diss - performing ideology - jscholarship

PERFORMING IDEOLOGY:

DADAIST PRAXIS AND INTERPELLATION

by

J. Brandon Pelcher

A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with

the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Baltimore, Maryland

August, 2017

© 2017 J. Brandon Pelcher

All Rights Reserved

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Abstract

My dissertation, Performing Ideology: Dadaist Praxis and Interpellation, analyzes the

intersection of Dadaist works across various media and the formation of ideological subjects. I

argue in my thesis that Dadaist praxis subverts the operative reproduction of ideology as

interpellation through various modes of media-dependent disruptive discourse. As theoretical

framework, my dissertation reads, develops, and utilizes Louis Althusser’s conception of

interpellation, the creation of ideological subject positions, as a literary and aesthetic theory,

wherein works of literature and art are recognized as not only as a reflection of some ideology,

but a tool in the reproduction of that ideology. This is particularly apt for the Dadaist work,

which violently jolted and confronted its potential audience until that audience was forced to

become its actual audience.

The intersection of this framework and Dadaist works as instantiations of Dadaist praxis is

explored throughout the various media landscapes of Dada. I begin with a reading of Kurt

Schwitters’s concrete poem “Das i-Gedicht” as exemplary of Dadaist encounters with the

isolated sign and its supposed transparency, which I then expand to a reading of the word dada

itself, both of which focus on the iterability and modes of materiality of the sign. I next

investigate Dadaist manifestos, particularly those by Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann,

and Tristan Tzara. Dadaist manifestos hypertheatrically parody the otherwise theatrical

presumption to auto-authority initially necessary to, but ultimately overcome by a performatively

felicitous manifesto. My next chapter focuses on Dadaist photomontage as a violent subversion

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of the photographic image’s ostensible indexicality as described by Charles Peirce, with the

reintroduction of the frame and the materiality of the cut. I read this symbolic violence in both

portrait and societal targeted photomontage. This leads to an extended reading of Hannah Höch’s

major works. Finally, I take commodity as medium to read Marcel Duchamp’s readymades as a

critical investigation of commodity aesthetics and its force within ideological subject formation,

particularly his With Hidden Noise as a radical critique of the shop window. I conclude with

suggestions for affinities in disruptive discourse and performance, such as theoretical concepts

within post-colonialism and queer and feminist theory.

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Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements vi

Abbreviations vii

List of Figures viii

–––––

Introduction 1

1 “Hey, Dadaist Over There!”: Dada, Ideology, and Interpellation 9

Ideology 20

Interpellation 26

2 “Can’t You Read the Dada?”:

The Letter and the Word in and as Dada 42

Das i-Gedicht 46

Work to Genre; /i/ to i 58

The Word dada 72

3 “A Specter is Haunting Dadaism”:

Dadaist Manifestos, Theater, and Irony 84

The Manifesto 89

Theatricality 105

Meliorisms 117

Ironies & Contradictions 133

4 “So brauchen wir nur die Schere nehmen”:

Painting/Writing the Dadaist Photomontage 147

Experiments & Index 158

Photomontages 168

Höch's Magna Opera 186

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5 “So That Its Useful Significance Disappeared”:

Subversions of the Commodity by Commodities 211

Choice at the Shop Window 216

Readymade Inscriptions 229

Conclusion 241

–––––

Figures 247

Bibliography 347

Curriculum Vitae 364

vi

Thanks to many faculty, co-workers, and colleagues throughout

Johns Hopkins University and University of Colorado Boulder,

but above all:

Drs. Andrea Krauss & Patrick Greaney

vii

Abbreviations

CP Collected Papers of Charles Peirce

CW Complete Works, Marcel Duchamp

DA Dada Art and Antiart; Hans Richter

DDSN Duchamp du signe; suivi des notes

DK Dada Kunst und Antikunst; Hans Richter

DLW Das literarische Werk; Kurt Schwitters

DT “Dada Triumphs!”; Hanne Bergius

GS Gesammelte Schriften; Walter Benjamin

KFSA Kritische Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe

MECW Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Complete Works

MEW Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke

MM Montage und Metamechanik; Hanne Bergius

OC Oeuvres Complètes; Tristan Tzara

ROC Reproduction of Capitalism, Louis Althusser

SLR Sur la reproduction, Louis Althusser

SML Seven Manifestos and Lampisteries; Tristan Tzara

SPN Selections from the Prison Notebooks; Antonio Gramsci

SW Selected Works; Walter Benjamin

Zinn Zinnoberzack, Hugo Ball

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LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter One

“Hey, Dadaist Over There!”: Dada, Ideology, and Interpellation

1.1 Francis Picabia. Portrait d’une jeune fille americaine dans l’état de nudité [Portrait of a

Young American Girl in the State of Nudity]. 1915. Ink on paper, dimensions unknown.

ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[ARTSTOR_103_41822000786481. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin,

Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 321]

Reference on page(s): 17; 243

1.2 Francis Picabia. Âne [Donkey]. June 1917. Cover of 391, 37 x 26.8 cm. International

Dada Archive. University of Iowa. Web. 25 June 2017. [DADA 01IOWA–

ALMA21380204720002771. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover,

Cologne, New York, Paris 322]


1.3 Carl Einstein & George Grosz. Gegen die Ausbeuter!! [Against the Exploiters!!]. 1919.

Advertisement for Der blütige Ernst [Bloody Serious], 20 x 40 cm. International Dada

Archive. University of Iowa. Web. 25 June 2017. [DADA 01IOWA–

ALMA21446394310002771]


Chapter Two

“Can’t You Read the Sign?”:

The Letter and the Word in and as Dada

2.1 Raoul Hausmann. OFFEAHBDC. 1918. Typography on green paper, mounted on paper,

33 x 48 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[AWSS35953_35953_30937233. See Hausmann, Texte I.18]

Reference on page(s): 12; 42; 43; 78

Raoul Hausmann. fmsbwtözäu. 1918. Typography on orange paper, mounted on paper, 33

x 48 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[AWSS35953_35953_30937313. See Hausmann, Texte I.18]


2.2 Kurt Schwitters. “Das i-Gedicht.” Die Blume Anna. Die neue Anna Blume: Eine

Gedichtsammlung aus den Jahren 1918-1922. Berlin: Sturm Verlag, 1922. 30. [See

Schwitters, Das literarische Werk I.206]

Reference on page(s): 45

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2.3 Kurt Schwitters. Ohne Titel (Ashoff, Ellen) [Untitled (Ashoff, Ellen)]. 1922. Collage,

water point, and paper on paper, 24.3 x 18.3 cm. From Kurt Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters:

Catalogue Raisonné. Eds. Karin Orchard & Isabel Schulz. 3 vol. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje

Cantz, 2000. I.478, 501. Print.


2.4 Hans Arp. Tableau i. 1920. Collage, 20.6 x 16.6 cm. From Dietmar Elger, Dadaism.

Cologne: Taschen, 2004. 33. Print.


2.5 Kurt Schwitters. Untitled (Mai 191). 1919. Collage, 17.1 x 21.6 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor,

Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_29328898. See

Schwitters, Catalogue raisonné I.355]


2.6 Kurt Schwitters. Untitled (i-Zeichnung) [i-Drawing]. 1920. Offset print on paper, 11 x

8.7 cm. From Kurt Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné. Eds. Karin Orchard

& Isabel Schulz. 3 vol. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000. I.334, 363. Print.


2.7 Kurt Schwitters. Anna Blume. 1920. Cover, with illustration and text in red and black,

22.4 x 14.4 cm. International Dada Archive. University of Iowa. Web. 25 June 2017.

[DADA 01IOWA ALMA21460245010002771. See Schwitters, Catalogue raisonné

I.256]


2.8 Kurt Schwitters. i-Zeichen [i-Drawing]. 1920. Postcard to Oskar Schlemmer, 14 x 9.4

cm.. From Kurt Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné. Eds. Karin Orchard &

Isabel Schulz. 3 vol. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000. I.364. Print.


2.9 Harald Süß. Sutterlin (details). From Harald Süß, Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lesen und

Schreiben Lernen - Lehrbuch. Augsburg: Augustus, 1995. 51; 59. Print.


From Harald Süß, Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lesen und Schreiben Lernen - Übungsbuch.

Augsburg: Augustus, 1995. 5. Print.


2.10 Harald Süß. Sutterlin (details). From Harald Süß, Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lesen und

Schreiben Lernen - Lehrbuch. Augsburg: Augustus, 1995. 51; 62. Print.


From Harald Süß, Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lesen und Schreiben Lernen - Übungsbuch.

Augsburg: Augustus, 1995. 5. Print.


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2.11 Kurt Schwitters. Tafelsalz [Table Salt]. 1922. Printed paper on paper, 32.1 x 23.3 cm.

Tate Modern. Tate Modern, London. Web. 25 June 2017. [T12391. See Schwitters,

Catalogue raisnonné I.515]


Chapter Four

“So brauchen wir nur die Schere nehmen”:

Painting/Writing the Dadaist Photomontage

4.1 Stephan H. Horgan. Steinway Hall. December 1873. Photograph. From Gail Buckland,

First Photographs: People, Places, and Phenomena as Captured for the First Time by

the Camera. New York: Macmillan, 1980. 165. Print.


4.2 Pablo Picasso. Bouteille, journal et verre sur une table [Table with Bottle, Wine Glass,

and Newspaper]. 1912. Charcoal, gouache, and papier glued to paper, 62 x 48 cm. Centre

Pompidou. Centre Pompidou. Web. 25 June 2017.


4.3 Pablo Picasso. Violon [Violin]. 1912. Pasted paper and charcoal, 62 x 47 cm. Centres

Pompidou. Centre Poumpidou, Paris, France. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Foster et al, Art

After 1900 113]


4.4 Pablo Picasso. Guitare, feuille de musique et verre [Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass].

1912. Charcoal, gouache and pasted paper, 62.5 x 47 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New

York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_26544003. See Foster et al, Art

Since 1900 117]


4.5 Georges Braque. Nature morte aux instruments de musique [Still Life of Musical

Instruments]. 1914. Pencil, newsprint, papers beige, white, black highlighted with

gouache, faux paper, pasted on paper, 63 x 47 cm. From Georges Braque, Les papiers

collés. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1982. 167. Print.


4.6 Juan Gris. Petit Déjourner [Breakfast]. 1914. Gouache, oil, and crayon on cut-and-pasted

printed paper on canvas with oil and crayon, 80.9 x 59.7 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc.,

New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_27250348. See Gris,

Catalogue Raisonné 168]


xi

4.7 Kazimir Malevich. Солдат первой дивизии [Soldier of the First Division]. 1914. Oil on

canvas with collage of printed paper, postage stamp, and thermometer, 53.7 x 44.8 cm.


[AMOMA_10312310058]


4.8 Filippo Marinetti. Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli Ottobre 1912: Parole in Libertà. 1912-

1914. Book with letterpress, 20.4 x 13.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art. Museum of Modern

Art. Web. 25 July 2017.


4.9 Reservistenbilder [Reservist Images]. Hannah Höch. Eine Lebenscollage. Ed. Cornelia

Thater-Schulz. 2 vol. Berlin: Aragon Verlag, 1989. II.472. Print.

Reference on page(s): 160; 164; 208

4.10 Bergmann & Co. A.G. Advertisement (detail). 1899. [See Meyer, “Dada ist gross, Dada

ist schön” 25]


4.11 Lucio Pozzi. P.S. 1 Paint. 1976. Acrylic on wood panel, unknown dimensions. Original

lost. [See Krauss, “Notes on the Index” 2.62]


4.12 Ellsworth Kelly. Spectrum II. 1966-1967. Oil on canvas, 13 panel polyptych, 203.2 x

693.4 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Saint Lewis Art Museum. Web. 25 June 2017.


4.13 Ellsworth Kelly. Spectrum II (detail). 1966-1967. Oil on canvas, 13 panel polyptych,

203.2 x 693.4 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Saint Lewis Art Museum. Web. 25 June

2017.


4.14 Jedermann sein eigener Fußball [Everyone their own Football], 15 February 1919, cover.


4.15 Otto Dix. Kriegskrüppel (45% Erwerbsfähig) [War Cripples (45% Fit for Service)].

1920. Oil on canvas, ca. 165 x 245 cm. Original destroyed. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New

York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_26649159. See Dickerman et

al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 98.]


4.16 Robert Sennecke. Opening of the 1st International Dada fair in the bookshop of the Dr.

Burchard in Berlin (Germany). 1920. Photograph, 16.5 x 11.9 cm. Bildarchiv

Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Berlin, Germany. Web.

25 June 2017. [2.00059445. See Biro, Dada Cyborg 161]


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4.17 Raoul Hausmann. Selbstporträt des Dadasophen [Self Portrait of the Dadasoph]. 1920.

Photomontage and collage on Japanese paper, 36.2 × 28 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc.,

New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_29328996. See Biro, Dada

Cyborg 118]


4.18 Charakterköpfe der Gegenwart II: Noske [Mastermind of the Present II: Noske]. Berliner

Illustrirte Zeitung, 2 March 1919, cover.


4.19 Huttenlocher & Krogmann G.m.b.H. Advertisement. Motor, May/June 1916, 122.


4.20 John Heartfield & George Grosz. Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield (Elektro-

mechanische Tatlin-Plastik) [The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-

Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture)]. 1920/1988 (replica). Tailor’s dummy, revolver, doorbell,

knife, and other objects, 220 x 45 x x45 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New

York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_26636168. See Dickerman et al., Dada:

Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 123]


4.21 Raoul Hausmann. Mechanisher Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) [Mechanical Head (The

Spirit of our Age)]. c. 1920. Hairdresser’s wigmaking dummy, crocodile wallet, and other

objects, 32.5 x 21 x 20 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June

2017. [SS35584_35584_26629662. [See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin,



4.22 Raoul Hausmann. Porträt einer alten Frau [Portrait of an Old Woman]. 1919. Collage on

woven paper, 25.5 x 21.2 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25

June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822000669596. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich,

Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 129]


4.23 Raoul Hausmann. Porträt eines Dienstmannes [Portrait of a Porter]. 1919. Collage on

woven paper, 26.5 x 21 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25

June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822000669604]


4.24 Raoul Hausmann. Gurk. 1918-1919. Collage on blue paper, 27 x 21.5 cm. ARTstor.

ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[ARTSTOR_103_41822000669588]


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4.25 John Heartfield. Wer Bürgerblätter liest wird blind und taub. Weg mit dem

Verdummungsbandagen! [Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and

Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages!]. 1930. Copper-plate photogravure,

dimensions unknown. J. Paul Getty Museum. J. Paul Getty Museum. Web. 25 July 2017.

[See Zervigon, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image 241]


4.26 Der Welt Speigel, 16 February 1919, cover.


4.27 Raoul Hausmann. Elasticum. 1920. Photomontage, collage, and gouache on the cover of

a exhibition catalogue Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First International Dada Fair],

31 x 37 cm. Ubu Gallery. Ubu Gallery. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Dickerman et al., Dada:



4.28 Raoul Hausmann. ABCD (Portrait de l’artiste) [ABCD (Portrait of the Artist)]. 1923-

1924. Collage and photomontage on paper, 40.4 x 28.2 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New

York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822001258613. See

Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 132]

Reference on page(s): 43; 179; 181; 197; 203

4.29 Raoul Hausmann. Tatlin lebt zu Hause [Tatlin at Home]. 1920. Photomontage and

aquarelle, 41 x 28 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June

2017. [SS35584_35584_29477077. See Biro, Dada Cyborg 138]


4.30 George Grosz. Herr Krause. 1919. Ink and collage, unknown dimensions. Original

stolen. From Hanne Bergius, Montage und metamechanik: Dada Berlin - Artistik von

Polaritäten. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000. 57; 300; 378. Print.


