.”30 Desubjectification ruled his collages in terms of both the prohibition of figuration and the renunciation of authorial intentionality, which paralleled Ball’s autodiffer- entiation of the self. In both models, difference and hybridity became the truth of identity and this exposure became the political force of their projects.

25. See Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 26. Flight, p. 24. 27. Jean Arp, “Dadaland,” in Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 232. 28. Ibid., p. 232. 29. For Arp, “We even felt the personality to be burdensome and useless since it developed in a world now petrified and lifeless.” Thus Arp desired to evacuate “cerebral intention” in his collages, “eliminating all volition.” See “And So the Circle Closed,” in Arp on Arp, and “Dadaland,” p. 232. 30. For more on Taeuber, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Sophie Taeuber-Arp against Greatness,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684245 by guest on 29 September 2021 Left: Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber. Untitled (Duo- Collage). 1918. Right: Arp. Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance. 1916–17. © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Arp’s collages play out the terms of identity-as-difference by introducing displacement into their very formal structure in the construction process. The procedure of dropping pieces of paper on the ground to arrive at their composition, which calls to mind the aleatory creation of Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, not only represents an assault on the “logical” bourgeois subjectivity of traditional artistic production, but also emphasizes the mobility and decontextualization that came to allegorize Arp’s own geopolitical displacement (as it did for Duchamp as well). The structure of identity-as-difference is also detected in the simultaneous presence of contradictory in the earliest of Arp’s collages. What is striking about those of 1916, such as the famous collages “made according to the laws of chance,” is that they invoke both the grid’s compositional format and chance-based procedures (even if this claim of using chance was made retrospectively, aleatory elements are still evident in the collages). In one, the logical arrangement of squarish pieces of paper is disrupted by their irregular sizes, colors, and place- ment, which destabilize the clean consistency of the grid. Additionally, the geometrical shapes of the paper that mimic the rectilinear support are in fact quite rough, due to their edges having been torn, which offers further signs of randomness in their process of construction. This combination of the grid and chance is contradictory because while the grid indicates the logic of scientific rationality, the use of chance represents its total rejection. Surely Arp invoked the former only to attack it with the latter. However, for Arp, both shared the same function: each displaced agency from artistic production, whether by letting

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aleatory systems take over compositional determination or by allowing the grid to dictate composition and thus release the author from the responsibility of such decisions. In addition, the random use of commercial paper further eliminated choices of color, tone, texture, and so on. Arp’s collages thus became a kind of battle- ground in which bourgeois logic and were called up only to be destroyed. Hybridity is indicated in Arp’s collages on a second level of contradiction by the intrusion of readymade elements into the terrain of abstraction, primarily through the use of commercial papers, but additionally through the employment of what might be called the readymade logic of its grid template. This abstraction/readymade combination is oxymoronic because whereas abstraction typically enacts the principles of simplification and purification, embracing originality and immanence, the readymade elements signal the very denial of originality, instead favoring the repetition of mass production. Also, whereas abstraction defines a space of ostensible autonomy, the readymade invokes commercial frameworks and the institutional site of its recontextualization. These conflictual factors suggest a complex reading of an expatriate identity, one that desires a new redemptive order outside of the domination of capitalist alienation and nationalist exploitation (abstraction), but that recognizes the ultimate impossibility of any new original language or autonomous space (the readymade). They indicate a fundamentally split subject, a divided singularity, which Ball acknowledged too: “[Arp] assumes here that the images of the imagination are already composites. The artist who works from his freewheeling imagination is deluding himself about originality. He is using a material that is already formed and so is undertaking only to elaborate on it.”31 In other collages, Arp conspicuously turned toward perfected geometries, straightened edges, and a more rigorous obedience to vertical and horizontal axes within his compositions, which seemingly overcame any sign of chance. These reveal the dominance of the very forms of rationality and technology that he was ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place. And they suggest this despite—or per- haps even because of—his wish to desubjectify the collages. We must wonder if there is not a further paradoxical remainder in Arp’s work, or in other moments of Zurich Dada, that indicates not only an ambivalent mimicry of dehumanized conditions, but also a desire for a redemptive order, even a purified model of sub- jectivity. Such a slippage would be confirmed in Ball—if not in Arp—in his own eventual embrace of a certain form of German nationalism after the war when he gave up Dada to write about politics and religion. And here again there is a corre- spondence between language and identity, if the opposite of the Dadaist equation; for Ball would contemplate a concept of a unified and originary “logos” that would speak the very “language of God” emanating from the “eternal home- land.”32 While the temptation of essentialism may be perceptible in his earliest

31. Ball, Flight, p. 53. 32. Ibid, p. 188.

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Dadaist period, by 1918 it seems to be unavoidable, as indicated in his eventual realization that “I am nevertheless completely German, German in my essence.”33 For Anson Rabinbach, this identifies Ball’s “inverted nationalism”—inverted because despite his hostility toward militarism, illiberal politics, and national chauvinism, he succumbed to a purist account of national identity (one, ominously, hostile to “Jewish” ). Of course, signs of essentialism were already perceptible in the primitivizing and abstracting aspects of Zurich Dada (particularly in the expressionist art nègre of and Hans Richter, the chants nègres of Tzara and Huelsenbeck, and the elementary organicism of Arp’s biomorphic collages). We can conclude that its aesthetics of anti-nationalism were at worst unstable and often contradictory. But, at best, Zurich Dada represented a radical attempt to model an identity that was immersed in a social space founded on difference and inclusiveness, constituted by an internally divided representation.

33. Cited in Rabinbach, p. xxviii. Even in 1916, Ball had tried to rediscover “the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image”(Flight, p. 68).

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