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In and Around Zurich Dada

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In and Around Zurich Dada 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 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. —Tristan Tzara, 1916 For Roman Jakobson, it is against the background of the “zoological nation- alism” of European nation-states during World War I 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.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 40. OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 147–158. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684245 by guest on 29 September 2021 148 OCTOBER 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 capitalism, 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 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 nationalization 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 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 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 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 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 find 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 expatriation, 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 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684245 by guest on 29 September 2021 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 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 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 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 propaganda 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 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 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: 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684245
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