4.31 Georg Scholz’s Bauernbild/Industriebauern [Farmer Picture/Industrial Farmers]. 1920.

Oil on wood with collage and photomontage, 98 x 70 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New


al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 148]


4.32 George Grosz. Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft; Souviens-toi de l'oncle Auguste, le

malheureux inventeur [A Victim of Society; Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy

Inventor]. 1919. Oil and graphite on canvas with photomontage and collage of papers and

buttons, 49 x 39.5 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June

2017. [AWSS35953_35953_30936132. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin,



xiv

4.33 Raoul Hausmann. Der Kunstkritiker [The Art Critic]. 1919-1920. Photomontage and

collage with ink stamp and crayon on printed poster poem, 31.8 x 25.4 cm. ARTstor.

ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_29361520.

See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 129]


4.34 Der neue Reichskanzler Ebert [The New Reich Chancellor Ebert]. Der Welt Spiegel, 17

November 1918, cover.


4.35 John Heartfield & George Grosz. Leben und Treiben in Universal-City um 12 Uhr 5

mittags [Life and Events in Universal-City at 12:05 noon]. 1919. Original test print of

photomontage with photo and text elements and a drawing by Grosz, dimensions

unknown. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[SS35584_35584_29329565. See Brill, Shock 82]

Reference on page(s): 43; 181; 183; 184; 186; 197

4.36 Raoul Hausmann. Dada im gewöhnlichen Leben; Dada Cino [Dada in Ordinary Life;

Dada Cinema]. 1920. Collage and photomontage on paper with ink inscription, 31.7 x

22.5 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[SS35584_35584_29329088. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover,



4.37 George Grosz. Germania ohne Hemd [Germania without a Shirt]. 1919-1920.

Photomontage, Unknown dimensions. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York.

Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_30492335. See Bergius, Montage und

Metamechanik 94]


4.38 Johannes Baader. Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin (Gutenberggedenkblatt) [Honorary

Portrait of Charlie Chaplin (Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg)]. 1919. Collage with

photomontage on paper, 35 x 46.5 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York.

Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_27698584. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich,



4.39 Johannes Baader. Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: DEUTSCHLANDS GROESSE

UND UNTERGANG durch Lehrer Hagendorf oder Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte

des Oberdada [The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: GERMANY’S GRANDEUR AND

RUIN by Teacher Hagendorf or the Fantastic Life History of the Oberdada].1920.

Original lost, dimensions unknown. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web.

25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_26617510. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin,



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4.40 John Heartfield & Wieland Herzfelde. Cover of exhibition catalogue Erste Internationale

Dada-Messe [First International Dada Fair]. 1920. Photolithograph, 31 x 39 cm.


[SS35584_35584_29336622. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover,



4.41 Grundriß der Ausstellungsräume der Dada-Messe 1920 [Layout of the Exhibition Rooms

of the Dada Fair 1920]. From Hanne Bergius, Montage und metamechanik: Dada Berlin

- Artistik von Polaritäten. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000. 237; 357. Print.


4.42 Hannah Höch. Dada Rundschau [Dada Panorama]. 1919. Photomontage and montage

with gouache and watercolor on board, 43.7 x 34.5 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New


al., Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 139]


4.43 Unruhen, Straßenkampf unter Brandenburger Tor [Unrest, Street Fighting under the

Brandenburg Gate]. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 19 January 1919, 19.


4.44 Hannah Höch. Staatshäupter [Heads of State]. 1918-1920. Photomontage on iron-on

embroidery pattern, 16.2 x 23.3 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York.

Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822003045323. See Dickerman et al., Dada:



4.45 Ebert und Noske in der Sommerfrische [Ebert and Noske in the Summer Freshness].

Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 24 August 1919, cover.


4.46 Wilhelm Steffen. Haffkrug, Ebert, Noske und andere beim Baden. July 1919. Digital

Image. Bundesarchiv. Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany. Web. 25 June 2017. [Bild 146-

1987-076-13]


4.47 Der Repräsentant des “Neuen Deutschland” [The Representative of the “New German”].

Deutsche Tageszeitung, 9 August 1919, cover.


4.48 Einst und Jetzt: Friedrich Ebert und Gustav Noske in Badehosen in der Ostsee. 1919.

Postcard photomontage and print, 14.1 x 9.1 cm. Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany. Web. 25 June 2017. [GOS-Nr.

JU005059. See Albrecht, Die Macht einer Verleumdungskampagne 69]


xvi

4.49 Hannah Höch. Friedensfürst [Prince of Peace]. 1919-1920. Watercolor, gouache and

chalk on a photograph, 43.7 x 34.6 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York.

Web. 25 June 2017. [SS35584_35584_29073262. See Höch, Eine Lebenscollage I.757]


4.50 Hannah Höch. Schnitt Mit Dem Küchenmesser Dada Durch Die Letzte Weimarer

Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands [Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last

Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany]. 1919-1920. Photomontage and collage

with watercolor, 114 x 90 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25

June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822003045315. See Dickerman et al., Dada: Zürich,



4.51 Robert Sennecke. Ohne Titel (Hannah Höch und Raoul Hausmann auf der 1.

Internationalen Dada-Messe Berlin) [Untitled (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann at

the First International Dada Fair Berlin)]. 1920. Photograph, 16.5 x 11.9 cm.

Berlinische Galerie. Berlinische Galerie. Berlin, Germany. Web. 25 June 2017. [BG-FS

077/94,4 (Repro 2). See Biro, Dada Cyborg 108]




Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (alteration). 1919-1920. Photomontage

and collage with watercolor, 114 x 90 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New

York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822003045315. See Dickerman et al.,

Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 138]




Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (detail, upper left). 1919-1920.

Photomontage and collage with watercolor, 114 x 90 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New






Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (alteration). 1919-1920. Photomontage

and collage with watercolor, 114 x 90 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New

York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822003045315. See Dickerman et al.,

Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 138]


xvii



Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (detail, upper right). 1919-1920.







Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (detail, lower right). 1919-1920.





4.57 Hannah Höch. Weltrevolution [World Revolution]. 1920. Gelatin silver print, 13.3 x 9.9

cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 25 June

2017.




Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany] (detail, lower left). 1919-1920.





4.59 Revolutionstage in Berlin [Revolutionary Days in Berlin]. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 14

November 1918, 365.


Chapter Five

“So That Its Useful Significance Disappeared”:

Subversions of the Commodity by Commodities

5.1 Marcel Duchamp. La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even]. 1915-1923. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on

two glass panels, 277.5 by 175.8 x 8.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 701; cat. no. 404]


xviii

5.2 Marcel Duchamp. Cover for New York Dada. April 1921. Offset lithograph; cover design

by Marcel Duchamp, 36.8 by 25.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 689; cat. no. 390]

Reference on page(s): 210;

5.3 Marcel Duchamp. Belle Haleine: Eau de vioilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water]. 1921.

Perfume bottle with label created by Duchamp and Man Ray inside oval violet cardboard

box, 16.3 x 11.2 cm. Private collection, Paris. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 688; cat.

no. 388]


5.4 Alfred Stieglitz. Fountain. 1917. Gelatin silver print. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York,

New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [AMCADIG_10310847706. See Ades & Brotchie, 3

New York Dadas + The Blind Man 134]


5.5 Alfred Stieglitz. Fountain and Budda of the Bathroom. 1917. Page proof from The Blind

Man vol. 2. 1917. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017.

[ARTSTOR_103_41822001336567. See Ades & Brotchie, 3 New York Dadas + The

Blind Man 134-135]


5.6 Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917/1964 (replica). Ceramic, glaze, and paint, 38.1 x 48.9 x

62.2 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 648; cat. no. 345]


5.7 Marcel Duchamp. Peigne [Comb]. February 1916/1963 (replica). Steel, 16.5 x 3.2 cm. 16

x 3 cm. Moderna Museet. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. From Marcel Duchamp

Complete Works New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000. 643; cat. no. 339. Print.


5.8 Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q. 1919. Reproduction of Leonardo di Vinci’s La Jaconde,

with added mustache, goatee, title, 19.7 x 12.4 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New York,

New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822001527900. See Duchamp,

Complete Works 670; cat. no. 264]


5.9 Francis Picabia. Au pluriel, Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp, and Manifeste DADA.

March 1920. Page proof from 391 vol. 12, 55.6 x 37.9 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc., New

York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822001527991]


xix

5.10 Marcel Duchamp. L’Envers de la Peinture [The Wrong Side of Painting]. 1955. Dish

towel reproducing Leonardo di Vinci’s La Jaconde, with added mustache, goatee, palette,

and paintbrush, 73.5 x 43 cm. Private collection, Milan. [See Duchamp, Complete Works

804; cat. no. 547]


5.11 Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q. Rasée [L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved]. 1965. Reproduction of

Leonardo di Vinci’s La Jaconde (playing card), 8.8 x 6.2 cm. ARTstor. ARTstor, Inc.,

New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [ARTSTOR_103_41822003255955. See

Duchamp, Complete Works 849; cat. no. 615]


5.12 Daniel Spoerri. Utiliser un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser [Use a Rembrant as an

Ironing Board]. 1964. Chair, iron, printed canvas, wooden table, 86 x 73 x 40 cm. Private

Collection, Milan. [See Uwe Fleckner et al., Handbook der politischen Ikonographie

I.147]


5.13 Marcel Duchamp. Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 1]. March 1913.

Oil on canvas, 61.9 x 64.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 578; cat. no. 264]


5.14 Marcel Duchamp. Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 2 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 2]. February

1914. Oil, graphite, and thread on canvas, 65.4 x 54.3 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 606;

cat. no. 291]


5.15 Marcel Duchamp. La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even] (detail, Bachelor Apparatus). 1915-1923. Oil, varnish,

lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 277.5 by 175.8 x 8.6 cm. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp,



5.16 Marcel Duchamp. Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 1] (detail). March

1913. Oil on canvas, 61.9 x 64.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum

of Art. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 578; cat. no. 264]


Marcel Duchamp. Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 2 [Chocolate Grinder, No. 2] (detail).

February 1914. Oil, graphite, and thread on canvas, 65.4 x 54.3 cm. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp,



xx

5.17 Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel. 1913/1964 (replica). Wheel, painted wood, 64.8 x 59.7

cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Web. 25 June 2017. [See

Duchamp, Complete Works 588-589; cat. no. 278]


5.18 Wurts Bros. 233 Broadway. Woolworth Building, final view. 1914. Photograph. ARTstor.

ARTstor, Inc., New York, New York. Web. 25 June 2017. [AMCNYIG_10313640793]


5.19 Marcel Duchamp. Bottlerack. 1914/1961. Galvanized iron, 49.8 x 41 cm. Philadelphia


Complete Works 615-616; cat. no. 306]


5.20 Marcel Duchamp. The. 1915. Ink and graphite on paper, 22.2 x 14.3 cm. Philadelphia




5.21 Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm. November 1915/1964 (replica). Wood

and galvanized iron snow shovel. 132 cm. The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of

Modern Art. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 636-637; cat. no. 332]


5.22 Marcel Duchamp. Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 [Rendez-vous of Sunday,

February 6, 1916]. Febuary 1916. Typewritten text with black ink corrections on four

postcards taped together, 28.6 x 14.4 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Web. 25 June 2016. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 642; cat. no. 338]


5.23 Marcel Duchamp. Peigne [Comb]. February 1916. Steel, 16.5 x 3.2 cm. Philadelphia




5.24 Marcel Duchamp, Peigne [Comb] (detail). February 1916/1964 (replica). Steel, 16.5x 3.2

cm. Andrea Rosen Gallery. Andrea Rosen Gallery. Web. 25 June 2017. [See Duchamp,



xxi

5.25 Marcel Duchamp. With Hidden Noise. 1916/1964 (replica). Ball of twine between two

brass plates, joined by four long screws, containing unknown object added by Walter

Arensberg, 13.2 x 13.2 x 10.8 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles

County Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works 644; cat.

no. 340]


5.26 Marcel Duchamp. With Hidden Noise (Detail). 1916/1964 (replica). Ball of twine

between two brass plates, joined by four long screws, containing unknown object added

by Walter Arensberg, 13.2 x 13.2 x 10.8 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los

Angeles County Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works

644; cat. no. 340]


5.27 Marcel Duchamp. With Hidden Noise (Detail). 1916/1964 (replica). Ball of twine

between two brass plates, joined by four long screws, containing unknown object added

by Walter Arensberg, 13.2 x 13.2 x 10.8 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los

Angeles County Museum of Art. Web. 25 July 2017. [See Duchamp, Complete Works

644; cat. no. 340]


1

Introduction

Some two months after the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire, the epicenter of Dada Zürich, co-

founder Hugo Ball attempted to explain its function, what it meant to accomplish:

“Unser Kabarett ist eine Geste. Jedes Wort, das hier gesprochen und gesungen wird, besagt

wenigstens das eine, daß es dieser erniedrigenden Zeit nicht gelungen ist, uns Respekt

abzunötigen. Was wäre auch respektabel und imponierend an ihr? Ihre Kanonen? Unsere

große Trommel übertönt sie. Ihr Idealismus? Er ist längst zum Gelächter geworden, in seiner

populären und seiner akademischen Ausgabe. Die grandiosen Schlachtfeste und

kannibalischen Heldentaten? Unsere freiwillige Torheit, unsere Begeisterung für die Illusion

wird sie zuschanden machen”1 (Flucht aus der Zeit 92 [14.IV.1916]).

Ball here juxtaposes World War One, a humiliating age of canons and slaughter, with the literary

and artistic goings-on of the cabaret, its words and performances, and therefore provides a

politico-historical context for the movement, which that same week would come to call itself

Dada.2 Indeed, this intersection has become so strong that it is quite unthinkable to separate Dada

from that context. As such, a substantial amount of research has focused on Dada’s situation with

its own politico-historical context, World War One and its aftermaths. For example, Hubert van

den Berg’s 1999 book, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zürich und Berlin,3 focused his

text on the intricate connections between Dadaist works and anarchism, and more specifically,

how those connections developed historically within the Zürich and Berlin chapters of Dada.

Hanne Bergius’s Montage und Metamechanik: Dada Berlin – Artistik von Polaritäten,4 from

1 “Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating

age has not succeeded in winning our respect. What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our

big drum drowns them out. Its idealism? That has long been a laughingstock, in its popular and its academic

edition. The grandiose slaughters and cannibalistic exploits? Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for

illusion will destroy them” (Flight out of Time 61). All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 2 For an in depth investigation into the history of the word’s introduction, see John Elderfield’s “‘Dada’: The

Mystery of the Word” in his translation of Hugo Ball’s Flight out of Time, 238-255. 3 The Avant-garde and Anarchism: Dada in Zurich and Berlin 4 Translated in 2003 as “Dada Triumphs!”: Dada Berlin, 1917-1923 – Artistry of Polarities: Montages -

Metamechanics - Manifestations.

2

2000, considered the push and pull, and indeed interrelationship, of the constructive apollonian

and destructive dionysian principles in play between Dadaist works and the cultural and politico-

historical moment from which they spring. The numerous studies such as these continually prove

themselves essential to further studies of Dada, our present one included. However, we can see in

Ball’s citation an element which is yet to be fully explored. Ball poses a question of respect, of

the social structures that have or have not earned that respect, and more clearly with his

introduction of the zeitgeist’s idealism the structure of earned respect at all. That is to say, Ball

here suggests an initial criticism against the dominant ideology.

Of course, the ideology-critique has long been a key topic in Dada scholarship, though it had

been particularly revitalized by Peter Bürger’s 1974 book Theorie der Avantgarde, which was

among the first to materialistically approach the topic of the avant-garde from an ideology-

critical viewpoint. Indeed, the work remains the central reference point for the intersection of the

avant-garde and ideology. Bürger takes the concept of ideology outlined by Marx’s critique of

religion, long an exemplar of ideology, in his Kritik der Hegelischen Rechtsphilosophie.5 This

explicates ideology as a false consciousness, in that God is merely a projection of what

humankind would like to see on Earth, though it is simultaneously, therefore, a true expression of

the deprivation within the real conditions of human lives on Earth. Bürger translates this line of

thought, with particular recall to Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Über den affirmativen Charakter der

Kultur,”6 to what he calls Institution Kunst, art as an institution. This institutionalized art

“[antwortet] auf eine als unzulänglich erfahrene Wirklichkeit”7 (Theorie 12), but so

5 See the first volume of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke, hereafter abbreviated MEW. It is translated as

Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and can be found in the third volume of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels:

Collected Works, hereafter abbreviated MECW. 6 In Marcuse’s Kultur und Gesellschaft 1. Translated as “The Affirmative Character of Culture” in the fourth

volume of the Collected Papers of Marcuse. 7 “responds to a reality experienced as inadequate” Unless otherwise noted, all emphases will be original to the

quote.

3

autonomously, at such a radical remove from the praxis of daily life that regardless of what that

response might be, it remains forever moot and ultimately unrealizable.8 That is, the institution

of art in bourgeois society functions ideologically. The avant-garde’s attempted “Aufhebung der

gesellschaftlichen Institution der Kunst, Vereinigung der Kunst und Leben[ …] hat sie [die

Kunst] jedoch als Institution erkennbar gemacht und damit die (relative) Folgenlosigkeit der

Kunst in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft als deren Prinzip”9 (78). Despite the ultimate failure of

the avant-garde movements to combine art and life, to de-institutionalize art and return it to the

everyday praxis of life, Bürger here focuses on the ideology-critical consequences of that

attempt, namely the realization that art’s conception, production, and even reception function

wholly within and as an autonomous institution, which precludes it from any meaningful

resolution or fulfillment of the everyday privations that such an institution in fact represents.

That is, the avant-garde’s critique of ideology turned out to be that it showed art as an institution

to be ideological. While Bürger’s observations and line of argumentation have proved extremely

illuminative throughout subsequent scholarship on the avant-garde in general and Dada in

particular, including our study here, there remain elements as yet not fully elaborated.

Though Bürger often references Dada as “die radikalste Bewegung innerhalb der

europäischen Avantgarde”10 (28f.), the specificities of that radicalism and the ways, and more

specifically media and genre in which it manifested itself within Dadaist works and their

subsequent contributions to a Dadaist praxis remain, however, relatively unexplored. That is,

Bürger leaves underdeveloped the question as to how do the specific techniques and praxes

embodied by Dadaist works confront the ideology-critical goal that Bürger set forth for avant-

8 This is clearly a dramatic simplification of Bürger’s argumentation, which can be found in Theorie 10-18; Theory

6-14. 9 “sublation of art as a social institution, uniting life and art[ …] did make art recognizable as an institution and also

revealed its (relative) inefficacy in in bourgeois society as its principle” (Theory 57). 10 “the most radical movement within the European avant-garde”

4

garde movements, the absolute destruction of the autonomous institute of art. In contrast to

Bürger’s relatively unspecified Dadaist praxis, however, Bürger’s conception of ideology and the

goals of avant-garde’s criticism of its instantiation in the institute of art, function within

particularly restrictive bounds, focused almost exclusively on autonomy and its demolition.

Bürger then confines the avant-garde’s praxes of ideology criticism to the ultimate sublation of

art’s conception, production, and reception into the praxis of everyday life. Bürger’s

simultaneously broad idea of the historical avant-garde and prescribed concept of ideology and

its criticism beg a series of questions that form the springboard of our current study.

How can we describe a concept of Dadaist praxis? In what ways is that praxis influenced or

challenged by the given medium of the Dadaist work? That is, given the extreme heterogeneity

of media within and as Dadaist works, from graphic design to political screeds, fragments of

mass-reproduced photographic images, or entire mass-reproduced commodities, how can we

describe a coherent Dadaist praxis? Here we come up against the question of concepts of

ideology and Dadaist criticisms of that ideology. Bürger’s conception of ideology critique

required an absolute dissolution of autonomy, the creation of a clean-slate, a destruction of the

apparatus of art as institution. Bürger’s argument that the avant-garde failed in this critique,

however, does little to help elucidate the specifics of avant-garde praxis. In order to gain insight

into the intricacies of Dadaist praxis, simultaneously concerned with the artistic and ideology-

critical, gestures and words spoken and sung that deride the ideologies of the humiliating age, we

focus rather on the disruption of the routine and recurrent operation of the ideological apparatus.

In his attempt to understand the endless reproduction of capitalism, Louis Althusser elaborated

precisely this operation of ideology with his conception of interpellation. Our shift in concept of

ideology, then, similarly shifts our concept of ideology criticism from destruction of an

5

autonomous apparatus to disruption of Althusserian interpellation, to a criticism of the complex

of material interactions through which ideology functions, of material elements that construct the

praxis of daily life, of the elements through which ideology functions, and more specifically, of

the very material media that Dadaist authors and artists utilized in and as their works. Here, we

can further hone our initial questions. In what media-specific ways do Dadaist works function as

material elements of and within Althusserian interpellation? How do these medial works

performatively criticize that same media’s utilization within the complex of interpellation that

constitutes the praxis of everyday life? The goal of this dissertation, then, is the focused

investigation of the media-specificity of Dadaist praxis and, with the concept of Althusserian

interpellation and its formation of the ideological subject, to specify and precisely enumerate the

multifaceted ways in which those Dadaist praxes confront, corrupt, subvert, and sabotage the

functional operation and reproduction of ideology. That is, we mean to investigate the

performative use of various media throughout Dadaist praxis in order to subvert the interpellative

formation of the ideological subject.

Partial combinations of this tripartite intersection between Dadaist praxis, mass (reproduced)

media, and Althusserian interpellation have been explored. Annette Runte’s 1982

Subjektkritische Diskurstheorie [Subject Critical Discourse Theory] was one of the first, and

remains one of the most in depth, investigations into the role of mass media, specifically

women’s magazines [Frauenpresse] such as Emma and Meine Geschichte. More recently, Arndt

Niebisch’s 2012 book, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde, shines a light on not only the

interaction between Dadaist praxis, particularly as seen in the works of Raoul Hausmann, and

mass media, but also on the disruptive facets of that praxis. The fourth chapter of Dafydd Jones’s

2014 book, Dada 1916 in Theory, highlights the ways in which interpellation and ideological

6

subject formation intersects with Dadaist manifestos. From these and other studies, this

dissertation progresses towards a fuller conception of Dadaist praxis as subversive performance

of interpellation embedded within particular media. As such, the specificities dictated by these

media have dictated the form of this dissertation.

The first chapter will initially outline the importance of two elements to Dadaist works, the

work’s reproducibility through and as mass media as well as the work’s critique of some element

of bourgeois society and politics. From here we will be able to view Dadaist works as not only

critical reflections of their particular moment, but rather as works that disruptively inform and

influence that moment, works that introduce a radical ideology-critique into the reproduction of

that moment, which is to say, subversively interpellate. For our initial theoretical framework, we

will take the work of Louis Althusser, whose politico-ideological theory of interpellation we will

thoroughly develop and recontextualize as a theory of literary and aesthetic praxis, embodied by

works that create ideological subject positions which any potential audience must necessarily and

speciously autonomously assume. Combined with Althusser’s use of Lacanian subject formation,

the dissertation will then turn to specific Dadaist works.

In lieu of a chronological outset of Dadaist works, the second chapter of the dissertation will

begin with the elemental, an investigation into the sign, and specifically the sign’s supposed

obviousness of signification. Kurt Schwitters’s utilization and examination of the isolated letter i

will serve as our exemplar for that supposed transparency and obviousness, which Althusser calls

the elementary ideological effect. Through a close reading of Schwitters’s poem “Das i-Gedicht”

[“The i-Poem”], the dissertation will explore the interpellative function of the typographic design

of the letter in the national/educational ideological apparatus, as well as Schwitters’s uniquely

disruptive reproduction of it in the poem and its praxis. Theories of materiality from Jacques

7

Derrida, Paul de Man, and Jacques Lacan help to develop further this intersection of a material

work and Althusserian interpellation, which we then utilize to consider the word dada itself, and

its provocative position and status within that intersection.

The third chapter of the dissertation will build upon Dadaist’s subversive act of naming

explored in the previous chapter, in order to examine the foundational act of multiple Dadaist

manifestoes as interpellation. Interpretations of performativity, theatricality, and their role within

the form of the manifesto by J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Althusser

himself will help to situate Dadaist manifestoes both in their literary historical context in the

wake of Communist and Futurist manifestoes, as well as in their subversion of the manifesto

form which those manifestos solidified. This convergence of performative theorizations of the

manifesto and Dadaist praxis of the manifesto will give not only a more complete conception of

the various performances inherent to the manifesto form, from the interpellative creation of an

“us,” “them,” and “we” to an assumption of theatrical and performative power, but also the

various ways in which Dadaist praxis undermines those specific moments in the ironic

performance of their own ostensible manifestoes.

The next chapter of the dissertation will explore Dadaist photomontages through both the

critical framework gained in previous chapters and contemporaneous critical media theory.

Works by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, and László Moholy-Nagy on the

technologically mass-reproduced photographic image, combined with Charles Peirce’s

conception of indexicality of the photograph, will create a critical vocabulary with which to

investigate photomontage’s radical excision, fragmentation, and reposition as Dadaist praxis.

This chapter will explore, then, Dadaist subversions of not only the obviousness of mass-

reproduced photographic indexicality, but also of the exploitation of that obviousness by various

8

ideological apparatuses referenced in the photographic fragments, such as nationalist

propaganda, disposable journalism, and consumer capitalist advertisement. The chapter will

culminate in an extended reading of Hannah Höch’s two exemplary works of Dadaist praxis:

Dada Panorama and Cut with the Kitchen Knife.

As a continuation of the confrontation between Dadaist praxis and consumerist capitalism,

the final chapter of the dissertation will focus on the commodity, commodity aesthetics, and

commodity language, specifically through Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Formed at the

intersection of Duchamp’s choice of commodity and his inscription upon it, the readymade will

be explored as a mode of radical disruption to the unique ways in which the commodity, its

aesthetics theorized by Wolfgang Haug and Jean Baudrillard, and its language of exchange value

theorized by Jacques Derrida, and Werner Hamacher exemplified by shop windows and

storefronts, function as a unique form of subject-consumer formation within particular elements

of the ideological apparatus of consumerist capitalism. This will allow us to examine many of

Duchamp’s readymades as instantiations of a particular mode within the Dadaist praxis of

subversively performative ideological subject formation.

While this dissertation will propose a complex and nuanced theory of Dadaist praxis as a

network of idiosyncratic subversions of ideology and ideological subject formation through its

investigations into media-specific Dadaist works, so too will it further hone, nuance, and

recontextualize theories of interpellation and ideological subject formation through its

performative disruption. With this combination of theoretical, material oriented close readings of

historically and medially embedded Dadaist works and their confrontations with Althusserian

interpellation, I hope to further extend and revitalize Bürger’s initial and exceptional contribution

to a materialist literary theory.

9

Chapter One

“Hey, Dadaist Over There!”: Dada, Ideology, and Interpellation

“Was ist ein Mensch? Eine bald lustige, bald traurige Angelegenheit,

die von ihrer Produktion, von ihrem Milieu gespielt und gesungen wird. Sehen Sie,

Sie glauben zu denken und Beschlüsse zu fassen, Sie glauben original zu sein…”1

–Raoul Hausmann

“I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is

being written, even if it looks like a subject.”2

–Jacques Lacan

The Dada movement began at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich on the 5th of February 1916 and

ended at Rue Danton 8 in Paris on the 13th of May 1921. None of that, however, is precisely true.

The founding of Cabaret Voltaire and the dissolution of the mock trial of Maurice Barrès were

certainly critical moments, in what would problematically come to be called “Dada,” though far

from well-formed start– and endpoints.3 For instance, a group of artists, which “n’était pas Dada

mais c’était dans le même ésprit”4 (Cabanne 101), had been agitating the art and literary world of

New York City since at least early 1915. Indeed, the word dada itself was not discovered until

the middle of April 1916.5 Moreover, the very designation of that word as label for a literary or

art movement was problematized by the continual assertion by many of the artists that it was not

1 Texte I.94. “What is a person? An occasionally humorous, occasionally sad matter, who is played and sung by their

own production, by their own milieu. See, you believe you think and make decision, you think yourself original.” 2 Four Fundamental Concepts viii. 3 Perhaps most famously, the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich is documented by Hugo Ball in his Flucht

aus der Zeit, see especially 79f. For documentation of the trial of Barrès, see Margeurite Bonnet’s L’affaire Barrès

and James Harding’s “Avant-Garde Rhetoric: Show Trials and Collapsing Discourse at the Birth of Surrealism.” 4 “was not Dada, but it was in the same spirit” All translations mine, unless otherwise noted. 5 As we will see, the word dada will play a large role in our investigation. Both the exact date of discovery and its

characterization as discovery are disputed, not least of all by Dadaists themselves. For an in depth investigation into

the history of the word’s introduction, see John Elderfield’s “‘Dada’: The Mystery of the Word” in his translation of

Hugo Ball’s Flight out of Time, 238-255. Despite the myriad difficulties that the word poses, we are left with little

else in the way of linguistic marker for our subject. As such, we will continue to use the words Dada, Dadaist, and

Dadaism, quite literally for lack of a better term.

10

one. A popular refrain from self-identified Dadaists in Berlin was “He, he, Sie junger Mann /

Dada ist keine Kunstrichtung”6 (Der Dada 2 2), in direct contradiction with Zürich’s

“Eröffnungs– Manifest 1. Dada Abends” that stated unequivocally its very first sentence: “Dada

ist eine neue Kunstrichtung”7 (Zinnoberzack 12, hereafter abbreviated Zinn). In addition, the

very word art was often snubbed: “L’art est mort. Vive Dada!”8 (Letzte Lockerung 9). While a

thing that appeared to defy definition, only loosely associated by the word Dada, had at some

point and in some way begun, its other borders were just as difficult to determine. Almost a year

before that mock trial of Barrès, some pointed to the first retrospective of Dada to be edited and

published by so-called Dadaists, the Dada Almanach in August 1920 in order to coincide with

the end of the “Erste Internationale Dada-Messe”9 in Berlin as the end of whatever Dada was.

Still others only considered André Breton’s 1924 publication of the Manifeste du surréalisme,10

long thought to be the artistic and chronological heir to Dadaism, to be the true end of Dada.

Whatever constituted this quasi– thing or concept, which appears occasionally to go by the name

Dada, was, if not constrained between 1914 and 1924 then appears to have been the most active

in this time. Geographically, Dada was even more diverse, with so-called chapters in New York,

Paris, Geneva, the Netherlands, Cologne, Hannover, Zürich, Italy, Berlin, Yugoslavia, Bucharest,

Saint Petersburg, Tblisi, and even as far away as Tokyo.

Beyond the movement itself, these difficulties of definition and constraint continue with the

artists themselves. Unlike Futurism with F. T. Marinetti, Surrealism with André Breton, or De

Stijl with Theo van Doesburg (all three of whom were contributors to, or members of, Dadaism

6 “Hey, hey, you young man / Dada is not an art movement.” In addition to Der Dada 2, edited by Raoul Hausmann,

this citation was prominently featured in the upper right corner of Hannah Höch’s photomontage Schnitt mit dem

Küchenmesser. See Dech, 85-88. 7 “Opening Manifest of the First Dada Evening” : “Dada is a new art movement.” 8 “Art is dead. Long live Dada!” 9 “First International Dada-Fair” 10 Manifesto of Surrealism

11

at some point), Dadaism had no central leader against which one could measure their alignment

to the movement. Emmy Hennings and her partner Hugo Ball, who co-founded and opened the

Cabaret Voltaire, quickly refused any presumed leadership role and soon thereafter refused

simple membership, as he broke many ties with his “Eröffnungs– Manifest.”11 After Ball’s

departure, Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck wrangled for control; the former often

travelled between Zürich and the Paris branch, the latter effectively started a new branch in post-

war Berlin.12 Others walked away from Dada all together, or simply continued their work quietly

and often without the Dadaist label. Dadaist works themselves offer little in the way of cohesion

or clarity, as they span themes as broad as religion, industrial and technical revolutions, the First

World War, mass media, consumerist capitalism, aesthetics and the world of art, all through the

use of various forms of media and performance, from dance, recital, singing, happening, poetry,

verse, manifesto, review, relief, photography, typography, montage, assemblage, sculpture, to

readymade, among others. This radical disarray and dislocation was summarized perhaps most

distinctly by Rex Last, who argued that “in a real sense there are as many ‘Dadas’ as there are

Dadaists,” the former existing only “in the most vague and nebulous terms” (162). Despite

critical desire to articulate something overarching and inclusive that binds the movement

together, to unify these disparate elements into an unambiguous critical vocabulary, the radical

heterogeneity of the works and performances of this uncoordinated (non)movement remains.

Dadaism itself, as much as there can be said to be a single Dadaism, appeared actively and

purposefully to resist the search for any critical vocabulary capable of unifying Dadaism. The

11 According to Ball’s Flucht aus der Zeit: “Hat man je erlebt, daß das erste Manifest einer neu gegründeten Sache

die Sache selbst vor ihren Anhängern widerrief? Und doch war es so” (109). [“Has the first manifesto of a newly

founded cause ever been known to refute the cause itself to its supporters’ face? And yet that is what happened”

(Flight 73).] As we will see, the question of membership, that is, who can be called a Dadaist, will become uniquely

important to our discussion of Dadaism and Dadaist praxis. 12 For a discussion of the rivalry between Tzara and Huelsenbeck over who stood as the true heir of Hugo Ball’s

project, see Elderfield’s “‘Dada’: The Mystery of the Word.”

12

word Dada had no extant or immediate connotations, no starting point from which the critic

could begin, such as the word Cubism contributed with geometric form or the word Futurism

with technological progress. Critics who looked elsewhere in an attempt to begin to build such a

vocabulary were consistently undercut, as though strategically, by the very movement, artists,

works, and even elements of those works that carried the label; from single letters in the case of

Raoul Hausmann’s poster poems (OFFEAHBDC and fmsbwtözäu [Texte I.18, see fig. 2.1]) to

entire genres and forms in the case of Tzara’s 1918 manifesto (“J’écris un manifeste et je ne

veux rien… je suis par principe contre les manifestes”13 [Oeuvres Complètes I.359, hereafter

abbreviated OC]) or Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (sculptures that Duchamp had not

sculpted).14 This strategy of distortion and confusion was often rewarded as contemporaneous

journalists and critics would throw up their hands in dismay and declare the whole operation

little more than nihilistic nonsense. Dadaists were overjoyed at the raucous difficulty they

created, specifically Tzara: “Il a paru jusqu’au 15 Oct. [1919] 8590 articles sur le dadaïsme dans

des journaux et révues…”15 (Dada Almanach 28), none of which had solved the riddle that

critics and journalists felt Dadaism to have presented and performed. In many ways, the

cacophony simply added to the critic’s own confusion which seemed to oscillate between their

assessment of Dada as nihilistic nonsense and some randomly proposed solution to the riddle,

which only thereby mirrored the very confusion and distortion given by Dadaists themselves:

“Was ist Dada? … ist es ☞ Garnichts, d. h. alles?”16 (Der Dada 2 7).

13 “I write a manifesto and I want nothing… I am, on principle, against manifestos.” 14 We will investigate each of these cases, and of course many others, in greater detail later. For the moment, it is

merely important to note the pervasiveness with which ‘Dadaists’ refused any cohesion either amongst their own

works or between their works and accepted critical norms in the form of technique, theme, media, etc. 15 “By October 15th [1919], 8,590 articles have appeared on Dadaism in journals and revues.” 16 “What is Dada? … is it ☞ nothing at all, i.e. everything?”

13

For the critic weary of attempts to wrench it into unity, the challenge of Dadaism remains.

What is a critic of Dadaism to do, how is she to speak on Dada’s terms of Dada’s works, when

the artists, the works, even elements of and within those works stubbornly refuse to cooperate, to

start or sustain the conversation? She is left with the option to no longer explore the realm of

direct Dadaist signification, meaning, etc. within a work, but rather to analyze something of the

work’s rules of engagement, the Dadaist praxis within the work itself; to no longer ask what a

work means, but rather in what ways and with what criterion does this work encounter meaning?

How do Dadaist works produce and reproduce this encounter? How does this work generate, and

conform to, its own vocabulary as a(n artistic) work? In short, in what ways do Dadaist works

describe themselves, their own production, and their own function as works? To forgo a cohesive

theoretical vocabulary of Dadaism itself, are we able to develop one analogous to Dadaist praxis,

upon which the manifold theoretical vocabularies of so many diverse Dadaist works supervene,

and if so, what might it look like?17 This is neither a means to bind Dadaists or their works

together into a homogenous whole, to presume some predominant meaning to Dadaism and

Dadaist works, nor an attempt to merely lay a particular vocabulary atop them, but rather it is a

desire to establish an incisive theoretical vocabulary of Dadaist praxis to expound upon the

theoretical positions inherent within diverse Dadaist works. Our critic, therefore, with a novel

theoretical approach towards a fresh theoretical goal, is simply left to begin again, from this new

viewpoint, with those same material works.

Perhaps too often overlooked is the importance of the fact that there are Dadaist works which

we as literary critics are able to interrogate and scrutinize. This is not merely the triviality that

17 We are certainly not the first to attempt to focus upon the production of, or praxis within, Dadaist works. This list

of questions is meant as a clarification of the goals of our study, the particular elements of Dadaist works which we

mean to thoroughly investigate, rather than as an innovation in the methodology of Dadaist studies itself.

14

artists create art. Rather, Dadaists appeared to have been uniquely cognizant of their works as

either material products in and of themselves, or as elements to be transformed into a material

product. Despite the exceedingly large proportion of ephemerality inherent in many Dadaist

works of art and performance, whether it had been planned in advance or coincidental in the

moment, there remains an abundance of Dadaist material for current critics. While this has

occasionally been thanks to the intrepid work of literary and art historians, far more often was it

the will of the artists themselves to document, in some way and as best they could, their works’

moments of ephemerality. The intoxicating first days of Cabaret Voltaire, suffused with

performance, spoken word, music, and dance, were endlessly described and documented by the

artists themselves, most notably in the group’s first ‘little review,’ Cabaret Voltaire: Eine

Sammlung Künstlerischer und Literarischer Beiträge,18 Tzara’s “Chronique zurichoise” (OC

I.591), and Ball’s Flucht aus der Zeit, though also through the multitude of journalists

specifically bidden to attend.19 Participating artists in Berlin Dada’s “Erste Internationale Dada-

Messe” invited journalists to their month long exhibition, as well as hired a professional

photographer to record the event for the Dadaist’s own promotional packet that they sent to

newspapers that had been either unable or unwilling to attend.20 Perhaps most infamously,

Duchamp’s 1916 readymade, Fountain,21 scandalously un-displayed by the Society of

Independent Artists, was destroyed and only known outside the Society’s hanging committee and

Duchamp’s friends through Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph reproduced in the second edition of

P.B.T. The Blind Man (4).22 As Walter Benjamin noted, Dadaists imprinted their work “mit den

18 Cabaret Voltaire: A collection of Artistic and Literary Contributions. 19 The entry from February 2, 1916 in Ball’s Flucht is a copy of the initial press notice to attend the opening of the

cabaret (79). 20 See Brigit Doherty’s “‘See: ‘We are all Neurasthenics’!’ or, the Trauma of Dada Montage,” 86. 21 See fig. 5.6. 22 See fig. 5.4 & 5.5. The history of the original Fountain and its fate as a material object have been disputed. For a

more in depth discussion, see William Camfield’s “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the

15

Mitteln der Produktion das Brandmal einer Reproduktion”23 (Gesammelte Schriften VII.379,

hereafter cited as GS). That is to say, the reproduction necessarily through, within, and therefore

as mass media is inherent in its very production.

From this point of view, one can begin to see that such a tactic is less a simple self-publicity

on the part of the Dadaists than it is an element of the work itself, less an egotistical or boastful

echo of some original, potentially auratic to use Benjamin’s vocabulary, performance than an

essential aspect of the performance itself. In a particularly telling example, Dadaists wrote a

series of fictive publicity gags [réclames-blagues] during the summer of 1919, which included

tales from a Ninth Dada Soirée which never occurred and a fully fabricated argument and pistol

duel between Tzara and Hans Arp. These press announcements, given to a single paper and

traced by the Dadaists throughout the Swiss and international press,24 were wholly echo, pure

journalistic surface without an authentic work or performance to support it. That is, the

reproduction, the echo is the work itself. As Leah Dickerman summarizes: “fundamentally,

Dadaism is about making and producing art” which required, was part and parcel with, or was at

the very least facilitated “by one of Dada’s most important innovations, a media network that

served as both conduit of ideas and images and site of practice” (“Gambits” 8). In short, if at this

point only preliminarily, we can begin to outline the decisive importance of the emergent modern

mass media in the early 20th century to Dadaist praxis. In the recognition that modern mass

Context of 1917” and Duchamp’s Complete Works 199-200, 648-650, hereafter cited as CW. This work will be

discussed further in the fifth chapter. 23 “through the means of its production, the hallmark of a reproduction” (Work of Art 39). The number of examples

of works that had been destroyed, lost, misplaced, un-shown, etc. but through their reproduction in either a Dadaist

pamphlet, a journalist’s review, or a photographer’s frame, is simply too many to list. Importantly, this dynamic was

not restricted to the time period or location, prolific or scarce artists, but rather was seemingly elemental across

Dadaist praxis as such. 24 At least 20 newspapers in Switzerland alone ran a story on the fictive duel between Tzara and Arp. See Raimund

Meyer’s “Zürich, Geneva: ‘From High, Low, Dull, Errand to Mad Intent’ – The Press as Dada Motor in Harriett

Watt’s Dada and the Press, 56-59.

16

media was not simply the mode or means of delivery, nor simply the material manifestation of

Dadaist works, but rather an integral element to the praxis of the work itself, that is, not only the

site of that praxis but also to a certain degree its subject, we are able to begin to articulate some

of our broader concerns.

This type of media network in itself was not entirely novel, but rather was unique in its

radical (re)appropriation to Dadaist, which is ostensibly to say internationally artistic and literary,

ends. Literary and artistic reviews, most notably the Expressionist reviews Die Aktion and Der

Sturm, to which Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, Walter Serner among others

who would later identify with Dadaism were connected, had been published for some time and

functioned as something of such a media network. Rather, what was unique of Dadaist mass

media was its amalgamation of their works with media, a lack of border between work and

media, a radical intersection of the two previously separate aesthetics. Where Die Aktion and Der

Sturm were collections of Expressionist art printed, Dadaist reviews were Dadaist works in and

of themselves,25 specifically works that radically appropriated the aesthetics of the mass media of

the time, namely the invocations of advertising, marketing, and branding in service of the Fordist

revolution in consumerist capitalism, as well as the invocations of political pronouncements and

propaganda in service of the war effort. For Dadaists, these were often one and the same thing.

The technological advancements in mass manufacturing, vertical integration, and international

distribution, all of which were direct consequences of the perfection of Taylorism and Fordism in

and through the Great War, necessitated a new media landscape of aggressive advertising,

marketing, and mass media.26 Arp, Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and others often utilized advertising and

25 One notable exception is Cabaret Voltaire. As Tzara put it: “Cette publication n’est pas une revue, mais une

ouvrage documentaire sur le cabaret que nous avons fondé ici” (Lista 111). [“That publication was not a journal but

a documentary publication on the cabaret we founded here” (qtd. in Dickerman’s “Zürich” 32).] 26 See Dickerman’s “Introduction,” 6-7; Haug’s Kritik 36ff. and Critique 22ff.

17

marketing aesthetics in their experimental typography and texts. Both the invention of Dadaist

photomontage, from retail mementos of the First World War and ironic care packages of useless

commodities sent to soldiers at the front, as well as its recurrent themes, such as Kaiser Wilhelm

II or Gustav Noske, were deeply indebted to the political and military propaganda of the time.27

Francis Picabia and Duchamp appropriated both the mass-produced commodities and their

marketing throughout their works; most notably Picabia’s objet-portraits for Alfred Stieglitz’s

review 291 (fig 1.1) and his own 391 (fig 1.2), and of course Duchamp’s readymades. These

Dadaist works, however, did not merely repeat the media aesthetics of war propaganda or Fordist

advertisement. Rather, their (re)appropriation was bitingly ironic and radically critical.

Dada, that is to say, stood firmly with one foot planted in the arenas of radical political

protest and the other within experimental aesthetic exploration, as they often criticized both. As

Hugo Ball summarized, the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire was decidedly political, a gesture

against the First World War: “Unser Kabarett ist eine Geste. Jedes Wort, das hier gesprochen

oder gesungen wird, besagt wenigstens das eine, daß es dieser erniedrigenden Zeit nicht

gelungen ist, uns Respekt abzunötigen”28 (Flucht 92). As he noted at the time, however, it was

not merely enough to create a politically engaged community of artists in Zürich. Ball sought

rather a few young people, “deren gleich mir daran gelegen wäre, ihre Unabhängigkeit nicht nur

zu geniessen, sondern auch zu dokumentieren”29 (quoted in Dada Kunst und Antikunst 13,

hereafter abbreviated as DK). Dadaist works and therefore the critical vocabulary of Dadaist

praxis that we seek are located within this composite of politics, aesthetics, and modern

27 While the history of the invention of Dadaist photomontage is particularly complex, as we will investigate in

chapter four, focused on photomontage, the location of the invention at the intersection of mass media, the First

World War, and consumerist capitalism is surprisingly clear. 28 “Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken or sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating

age has not succeeded in winning our respect” (Flight 61). 29 “who like me were not only interested in enjoying their independence, but also in documenting it” (quoted in

Dada Art and Antiart 13-14, hereafter abbreviated as DA, translation slightly altered).

18

reproducible mass media. Indeed, one of the first critical examinations of Dadaist theoretical

praxis, Benjamin’s “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,”30

examines precisely this tripartite and inter-dependent structure of politicized aesthetics through

the reproducibility of mass media as a means of protest. For Benjamin, Dadaist praxis served as a

possible archetype of protest against the aestheticized politics of growing Fascism in 1935.31

Dadaists, however, appeared to have targeted their protest upon something somewhat broader

and more chaotic than the particular political movements of this or that time or, eventually, war.

While best known for their disarray and dislocation, their antics and distinctly disorienting

ambiguity, Dadaists were occasionally direct, most often about their own critical motives and

targets. Somewhat regularly, the target of Dadaist protest revolved around the particularly broad

vocabulary of system and order, in reference to neither aesthetics, politics, nor any specific

conceptual realm, but rather in general. Tzara, in his 1918 manifesto stated quite unequivocally:

“Je hais… l’harmonie, cette science qui se trouve tout en ordre…” and more famously “Je suis

contre les systèmes, les plus acceptable des systèmes est celui de n’en avoir par principe

aucun”32 (OC I.364). Serner was somewhat more blunt: “Den Menschenmist ordnend

durchduften!!! Ich danke…”33 (5, exclamation and ellipsis in original). Ball explained his hatred

of systems and organization in a letter explaining the goals of his work, almost a year before the

opening of Cabaret Voltaire: “Vorzubeugen der Systematisierung, Kafferisierung Deutschlands.

30 “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin wrote three versions of the essay, of

which he considered the second to be the Urtext, the master version. See Benjamin’s GS VII.350-384. 31 This is, of course, a preliminary and significantly simplified summary of Benjamin’s analysis of Dadaist praxis as

well as his larger analysis of the essay as a whole. As we will see, Benjamin’s thought will play a notable, and more

nuanced, role in our deeper discussions of Dadaist praxis. 32 “I hate… harmony, the science that finds everything in order…” ; “I am against systems, the most acceptable of

systems is on principle to have none.” George Bataille engaged this particular quote in a note to his “Figure

humaine” (200), presumably in response to the quote’s use as an epigram to Louis Aragon’s Anicet: ou le

panorama. See OC I.701f. 33 “To perfume and order this human shit!!! Thanks a lot…”

19

Alles was System, Organisation, Charakter, etc. heisst fordert »Subordination«”34 (Briefe I.77).

These sentiments persisted in Dadaist’s discerning hindsight in later years. Tzara, writing a small

retrospective of Dada for Robert Motherwell’s influential 1951 anthology, wrote: “Dada took the

offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety, for it regarded this system as inextricably

bound up with human stupidity” (403). According to Hans Richter: “Der offizielle Glaube an die

Unfehlbarkeit der Vernunft, der Logik und der Kausalität erschien uns [Dadaisten] sinnlos”35

(DK 59). That is, it was not merely the system or systematization itself, but the official belief in

that system and systematization, against which Dadaists so powerfully protested. Ball also

emphasized the seeming ability of this ‘official belief’ to blind people to its very consequences:

“Der Schindanger wächst und man hält am Prestige der europäischen Herrlichkeit fest. Man

sucht das Unmögliche möglich zu machen und den Verrat der Menschen, den Raubbau an Leib

und Seele der Völker, dies zivilizierte Gemetzel in einen Triumph der europäischen Intelligenz

umzulügen”36 (Flucht 101). The combination of many of these elements—systematicity, society

and culture; subordination and exploitation reinterpreted and reframed as an authorized belief of

prestige and triumph—can perhaps be best summarized by the concept of ideology.

34 “to counter the systematization, the kaffirization of Germany. Everything called system, organization, character

demands ‘subordination.’” The term ‘Kafferisierung’ is particularly difficult to translate. While it is currently known

as an extremely racist term, at the time it denoted the complex system of hierarchies of tribal relationships

throughout southwest Africa during and immediately after the Zulu Civil War on the fringes of what was then

German East Africa. In this regard, it fits well with the systematization, standardization, etc. that Ball attempted to

elucidate and against which he is arguing, though with the introduction of racially charged vocabulary. See Schnee’s

Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, II.141-142. 35 “The official belief in the infallibility of reason, logic, and causality seemed to us [Dadaists] senseless” (DA 58). 36 “The slaughter increases, and they cling to the prestige of European glory. They are trying to make the impossible

possible and to pass off the betrayal of man, the exploitation of the body and soul of the people, and all this civilized

carnage as a triumph of European intelligence” (Flight 67).

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Ideology

Dadaists themselves occasionally utilized the specific vocabulary of ideology to describe the

conceptual target of their protest and praxis. As they laid out their program for Dadaist praxis in

Germany, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann declared: “[Der Dadaist] sieht instinktmäßig seinen Beruf

darin, den Deutschen ihre Kulturideologie zusammenzuschlagen”37 (En Avant 34). As well, Carl

Einstein and George Grosz’s short-lived Dadaist review, Der blutige Ernst [Bloody Serious],

advertised itself as “Gegen die bürgerlichen Ideologien! […] ‚Der blutige Ernst’ nagelt die

Krankheiten Europas fest, […], bekämpft die tödlichen Ideologien und Einrichtungen, die den

Krieg verursachten…”38 (front cover, fig. 1.3). Perhaps most direct of such quotations is

Huelsenbeck’s introduction to his Dada Almanach: “[Dada] wendet sich gegen jede Art von

Ideologie”39 (6). These exemplary citations, whether in the application of the specific vocabulary

of ideology or simply the elements of ideology, indicate the extreme flexibility of the concept

itself and therefore any potential critical vocabulary or theory of Dadaist praxis based upon it.

That is, the concept of ideology is thematically broad, which would allow for the enormous

dissimilarities between individual artists, branches, media, etc. within Dadaism, while it

simultaneously serves as a theoretically incisive concept,40 with which to analyze a Dadaist

praxis inherent within, and informed by, Dadaist works. We will take this then as initial basis of

37 “[The Dadaist] instinctively sees his mission to smash the cultural ideology of Germans.” Huelsenbeck connected

the desire of the Dadaist to destroy ideology with the vocabulary of systematicity utilized more often in Zürich:

“Daß Ruhe, Ordnung, und Aufbau, das ‘Verständnis für eine organische Entwicklung’ nur Symbole, Vordergründe

und Vorwände für Hintern, Fett und Gemeinheit sind, hat unsere Zeit zur Genüge erfahren” (En Avant 35). [“It has

become sufficiently apparent in our time that law, order and the constructive, ‘the understanding for an organic

development,’ are only symbols curtains and pretexts for fat behinds and treachery” (qtd. in Motherwell 44).] 38 “Against the bourgeois ideologies! […] ‘Bloody Serious nails down the sickness of Europe, […], combats the

deadly ideologies and institutions that caused the war.” 39 “[Dada] opposes every kind of ideology” (Dada Almanac 11). 40 Indeed, this is similar to Heulsenbeck’s description of Dada itself: “[E]s kristallisiert sich in einem Punkt und

breitet sich über die endlose Fläche” (Dada Almanach 4). [“[I]t crystallizes into a single point yet extends over the

endless plain” (Dada Almanach 10).]

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our critical vocabulary of Dadaist praxis. However, the introduction of the critical vocabulary of

ideology requires us, of course, to clarify what precisely this vocabulary brings to our

investigation. That is, what is it that we mean when we say ideology?

The concept of ideology requires a particular bit of clarification and precision from its

historical and relatively ambiguous roots. Before it was designated by the term ideology, the

concept that perhaps best fits our current, common-use definition was first elucidated by the

‘Noble Lies’ in the third book of Plato’s Republic, whereby those in power, whether priests or

despots, would manipulate, for lack of a better term, the general population with such a noble lie,

so as to induce the citizenry to support the city-state (414b–415d). This concept, however, would

not get a unique name for some two millennia. When Antoine Destutt de Tracy invented the

term, and therefore began to solidify the vocabulary surrounding it, from his prison cell during

the Terror following the French Revolution, ideology was meant much more as a strict adherence

to rational science in order to better restructure politics, economics, ethics, etc., as “simply the

theoretical expression of a pervasive strategy of social construction” (Ideology 67). Our more

contemporary conception of ideology as reactionary and conservative of the status quo is thanks

to Napoleon’s appropriation of Tracy’s concept, in order to attack Tracy and his contemporaries

who stood in the way of Napoleon’s progress in the formation of the First French Empire.41 In

1841, Ludwig Feuerbach introduced a new conception of ideology, free of the earlier necessity of

ideologues or noble liars, in his Das Wesen des Christentums, where he argued that the Christian

idea of God is merely an external personification of inner human nature, in other words a

specular creation of its very adherents, rather than a lie or argument foisted upon them. Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels utilized this specular dynamic in their very similar conception of

41 For a more detailed investigation of this time in the history of the concept of ideology, see Terry Eagleton’s

Ideology: An Introduction 65-70. See also the first chapter of Haug’s Elemente einer Theorie des Ideologischen.

22

ideology, which has come to form a type of basis for most modern uses of the term, including

ours.

Where Feuerbach focused upon the ideology of Christianity, Marx and Engels markedly

expanded the concept to the wider socio– and politico-economic spheres, that is, to the State.

Orthodox Marxism considers the bourgeois capitalist State to function as something of a two-tier

system, whereby a base sometimes referred to as simply structure or infrastructure, of politico-

economic exploitation creates and informs a superstructure of social and cultural norms and

ideals, which in turn maintains that base by legitimizing, concealing, or some combination

thereof, that base’s exploitation. This superstructural system of social and cultural ideas and

ideals is, for orthodox Marxism, both where ideology resides and what it is. Paralleling

Feuerbach, here the ideological complex of the superstructure is a specular, alienated creation of

those caught within the base’s exploitative, alienating, capitalist mode of production, which for

Marx and Engels is to say the ideological subject’s real conditions of existence.42 While this

overall metaphor of the base-superstructure dichotomy was exceedingly influential and has

continued throughout much of Marxist thought as a framework for ideology’s role and place

within the superstructure, the particulars of this dichotomous metaphor were quickly

questioned.43 Max Weber, in his “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik,”44

42 This gave rise to the oft-repeated false consciousness descriptor of ideology, where a set of false ideas was laid

over the real facts thereby obscuring them and their exploitative nature. As Engels wrote in a 14 July 1893 letter:

“Die eigentlichen Triebkräfte, die ihn bewegen, bleiben ihm unbekannt… Er imaginiert sich also falsche resp.

scheinbare Triebkräfte… Er arbeitet mit bloßem Gedankenmaterial, das er unbesehen als durchs Denken erzeugt

hinnimmt…” (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke XXXIX.97, hereafter abbreviated as MEW). [“The real motive

forces impelling him remain unknown to him… Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces… He operates in

pure conjecture, which he accepts without examination as the product of thought” (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels:

Collected Works L.164, hereafter abbreviated as MECW, translation modified).] As many have noted, and as we will

see in more specific terms later, this conception of ideology is in peculiar ways flawed and has over the years

become somewhat outmoded. 43 For a more extensive overview of this base-superstructure metaphor, and its difficulties, see Ellen Wood’s

Democracy against Capitalism, especially Chapter 2. 44 “The Nationstate and Economic Policy” See Weber’s Gesammelte Politische Schriften 7-30.

23

considered the two elements of Marx’s metaphor to be far more symbiotic and fluidly defined, to

the point that the base and superstructure became practically indistinguishable. The Italian

Marxist Antonio Gramsci continued to utilize the basic metaphor of base and superstructure,

though he also highlighted the simultaneous influence of the superstructure on the base.45 In

contrast to what he considered to be the rigid, orthodox vocabulary of ideology, Gramsci

advanced the concept of cultural hegemony through the compartmentalization of the

superstructure into the political and civil spheres, which allowed for the illumination of the

manifold differences between, for example, a “political” policeman and a “civil” journalist. Both

are informed by the base, to some extent mean to legitimize it, and therefore are elements of the

superstructure. Gramsci tried to underscore, however, the inherent differences between the

“complex, contradictory, and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” which two such

characters represent (SPN 366). While this history and these relatively contemporaneous

vocabularies of ideology will provide added and important context, there remains something

unique to Dadaist praxis expressed through the production of their works, to which these

conceptions of ideology only allude.

Whether in terms of orthodox Marxism’s conception of ideology, references to false

consciousness, or Gramscian hegemony, the idea of Dada’s project as predominantly critical of

ideologies becomes almost trivial. Indeed, both contemporaneous journalists and subsequent

literary, art, and cultural critics have long considered Dadaism to be a form of ideology critique.

When not dismissively deemed nihilistic, which in its own way is a particular form of ideology

critique, Dadaist works radically questioned and problematized the various ideologies of God

and religion, profit and capitalism, state and nationalism, beauty and aesthetics, among many

45 See Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 365-66 and 407-09, hereafter abbreviated as SPN.

24

others. In many ways, however, such readings remain at the level of meaning rather than praxis,

where the question posed of the work remains “To what does this work, this text, this picture

refer or allude?” rather than “How are such references and allusions created, how accurate or

faithful are these references and allusions, and just as importantly, how are these references and

allusions delivered and disseminated as works?” While it may be trivial to note that Dada was

critical of ideology, the question of how they became critics of ideology, the praxis that created

that ideology critique, the critical process and praxis of a Dadaist as a point of inflection and

reflection between ideology and the Dadaist’s audience remains to be fully investigated. That is,

are we able to see how Dadaist works critically analyze the process of ideological meaning-

formation and its reproduction and propagation? While the two sides of this specular/inflective

Dadaist point are necessarily and deeply interdependent, the former, i.e. the diverse Dadaist

praxes of artistic creation in relation to ideology, will require more thorough examinations of

Dadaist works, whereas we are already able to broach the latter and more general question of the

relationship between a Dadaist work and its audience.

As we’ve alluded, Dadaist’s rabid desire for an audience, observers, and readers, or rather for

targets, manifested itself in their incessant utilization of the technological reproducibility of the

burgeoning modern mass media environment, both as a wellspring from which Dadaists drew

their materials and aesthetics, as well as the instrument, as vehicle, with which Dadaists

propagated and disseminated their works. This allowed Dadaists not only the ability to

propagandize themselves more efficiently and successfully, but in many ways gave Dadaists the

tools and aesthetics to arrest and interrupt the target viewer, such as political and social

manifestation, marketing, and advertisement had proven to be so successful in their own arenas.

These tools and praxes, however, were weaponized in Dadaist’s hands. Benjamin noted that “das

25

Kunstwerk bei den Dadaisten zu einem Geschoß [wurde]. Es stieß dem Betrachter zu”46 (GS

VII.379). Dadaist performances regularly featured physical altercations, insults, riots,

provocations, etc. This was not unique to Dadaist ‘happenings,’ but rather can be seen in ‘riotous’

sound– and simultaneous– poetry, assemblages and photomontages, and even the challenging

distortion and (re)appropriation of everyday commodities and consumerist aesthetics. That is, the

Dadaist work violently confronted its potential audience until that audience was forced, whether

through defense or acceptance, outrage or enjoyment, or something in between, to become its

actual audience. As Dorothée Brill summarized, “It deprived the audience of the means of

controlling its perception” (155).47 Rather, the observer is involuntarily subjected to the

intrusions of the Dadaist work. In other words, the Dadaists work refuses to wait idly by for a

contemplative observer,48 but rather conspicuously and often violently calls out, howls and wails

to be observed, with and through mass media and their own design and production. The Dadaist

work invokes, proclaims, asserts, and thereby creates its audience. While it remains for us to

determine the unique aims and intricacies of diverse Dadaist works and the idiosyncratic praxis

with which they critique ideology, we can begin from this most fundamental operation of the

structural praxis of every Dadaist work towards its potential audience:49 as an interpellation.

46 “the Dadaists turned the artwork into a bullet. It jolted the viewer…” (Work of Art 39, translation slightly

modified). 47 This mirrors Peter Bürger’s assertion, summarized in Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s forward to Theory of the Avant-

Garde, that “Avant-garde aesthetic praxis […] aimed to intervene in social reality” (xxxix). For a deeper discussion

of Bürger’s views on the use of avant-garde art as social praxis, see the fourth chapter of his Theorie der

Avantgarde, titled Avantgarde und Engagement, 117-133. In this regard, Theodor Adorno’s formulation: “Der

Betrachter unterschreibt, unwillentlich und ohne Bewußtsein, einen Vertrag mit dem Werk, ihm sich zu fügen, damit

es spreche” (Ästhetische Theorie 114), is at best radically understated in the case of Dadaist works. [“Involuntary

and unconsciously the spectator enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it

speak.”] 48 As Benjamin noted: “Auf die merkantile Verwertbarkeit ihrer Kunstwerke legten die Dadaisten viel weniger

Gewicht als auf ihre Unverwertbarkeit als Gegenstände kontemplativer Versenkung” (GS VII.379). [“The Dadaists

attached much less importance to the commercial usefulness of their artworks than to the uselessness of those works

as objects of contemplative immersion” (Work of Art 39).] 49 From this vantage, we can see that Leah Dickerman’s suggestion of “something crucial… more overarching

about the idea of Dada” (“Dada Gambits” 9), may turn out to be that something crucial undergirding about the

praxis of Dada.

26

Interpellation

In his essay “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recherche)” and the

larger work in which it is found, Sur la reproduction,50 Louis Althusser developed his concept of

ideological interpellation. This concept answered the question, how are the means of production

reproduced through ideology, i.e. How does the state reproduce ideological subjects who

consider their position and situation within the hierarchy of social structure to be their natural

one. Althusser begins with the orthodox distinction of base (which he often denoted as

infrastructure) and superstructure, the latter of which he then further separates into “l’Appareil

répressif d’État [ARE] et les appareils idéologiques d’État [AIE]”51 (Sur la reproduction 183,

hereafter abbreviated SLR), where the former functions massively and predominantly through

physically violent repression and the latter massively and predominantly through ideology. In

this regard, the separation between the RSA and the ISAs is far from strict, but rather more

symbiotic.52 Althusser notes, however, one distinct difference: “La classe (ou l’alliance de

classes) au pouvoir ne fait pas aussi facilement la loi dans les AIE que dans l’appareil (répressif)

d’État… parce que la résistance des classes exploitées peut trouver le moyen et l’occasion de s’y

exprimer [aux AIE]”53 (284). That is, while the state is able to utilize repression independently

50 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” can be found as an appendix in the book length study translated as

On the Reproduction of Capitalism, as well as in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. 51 “the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” For brevity, I will follow Althusser’s

custom (as well as that of his English translator, G.M. Goshgarian) of abbreviating “Repressive State Apparatus” by

“RSA” and “Ideological State Apparatuses” by “ISAs.” In many ways, this division mirrors Gramsci’s between the

political and the civil elements of the superstructure. Though he ultimately rejected Gramsci’s conception of

hegemony, Althusser recognized his contribution in a footnote to the essay “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques

d’état” in SLR: “Gramsci est, à notre connaissance, le seul qui se soit avancé sur le voie que nous empruntons”

(281f). [“Gramsci is, to my knowledge, the only one who advanced down the path we are taking.”] 52 For instance, Althusser notes that the legal apparatus is violent and repressive, as well as simultaneously

ideological. 53 “The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive)

State apparatus… because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself

there [in the ISAs]” (Reproduction of Capitalism 245-46, hereafter abbreviated ROC).

27

and unilaterally, which recalls Max Weber’s “Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit,”54

the state is unable to act so unilaterally within the multi-vocal realm of ideology.55 This allows

not only the exploited classes and the Gramscian subaltern to have a voice within the complex of

ISAs, of course to varying degrees and to various advantages, but more importantly, anyone with

a voice is therefore a potential critic of ideology. In this way, we can already see hints of one of

the revolutionary advancements in Althusser’s theory of ideology and thereby its distinct benefits

in our analysis of the praxis of Dadaist’s radical disruption of aesthetics and indeed

communication: its introduction of discourse.56

Rather than a set of deeply held beliefs or a set of psychological ideas, Althusser focused his

study of ideology on the material communicative processes that form and reinforce certain ideas

and ideals of social structure while they simultaneously preclude, to some degree, other ideas and

ideals. That is, Althusser is less concerned with the specific idea or belief than he is with the

discourse that surrounds it. This is Althusserian interpellation: the discursive means through

which the ideological state apparatuses create a position or framework of social (hierarchical)

structure as well as the way in which it populates that framework with subjects. This concept of

interpellation as concerned less with the idea of ideology than with the structure of interpellative

discourse that practices that idea, mirrors our own focus on Dadaist praxis over Dadaist meaning.

While it may initially appear that we are abandoning the vocabulary of ideology for that of

54 “monopoly of legitimate physical violence” This formulation is most famously known from Weber’s essay

“Politik als Beruf” [“Politics as a Vocation”]. See Weber’s Gesammelte Politische Schriften 396-450. This

conception of the singularity, or univocality, of state repression is shared by Althusser, who maintained that there

was but one RSA, as opposed to the complex multitude of ISAs. 55 As Althusser noted, ISAs “sont objectivements distincts, relativement autonomes, et ne constituent pas un corps

organisé centralisé avec une direction unique et conciente” (SLR 166). [“are objectively distinct, relatively

autonomous, and do not form an organized, centralized corps with a single, conscious leadership” (ROC 137).] For a

deeper explanation of the complex of ideological structures, see Michel Pêcheux’s Les vérités de la palice, 129. 56 I use the term discourse here and throughout our study in the Foucauldian sense of a concrete system of

representation. See the second chapter of Foucault’s L’archeologie du savoir. For a concise and insightful overview

of Foucault and discourse, see Stuart Hall’s essay “The Work of Representation” in Representation: Cultural

Representations and Signifying Practices, 42-47.

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interpellation, Althusser’s analysis makes no meaningful differentiation between the two. “C’est

une seule et même chose que l’existence de l’idéologie et l’interpellation…”57 (227). They are

one and the same thing, to use the vocabulary of one is to use the vocabulary of the other. What

remains, then, is a deeper understanding beyond these preliminary remarks, of precisely what

interpellation is and how it functions.

Althusser gives something of an inverted definition of interpellation and its relation to

ideology thus: “Nous suggérons alors que l’idéologie « agit » ou « function » de telle sorte

qu’elle « recrute » des sujets parmi les individus… ou « transforme » les individus en sujets…

par cette opération très précise que nous appelons l’interpellation”58 (SLR 226). That is,

interpellation is the act of ideological subject formation. Althusser notes that interpellation is

perhaps best understood through simple examples, one of which seems to be particularly, if

infamously, illustrative. A police officer in a public square yells out “hé, vous là bas!”59 to which

vous, you turn around (226). This simple act is Althusser’s exemplar of interpellation, though it

belies a complex dynamic underneath the surface. Through the acknowledgment of, and turn

towards, the call or interpellation, the individual You is transformed into the ideological subject

You, in this case the subject of and within a complex structure of legal, political, etc. ideologies.

For Althusser, this transformation from individual to subject occurs through two simultaneous

and deeply interrelated developments. The thought “It was Me to whom the officer called!” and

its expression in You’s turn towards that officer’s call is what Althusser calls ideological

recognition. This is, however, also an ideological misrecognition in that the subject You sees its

own recognition as obvious, self-evident, natural, in that the recognition, i.e. the interpellation of

57 “The existence of ideology and the hailing of interpellation […] are one and the same thing” (ROC 191). 58 “We shall go on to suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to ‘recruit’ subjects among

individuals… or ‘transforms’ individuals into subjects… through the very precise operation that we call

interpellation” (ROC 190). 59 “Hey, you there!”

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the officer, has found its target, “I am an individual called You. Therefore, it really was Me to

whom the police officer called!” This process of misrecognition is not dependent upon our

perception of legal authority within the police officer nor You’s guilty conscience that might

impel You to turn, but rather the dynamics of interpellation within a particular complex or set of

ideologies. While this example of misrecognition highlights the use of deictic personal

pronouns—we, you, I, me, etc.—Slavoj Žižek summarizes the predicament of misrecognition’s

more general deictic nature in a recapitulation of Barbara Johnson’s essay on Lacan’s and

Derrida’s readings of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter: “A letter always arrives at its

destination since its destination is wherever it arrives” (Enjoy 12). That is, turning to the police

officer who yells “Hey, you!” carries with it the same quality of ideological misrecognition, if

exaggerated, as believing the message in a bottle that begins “Dear Reader” has finally found

someone who happens to be a reader, namely You, not only a reader but The Current Reader, the

one who happens to be reading “Dear Reader”.60 The message in a bottle arrived, after all these

years and miles (what luck!), precisely at its destination. While the deictic personal pronoun may

most easily exemplify misrecognition, we can see such dynamics expanded to every instance of

interpellation, regardless of message or bottle.

Interpellation, its ideological recognition and misrecognition, occurs when a friend knocks on

You’s door and says “It’s Me” or shakes You’s hand, when God calls to Moses, when a child is

named.61 In other words, the process of interpellation requires two ideological subjects, one

60 For those who find a yelling police officer or a message in a bottle to be obscure examples of ideological

misrecognition, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and its lyric “I bet you think this song is about you” may offer

both a more ‘current’ and intriguing example. For a quite literal if occasionally unsympathetic reading of this

example, see Judith Butler’s “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All.” 61 For a series of everyday instances of interpellation and ideological recognitions and misrecognitions, see SLR

224-26 (ROC 189-191). Althusser takes Christian ideology as one of his most studied examples in chapter 12, “De

l’idéologie” [“On Ideology”], 229-235, ROC 194-99. For the naming of a child as an act of interpellation, see SLR

228, ROC 192.

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interpellator of the interpellated,62 and moreover what Althusser calls a “Subject” of ideological

communication, a type of ideological framework or vocabulary, in and through which the

subjects speak or otherwise symbolically act; in our examples, justice, legal, companionship,

religious, familial, or some complex amalgamation of such ideologies. As Althusser put it: “c’est

qu’il n’existe une telle multitude de sujets religieux [idéologiques] possibles, que sous la

condition absolue qu’il y ait un Autre Sujet”63 (231). It is in the name of, and measured against,

this absolute Other Subject of ideology (for example God, Justice, Father within the respective

religious, juridical, patriarchal ideologies),64 that individuals are interpellated into subjects. In the

same instant in which those subjects are interpellated in the name of the Subject, so too does the

subject (ideologically) recognize the Subject as the Subject to which all subjects are subjected. In

other words, ideology is doubly specular; the actions of the personification of the Other Subject,

e.g. the police officer as the subject of, and spokesperson for, Justice; interpellation, and the

(re)actions of the subject, e.g. You, who turned to the policeman; the response to that

interpellation’s call, taken together form a process by which each is to a degree reflected in the

other. Althusser sees in this specular dynamic: “1/ l’interpellation des individus en sujets. 2/ la

reconnaissance mutuelle entre les sujets et le Sujet, et entre les sujets eux mêmes, et la

reconnaissance du sujet par lui-même, et 3/ la garantie absolue que tout est bien ainsi”65 (232);

62 Though somewhat absurd to imagine, it is important to note that a police officer cannot interpellate rocks, a priest

cannot proselytize to a forest. In short, there must be an interpellated subject for the process of interpellation to have

taken place. As Charles Peirce famously wrote: “Nothing is a sign, unless it is interpreted as a sign” (Collected

Papers of Charles Peirce II.172 [2.308], hereafter abbreviated CP), which would apply just as elegantly to

interpellation itself. For a deeper discussion of this necessity, see Pêcheux’s Les vérités 135-142. 63 “there can only be such a multitude of possible religious [ideological] subjects on the absolute condition that there

is an Other Subject” (195, translation modified). 64 This recalls, for instance Feuerbach’s thesis that Christ is merely the alienated, ideal man, and therefore suggests a

connection to the Freudian Ideal-Ich or Lacanian je-idéal and their relation to Lacan’s stade de miroir [mirror

stage]. As we will see, these connections, among others specific to Lacanain psychoanalysis, play a large role in

both Althusser’s thought and our use of Althusserian vocabulary in analyzing Dadaist praxis. For the moment,

however, we will remain focused upon our preliminary analysis of interpellation. 65 “1) the interpellation of individuals as subjects; 2) the mutual recognition between subjects and Subject and

among the subjects themselves, as well as the subject by himself; and 3) the absolute guarantee that everything

31

in other words, interpellation, recognition, and misrecognition.66 This tripartite process of

ideology is therefore no longer a system of psychological ideas within the mind of an ideological

subject, but a system of traditions, ceremonies, apparatuses, speeches, and interactions between

subjects. In other words: “L’idéologie a une existence matérielle”67 (218).

Althusser reads the ideology of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums and Marx’s Die

Deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology], as psychological, a false consciousness that

reflected an alienated version of the ideological subject’s real conditions of existence precisely

because those conditions were alienating.68 Althusser noted, however, that an alienated reflection

of alienating conditions of existence implies a rather accurate reflection, that the false

consciousness was less distorted, less false than imagined. For Althusser, then, factual

consciousness is just as ideological as false consciousness. Rather, consciousness itself is

entrenched in ideology and the differentiation between factual and false is not one of accuracy in

the elucidation of real conditions of existence, but rather is merely a reorganization of ideology.

At this impasse, Althusser removes ideology one degree: “l’idéologie représente le rapport

imaginaire des individus à leur conditions réelles d’existence”69 (SLR 216, my emphasis). That

is, rather than ideology’s direct representation of so-called reality, ideology is the imaginary

representation of an ideological subject’s relation to those real conditions of existence, as though

really is so” (197). At this third point, Althusser places a footnote indicating that there has been no proper theorist of

this guarantee, and such a theorization will be placed to the side for the time being (presumably to be taken up in the

unwritten second volume). As we will see, this guarantee is simply the guarantee that language functions properly,

that ideological misrecognition is hidden, ignored. 66 Althusser noted the similarity between his “définition de l’idéologie comme « reconnaissance » et «

méconnaissance »” (207) [“the definition of ideology as ‘recognition’ and ‘miscognition’” (173, translation

modified)], and that of Marx’s own identical terms Erkennung and Verkennung in Die deutsche Ideologie. See SLR

207n103; ROC 173n3. 67 “Ideology has a material existence” (184). 68 See SLR 209; ROC 174-75. Eagleton reads Die Deutsche Ideologie similarly. See his Ideology: An Introduction,

80 and 89. 69 “Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence” (ROC 181, my

emphasis).

32

that relation were real. This relation is imaginary in the specifically Lacanian concept of the

image. Lacan’s infamous essay “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,”70

describes an infant who observes her own image in a mirror and the Aha-Erlebnis that the vision

of her own Gestalt constitutes. While the young infant recognizes herself in the mirror, she

simultaneously perceives her specular image’s recognition of her. She therefore becomes

simultaneously subject and object, self and other. Moreover, the Gestalt of this specular other

appears, to the infant, a more unified whole than her own experience of her own body, what

Lacan would call the “je-idéal” (Écrits 94). Therefore, “par ces deux aspects de son apparition

[cette Gestalt] symbolise la permenance mentalle du je en même temps qu’elle préfigure sa

destination aliénante”71 (95). Just as for the infant before the mirror, the ideological subject is

continually confronted with alienating (specular) images of their idealized selves (ideal-I), which

are reflected in, and therefore seen through or distorted by, a particular ideological vocabulary of

Justice, God, Beauty, etc. These ideological reflections are placed into context. That context,

which for the infant had been the others visible in the reflection, e.g. her mother and their

environment, becomes for the ideological subject other ideological subjects and the real and

social conditions of their existence. Therefore, ideology represents the imaginary relation, i.e.

the distorted specular projection of an alienated individual, to relations of production.

Unlike the psychological process of our Lacanian infant, however, Althusser’s ideological

interpellation is material: “une idéologie existe toujours dans un appareil, et sa practique ou ses

practiques. Cette existence est matérielle”72 (SLR 291). As opposed to ideas themselves,

70 See Écrits 93-100. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Bruce Fink’s translation of Écrits, 75-81.

As we will later see, Lacan’s influence extends far beyond this particular work. 71 “Through these two aspects of its appearance, this Gestalt… symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same

time as it prefigures its alienating destination” (Écrits[en] 76). 72 “an ideology always exists in an apparatus and in the practice or practices of that apparatus. This existence is

material” (ROC 184). Žižek clarifies the distinction between Lacan and Althusser in his criticism of the latter’s

33

Althusser focused on the only way in which those ideas can manifest, namely through material

expression, e.g. genuflection, prayer, signed petitions, marches on Washington, a policeman

yelling “Hey, you!,” etc. The traditional conception of idea-then-action is, in a way, reversed

through Althusser’s use of Pascal’s dialectic: “Mettez-vous à genoux, remuez les lèvres de la

prière, et vous croirez”73 (221). Through the dismissal of the primacy of the mental idea, the

(foreign) genesis of that idea, and a subject’s true belief in that idea within traditional

conceptions of ideology, the theorist or critic of interpellation is able to focus on, analyze,

investigate the “actes matériels insérés dans des practiques matérielles, régelées par des rituels

matériels, eux-mêmes définis par l’appareil idéologique matériel”74 (ibid). We can see this in

Althusser’s repeated use of “inscrire” and even in the term “interpellation” itself, as well as

examples of interpellation as “frapp[a]nt à notre porte”; “serrant la main”; “coup de sifflet”;

“écriture” 75 (222-26), all indicative of ideological interpellation’s realization in the material

symbolic communication between subjects in reference to, and in the name of, an ideological

Subject within an ISA; an ideological text woven from material, observable, readable,

practices.76 Moreover, ideology itself, exemplified in, and constituted from, these textual

ideologies, is ubiquitous. That is, there is no non-interpellative, non-ideological, symbolic

communication: “il n’est de practique, quelle qu’elle soit, que par et sous une idéologie”77 (223).

insistence on the material nature of ideology. See Enjoy 68f. and Sublime Object 42f. We will encounter the

criticisms again in later chapters. 73 “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (186). For an extended discussion of Althusser’s

use, and Slavoj Žižek’s reading of that use, see Thomas Pepper’s “Kneel and You Will Believe.” 74 “material acts inserted into material practices regulated by material rituals, which are themselves defined by the

material ideological apparatus” (186). 75 “inscribe”; “interpellation”; “knocking on our door”; “shaking hands”; “whistle”; “writing” (187-191) 76 I utilize the word text here, and from here on, as a type of short hand to denote an act or product of acts which is

both material and semiotic. 77 “There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology” (187). While this seems sufficiently clear,

Althusser is perhaps more direct in a footnote regarding linguistics itself: “Les « linguistes » et ceux qui appellent au

secours le malhereuse linguistique à differents fins, achoppent sur des difficultés qui tiennent à ce qu’ils

méconnaissent le jeu des effécts idéologiques dans tous le discours – y compris les discours scientifiques eux-

mêmes” (224f). [“‘Linguists’ and those who call poor suffering linguistics to the rescue to different ends run up

34

There are many ways in which the ubiquity of ideological interpellation as material

communication, if often quotidian and unremarkable, appears to be, even initially, beyond

question. As a system of communication, a text and context, we could be tempted to cite Jacques

Derrida’s infamous “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”78 (Grammatologie 277), where each successive

layer of context is shown to be still more material systems of ideological interpellation, or to take

recourse to Lacan and the ubiquity of the symbolic order which Althusser considered practically

equivalent to interpellation.79 Althusser does precisely this by invoking Lacan’s Nom-de-père,

where an unborn embryo is named and therefore interpellated: “qu’il portera le nom de son père,

aura donc une identité… et sera irremplaçable”80 within familial and patriarchal ideologies,

among others (SLR 228). Althusser argues that for the ideological subject, i.e. any and every

individual with a name, every individual who has been interpellated into, and exists within the

symbolic order, interpellation has always already begun and is therefore temporally ubiquitous,

omni-historical, “omniprésent, donc immuable en sa forme dans toute l’étendue de l’histoire”81

(210). In addition to the temporal dimension, the geographical or schematic ubiquity of

ideological interpellation also follows, in a certain regard, from its relation to the symbolic, or

the more general mark to use Derrida’s terminology. Describing the symbiotic relationship

between the RSA and ISAs, Althusser writes: “Ce sont eux [les AIE] qui assurent, par définition,

against problems due to the fact that they ignore the play of ideological effects in all discourses – even scientific

discourses” (189f).] 78 “there is no outside-text” (Grammatology 158). The many and regular misreadings of this particular saying

plagued both Derrida and deconstruction. For a more involved discussion of this statement, see Limited Inc. 136. 79 See, for instance, Lacan’s 1 December 1954 seminar (Séminaire II.39-53), entitled “The Symbolic Universe” in

the English translation (Seminar II 27-39). In particular, Lacan writes: “dès qu’il vient le symbole, il y a un univers

de symboles… ces symboles impliquent la totalité de tout ce qui est humain. Tout se classe et s’ordonne par rapport

aux symboles une fois qu’il sont apparus” (Séminaire II.42). [As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of

symbols. […] …they imply the totality of everything which is human. Everything is ordered in accordance with the

symbols which have emerged, in accordance with the symbols once they have appeared” (Seminar II 29).] 80 “will bear its father’s name, and so have an identity” ; “and will be irreplaceable” (ROC 192). For a further

discussion of Althusser and Lacan, see Anthony Wilden’s System and Structure, specifically chapter 17. 81 “omnipresent and therefore immutable in form throughout all of history” (176).

35

la reproduction même des rapports de production sous le « bouclier » de l’Appareil répressif

d’État”82 (171). As we have seen however,83 there is no strict separation between ISAs and the

RSA in Althusser’s conception. The complex of ISAs is therefore inclusive of the RSA, inclusive

of its own shield. While the term shield often implies the concept of a protective border against

some outside or some Other-agent, the (relative) influence of even the most exploited classes

within the complex of ISAs, as well as the RSA’s interiority to that complex, makes the RSA less

a shield against external threat from some non-ideological, which is to say non-discursive Other-

agent, than it is a labyrinthine series of prison walls that confine the critical ideological subject

who hopes or plans to disrupt or escape. Far from excision or expulsion into a non–, Other– or

Unknown–ideological space, the RSA turns potential saboteurs or escapees back into the, which

is to say our, ideological fray. As Francis Mulhern succinctly put it: “To live at all is to live in

ideology”84 (160).

This inescapable ubiquity is to be expected from a symbiosis at the heart of the reproduction

of the means of production and therefore itself through the reproduction of ideological subjects.

Michel Foucault’s Surveillir et punir, his investigation into the history of the penal system, an

example of the RSA in nuce, exemplifies the very “but prinicipal de la peine… [:] l’amendement

et le reclassement social du condamné”85 into a productive member of, rather than exile from,

82 “It is them [the ISAs], in fact, that assure, by definition, the very reproduction of the relations of production under

the ‘shield’ of the Repressive State Apparatus.” This metaphor mirrors that of Gramsci’s description of the

geography of the superstructure: “The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of

[ideological] fortresses and earthworks” (SPN 238). 83 See above, page 22f. 84 This is similar to what Althusser wrote in his famous letter to André Daspre regarding art and ideology: “Quand

nous parlons d’idéologie, nous devons savoir que l’idéologie se glisse dans toutes les activités des hommes, qu’elle

est identique au « vécu » même de l’existence humaine” (“Réponse” 143) [“When we speak of ideology we should

know that ideology slides into all human activity, that it is identical with the ‘lived’ experience of human existence

itself” (Lenin 223).] 85 “principle aim of the penalty” ; “the reformation and social rehabilitation of the convict” (Discipline and Punish

269). That this tout récente [quite recent] emphasis on rehabilitation of the convict into a socially productive

individual coincided with the second industrial revolution and classical bourgeois society was not lost on Foucault,

nor should it be lost on us.

36

that society (274). This symbiotic relationship between the RSA and the complex of ISAs,

through the inescapability of that (all) complex(es), to the point that its radical ubiquity within,

and as every form of discourse allows it to hide in plain sight, becomes, however, its own

dialectical weakness. It necessarily exposes itself and its inner workings, in its radical and

radically unavoidable ubiquity, to the unproductive whom it means to correct—the apathetic

worker in capitalism, the hysteric woman in patriarchy, the nonsensical artist in aesthetics, etc.—

so long as they know how to identify or diagnose that ideology as ideology. Every critic and

analyst of ideology, therefore, becomes a potential rebellious insurgent, a guerrilla fighter within

the ideology against which it fights, an agent who possesses the means to subvert, sabotage, or

skew the functioning of that ideology.86 As Althusser put it: “les Appareils idéologiques de l’État

puissent être non seulement l’enjeu, mais aussi le lieu de la lutte des classes”87 (284). That is, the

metaphorical Promised Land is always already the battleground and the crown jewels are the

weapons. There is no outside, from which a detached, purely descriptive, critical analysis can

take place. Therefore, the critical interpretation of the complex of material ideological

apparatuses is always already an element of and within that complex.88 In this way, the great

power, and the great responsibility that comes with it, of the critical analyst of ideological

interpellation is that her analysis becomes both constitutive and transformative of what is being

86 Judith Butler investigates a similar possibility of the positive re–appropriation of hate speech, though often in a

specifically legal context, in her Excitable Speech, esp. 23. 87 “Ideological State Apparatuses may not only be the stake, but also the site of class struggle,” (245). Michel

Pêcheux added: “les appareils idéologique d’Êtat constitutent simultanément et contradictoirement le lieu et les

conditions idéologiques de la transformation des rapports de production” (129). [“the ideological state apparatuses

constitute simultaneously and contradictorily the site and the ideological conditions of the transformation of the

relations of production” (99)]. 88 In a certain respect, this line of thought given by Althusser contradicts his own conception of “la connaissance

scientifique” (SLR 227) [“in scientific knowledge” (ROC 191)]. As we will see below, this becomes a particularly

difficult contradiction in regards to art and ideology. For a discussion of the impossibility of an “hors de l’idéologie”

(SLR 227) [“outside of ideology” (ROC 191)] or something of an internal space, and the difficulties that

impossibility engenders in the search for a critique of ideology, see Slavoj Žižek’s introduction to Mapping Ideology

and Ernesto Laclau’s “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology” in The Rhetorical Foundations of

Society, 11-36.

37

analyzed. The diagnosis not only describes but also alters the disease; or perhaps most

appropriately, the critical reading of ideology always already reconstructs, reforms, and

potentially revolutionizes the ideological text.

Our preliminary outline of the particularities of Althusserian interpellation and his assertion

that ideology is co-extensive with interpellation, offer clues as to how the critic of ideology may

best proceed.89 As implied by the very term interpellation and the examples with which Althusser

illuminates the concept, every particular ideology can be thought of as a type of Subject-centered

vocabulary. Concrete individuals become ideological subjects within a patriarchal, capitalist, etc.

ideology when they speak and act with(in) the vocabulary of, and in reference to Father, Capital,

etc. respectively. The use or active perception of an ideological vocabulary, which is to say the

individual’s entrance into that ideology’s localized symbolic order, is the act of becoming an

ideological subject. These acts and this speech is material, organized into a complex of material

apparatuses, creating an ideological text which can be read.90 The ubiquity or inescapability of

this text, that every material vocabulary is always already ideological, reveals that this complex

of ideological vocabularies that constitute the ideological text as a whole not only can be read,

but must be, is forced upon us. To speak or to act, whether to simply say “Hello!” to a neighbor

or put on a suit, to write a dissertation or build a hydroelectric dam, to design a new style of

handwriting or sell a chocolate grinder, is to have read the ideological (con)texts and

89 At this point, we will remain merely at this brief introduction to the concept of interpellation, which we will

further hone and refine through its many encounters and confrontations with Dadaist praxis. While there are distinct

differences between his study and our current project, elements of James R. Martel’s recent book of political theory,

The Misinterpellated Subject have proved helpful in clarifying current critical readings of Althusserian interpellation

and its subversion. Counter to our focus on Dadaist performative subversion as interpellators, Martel focuses on the

side of the interpellated, those who interject themselves into another’s interpellation, a subversively radical “I am

Spartacus” moment, which Martel reads in political movements such as the Haitian revolution and Arab Spring, as

well as characters in various narrative stories from Kafka, Melville, Ellison, and others. 90 As we will see, the question of ideological interpellation and the question of Dadaist praxis can both be thought of

in terms of reading, which I am using here and elsewhere in the widest sense, as a systematic recognition of material

signs, signals, symbols, or marks.

38

vocabularies which allow for that speech and those acts. By and large, this simultaneous process

of reading and being read is performed in order to navigate the praxis of everyday life, the

quotidian ideological world with a level of stability and consistency. These readings, responses to

interpellations, are transformed into textual actions in the course of that navigation, to be read by

others, a new re-interpellation, creating something of a social tapestry, the material

manifestations of the complex of dominant ideologies. Different in formation, though

inseparable from that complex and its processes, the work of art functions as a form of critical

double reading; one that analyzes and investigates both the tapestry on the whole and the texts in

the singular, uniquely macro and micro, while simultaneously contributing to that tapestry.91 In

this way, the study of a work of art, with specific attention paid to either that work’s explicit,

incidental, or duplicitous deployment of, relationship to, confrontation with, and perhaps most

importantly construction as interpellation, is able to give significant insights into the complex of

ideological interpellation, in and as which that work functions. This immediately opens the

difficult problem of literature and art as ideological form.

In his letter on art and ideology to André Daspre, Althusser recognizes the predicaments

that arise between the two: “Le problème des rapports de l’art et de l’idéologie est un problème

très complexe et très difficile”92 (“Réponse” 141-42). Althusser continues: “Je ne range pas l’art

veritable parmi les idéologies, bien que l’art entretienne un rapport tout à fait particulier et

spécifique avec l’idéologie”93 (142). Althusser points to the work of Pierre Macherey, Althusser’s

91 Here, of course, I am using the term work of art in the widest sense, to include the literary and pulp, sacred and

profane, so-called material and performance art, across all media. 92 “The problem of the relations between art and ideology is a very complicated and difficult one” (Lenin 221). 93 “I do not rank real art among the ideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specific relationship

with ideology” (221). This, of course, brings up a whole new set of difficulties: What is real, or authentic art as he

later calls it? How is it differentiated from average or mediocre art? How can real art not be ideological, as ideology

is ubiquitous? For a more in depth discussion of this passage of Althusser’s letter, and the myriad difficulties that it

presents, see Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology, 82-84.

39

student and coauthor of Lire le Capital,94 who at the time had written an article on V.I. Lenin’s

criticism of the works of Leo Tolstoy, around which he would build his later book, Pour une

théorie de la production littéraire,95 which outlines both Althusser’s and Macherey’s thoughts on

art and ideology. “Ce que l’art nous donne à voir, nous donne donc dans la forme de « voir », du

« percevoir » et du « sentir » (qui n’est pas la forme du connaître) c’est l’idéologie dont il naît,

dans laquelle il baigne, dont il se détache en tant qu’art, et à laquelle il fait allusion”96

(“Réponse” 142). This detachment is “en quelque sorte du dedans, par une distance intérieure”97

(ibid). The creation of this interior distance allows the ideology to be felt, if not known.98 The

careful critic, then, with her ear attuned to the play of ideology, is able to begin to diagnose the

presence of ideology with and within the work, a piece of reality uniquely (re)formed, which

thereby highlights the reality around it. In other words, the work of art is a uniquely (re)formed

text that thereby highlights the dynamics and functions of the text and tapestry that surround it.

For Althusser, Macherey, and others, this is the place of symptomatic reading which attempts to

read a text “au départ à la problématique invisible contenue dans le paradoxe d’une réponse ne

correspondant à aucune question posée”99 (Lire 29), which is to say, a reading of the invisible

ideological presuppositions of a text. Less a symptomatic reading, our project means to read

Dadaist works not only as texts imbedded within the ideology dominant at the time and place of

94 Lire le Capital was cowritten by Althusser, Macherey, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, and Jacques Rancière in

1965 and has recently been publish in an unabridged edition as Reading Capital. 95 A Theory of Literary Production 96 “What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not

the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art,

and to which it alludes” (222). 97 “in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance” (223). 98 This topic, Althusser’s concept of knowledge, a translation of the French connaissance, by which he means

scientific knowledge, by which he means non-ideological scientific knowledge, will be broached in a later chapter. 99 “against the invisible problematic contained in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any

question posed” (Reading Capital 27). For an excellent overview of symptomatic reading and specifically its

importance to literary theory, see Klaus-Michael Bogdal’s “Symptomatische Lektüre und historische

Funktionsanalyse (Louis Althusser)” in Neue Literaturtheorien, 84-107.

40

its production, but rather as texts which inscribe and interpellate its readers as ideological

subjects, and more specifically the ways in which the text attempts to subvert its own necessary

inscriptions and interpellations. While Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology and Fredric

Jameson’s The Political Unconscious were among the first to engage in involved readings of

literary works as semiotic interpellation, that is, as a discursive field that positions the reader

in(to) a particular ideological viewpoint, Renée Balibar’s Les français fictifs and, perhaps more

importantly, Étienne Balibar and Macherey’s preface to it, “Sur la littérature comme forme

idéologique: quelques hypothèses marxistes,” were among the first to attempt to think through

literature as a mode of interpellation in the shadow of Althusser’s work on ideological

interpellation.100

É. Balibar and Macherey make important distinctions between their position and Althusser’s

thoughts expressed in his letter to André Daspre, on the relationship between a work of art and

ideology, as well as distancing themselves from Macherey’s previous positions outlined in Pour

une théorie. Namely, they argue that there is no relation between literature and ideology, no more

than there can be a significantly meaningful relation between a thing and itself, for literature is

ideology, and the internal distance that Althusser considered the work of art to have created

collapses. Indeed, a critic’s reading of any internal distance is almost invariably aesthetic. For É.

Balibar and Macherey the aesthetic is ideological, which leads them to dismiss the concepts of

aesthetics and, more specific to their study, literature itself as constructs in and within the process

100 While É. Balibar and Macherey’s preface, translated as “On Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist

Hypotheses,” was more concerned with theoretical questions of literature as interpellation, R. Balibar’s main text

attempts to identify the discrepancies between literary and spoken, or so-called common French taught in the public

school system and the use of those discrepancies as a means of ideological domination. Butler explores this concept

of “bien parler” [speaking properly] within the work of Althusser in her article “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of

Us All,” specifically 13-15.

41

of ideological domination.101 That is, works of art and literature are not crystalized or immutable

fossils that accentuate the dynamics of some moment of historical ideology in which they were

produced, but rather are sustained interpellative discourses throughout the history of their

(re)productions and (re)readings. The collapse of the internal distance between sacred literature

and profane ideology necessitated a parallel collapse of the separation between the critical

importance given to ideological production and ideological reception, between a work’s

reflection of some past or distant ideology and its intervention into current ideology as

interpellation, or to use our terminology, between (con)text and reading. The work then becomes

a point of reflection and inflection, between the ideology from which it is culled and the

audience to which it is transmitted.102 This is precisely the point where we begin our readings of

Dadaist works.

101 Indeed, Foucault outlines the invention of the concept of literature as a bourgeois construct in Les mots et les

choses, 312f. 102 We have already initially, if crudely, outlined this dynamic in Dadaist praxis. See above, page 23f.

42

Chapter Two

“Can’t You Read the Dada?”:

The Letter and the Word, in and as Dada

OFFEAHBDC

BDQ☟,,qjyE!1

–Raoul Hausmann

“La pensée occidental ne supporte pas, n’a jamais supporté au fond

le vide de la signification, le non-lieu et la non-valeur”2

–Jean Baudrillard

“Sie sind das Opfer Ihrer Anschauungsweise, Ihrer sogenannten Bildung,

die Sie aus den Geschichtsbüchern, dem Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch

und einigen Klassikern gleich en gros generationenweise beziehen.”3

–Raoul Hausmann

Given the problems inherent with the beginning of Dadaism that we outlined in the previous

chapter, it is perhaps best if we begin rather with the elemental within Dadaist works. Dadaist

praxis, and more specifically Dadaist praxis in regards to the linguistic sign on which we will

focus in this chapter, dissected the Saussurian sign beyond its most common components—a

signifier, most often in the form of a word, without motivation but traditionally bound in practice

to a signified, a concept of some sort, which only then is attributed to a referent.4 More elemental

than signifier and signified, or even phoneme and morpheme, however, is the individual letter

and it is at this rudimentary level that our investigation of Dadaist praxis as a subversive

performance of ideological interpellation will begin. Dadaist works give an abundance of

1 See fig. 2.1. 2 L’échange 337. [“Western thought cannot bear, and at bottom has never been able to bear, a void of signification, a

non-place, and a non-value” (Symbolic 234).] 3 Texte I.94f. [“You are the victim of your way of thinking, your so-called education, which you generally refer to in

the history books, the civil code, and some classics, from generation to generation.”] 4 This is, of course, a drastic simplification of the structure of the Saussurian sign outlined in his Cours de

linguistique générale, which we will further examine and clarify later.

43

possible examples to consider, for the Dadaists who meant to focus their criticisms on “die

Grundlagen der Zivilisation”5 (Ernst 35), appear to have been in their turn also fascinated by the

isolated letter at the heart of linguistic infrastructure. Perhaps the most popular examples would

be the photomontages of Berlin Dada which incorporated isolated letters through radical

imbrication and removed the context of the complete words in cases such as in Grosz and John

Heartfield’s Leben und Treiben in Universal-City 12 Uhr 5 Mittags (1919) or Johannes Baader’s

Ehrenportrait von Charlie Chaplin (1919), perhaps for our discussion here more aptly described

by its secondary title, Gutenberggedenkblatt,6 or through the total excision of the letters from

their original contexts, most notable in Hausmann’s Elasticum (1920), ABCD (1923), Der

Kunstreporter (1919-20), and Dada Cino (1920), or Höch’s masterpiece Schnitt mit dem

Küchenmesser Dada (1919).7 In many cases of radical excision, the original source of these

individual letters is often previous Dadaist works composed of letters already decontextualized

from words, most often Hausmann’s poster-poems (fig. 2.1), something of a sub-genre of his

opto-phonetic poems.8 In certain ways, we can also see the elemental importance of the letter to

interpellation.

5 “foundations of the civilization” This conflation of the foundation of civilization with language is repeated in

Tzara’s retrospective “An Introduction to Dada”: “This led us to direct our attacks against the very fundaments of

society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (Motherwell 404). 6 Life and Activity in the Universal City at Five Past Twelve; Honorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin;

Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg. See figs. 4.35 and 4.38, respectively. The latter’s dual-title in fact mirrors our

current focus upon the printed linguistic sign, where Charlie Chaplin the beloved silent movie star, who so strongly

resisted verbal speech and therefore relied on title cards, was particularly indebted to the composition of printed

words, i.e. indebted to Gutenberg. 7 Elasticum; ABCD; The Art Critic; Dada Cino; Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada. See figs. 4.27; 4.28; 4.33; 4.36;

4.50, respectively. We will investigate Dadaist photomontages in detail in our fourth chapter. 8 According to Hausmann, these poster-poems were composed by chance in that a printer randomly chose individual

blocks, mostly but not exclusively, until he filled two rows of the printer’s bed. See Hausmann’s Am Anfang war

Dada, 43. Both poster-poems can be seen in Hausmann’s Texte, I.18. Gertrud Dech points out that Höch excised the

‘nf’ that appears in the upper middle of Schnitt from one of Hausmann’s poster-poems (87-88). The large ‘e’ in the

lower left is also likely to have come from a poster-poem, or at the very least is the same wood-block typeset from

Hausmann’s poster-poems and his photomontages. See fig. 4.50. While only fmsbw and OFFEAH remain today,

photos of still other poster-poems were taken during the Erste International Dada-Messe [First International Dada

Fair] in 1920, though the posters themselves have since been lost or discarded.

44

Althusser notes: “l’effet idéologique élémentaire” is the self-evident fact, the obviousness of

signification, “qu’un mot « désigne une chose » ou « possède une signification » (donc y compris

les évidences de la « transparence » du langage)”9 (SLR 224). Though Althusser here writes of a

word that possesses a meaning, the inclusion of the word transparency suggests other, perhaps

more nuanced, connotations. While Althusser himself does not elaborate on his concept of

transparency, the word itself allows us some clues. Most immediately, it implies the initiation of

a specific and ideological form of reading. That is, transparency is a visual phenomenon, which

in collaboration with language, results in reading, and for Althusser the initiation of the

ideological effect.10 It is important here to note that Althusser does not suggest that (written)

language is, in fact, transparent, but rather that the perception of language as transparent is the

elementary ideological effect, upon which ideology itself and therefore complexes of ideologies

function. Although transparency of language is here discussed in terms of words, e.g. the word-

image tree purely, transparently transmits the conceptual meaning tree when read, there is a

deeper analogue at the level of the letter, for to read the word-image tree is to read its material

letters, their design in physical, if ostensibly 2-dimensional space. In his summary of one of Eric

Havelock’s central theses of literacy,11 Richard Lanham writes that “…a culture, to be truly

literate, must possess an alphabet simple… and unobtrusive enough… that a reader forgets about

its physical aspects and reads right through it to the meaning beneath. The written surface must

be transparent… and unselfconscious. We must not notice the size and shape of the letters” (33).

Havelock’s reader is, as of course all readers are, ideological. For us to consider the material

9 “elementary ideological effect” ; “make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have meaning’ (including therefore the self-

evident facts of the ‘transparency’ of language)” (ROC 189). 10 Though it would perhaps be excessive, a Derridian argument could be made here against the opposition or

hierarchy between speech and writing, and therefore hearing and reading. 11 See Havelock’s The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, especially the fourth and sixth

chapters.

45

alphabet, i.e. the size and shape of the letters, to be transparent means for us to enter into the

vocabulary, the symbolic order, the possible ideologies of that alphabet. That is, Havelock’s

concept of transparency, in combination with Althusser’s elementary ideological effect of

transparency, becomes a type of shibboleth that marks us as members of the elemental and

elementary ISA of proto-literacy.

Although we outlined the interests of many Dadaists towards the isolated letter, this

intersection of the material letter, its ostensible transparency, that transparency’s effect on

literacy, and the ideology that results may best be occupied by the work of Kurt Schwitters.

Indeed, Schwitters actively recognized the elemental and foundational role of the individual

material letter to his work: “Nicht das Wort ist ursprünglich Material der Dichtung, sondern der

Buchstabe”12 (Das literarische Werk V.190, hereafter abbreviated DLW). His insistence on the

materiality of the letter led him to pay specific attention to how one encounters a material, visual

object meant for the (ideological) transmission of meaning, which is to say, how one reads a

letter. For Schwitters, that primordial, material letter was the letter i and in many ways he reads it

nowhere more openly, with all of its implicit ideological particularities and complications, than

in his 1922 work “Das i-Gedicht” (fig. 2.2).13

12 “The word is not the primordial material of poetry, but rather the letter.” 13 “The i-Poem” See DLW 1.206.

46

“Das i-Gedicht”

First published in his 1922 collection of poems, Die Blume Anna: Die neue Anna Blume,

“Das i-Gedicht” is one of Schwitters’s shorter, and ostensibly simpler, works. Indeed, the

structure of the work is that of the traditional, tripartite emblem—a title (lemma), a picture or

design (icon), and a following, often explanatory text (epigram)—, a form designed for easy

consumption and comprehension, though it so often falls into enigma.14 Here the presumptive

title/lemma above is “Das i-Gedicht,” a title which serves as both a preparatory descriptor of the

contents of the work—it is a poem and deals with the letter i—as well as of the aesthetic ideals

and philosophy that Schwitters followed in its production and would enumerate in the following

years.15 The icon is a design of three straight, connected lines and a dot; from left to right, one

line angled up, connected to a thicker vertical line, which is in turn connected at its bottom to

another line angled up, the dot placed above the vertical line. In the second issue of his review

Merz (April 1923), playfully numbered i, Schwitters elaborated on the central design: “Das

14 Schwitters utilized the concept of emblems in other works. For example, his “Tran 24,” from the same year,

describes itself as “ein Sinnbild für die brave Kritik” [“an emblem for the good criticism”] and follows this tripartite

formula. It is reproduced in DLW V.107. For a brief introduction to the general structure of the traditional emblem,

see John Manning’s The Emblem, especially the introduction, 13-36. In the introduction to the Companion to

Emblem Studies, editor Peter Daly notes: “The function of the emblem is didactic in the broadest sense: it was

intended to convey knowledge and truth in a brief and compelling form that will persuade the reader and imprint

itself on memory” (5). Despite this attempted didacticism, and of course in certain ways because of it, the emblem

frequently becomes far more cryptic than didactic. For a deeper discussion of the enigmatic nature of the emblem,

see Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in GS I.203-430, especially 344ff. In addition to Schwitters’s

“Das i-Gedicht,” we will see the recondite emblematic structure in other works, perhaps most notably in certain

readymades, such as Fountain (1917, fig. 5.1), Peigne (1916, fig. 5.9), and Apolinère Enameled (1916, fig. 5.11),

which had titles, a visual design or object, and a supplemental inscription. We will discuss these works in chapter

five. 15 Schwitters wrote elsewhere of i-Kunst [i-art]. See specifically “i (Ein Manifest)” (1922), “i” (1923), and “i-

Architektur” (1924), reproduced in DLW V.120, 137, and 176-77 respectively. As we will see shortly, the referent of

what Gérard Genette would consider the rhematic portion of the title (“Gedicht”) becomes particularly difficult to

locate. To continue with Genette’s vocabulary, the titular “i” then takes on the role of both thematic and rhematic

element, i.e. in that it refers to both the theme of the poem (it is a poem that prominently features the letter i) and the

form of the poem (it is a work of i-Kunst that conforms to the aesthetic ideals that Schwitters came to denote with

the letter i). See chapter four of Genette’s Seuils, especially 73-89.

47

Zeichen i heißt » I «. Es ist ein kleines » I « aus dem deutschen Alphabet…”16 (V.138). Here,

Schwitters contrasts not the letter, but rather the design of i from “Das i-Gedicht,” which is to

say the i from the Sütterlin script, with the former ornate Kurrent script of German handwriting,

which font he utilizes in the citation, and which Sütterlin was meant to update.17 Though it is

ostensibly a letter, the i-design takes the place of the emblematic visual icon as both the only

piece of (mechanically printed and approximated) handwriting, rather than printed typeface, and

the only so-called German (Fraktur) script, rather than the Latin (Antiqua) type utilized for both

the title and epigram. The epigram is set in brackets beneath: “[lies: »rauf, runter, rauf,

Pünktchen drauf«].”18 This seemingly simple structure belies its radical complexity.

The emblematic structure of the work emphasizes the Sütterlin-i as the visual icon, rather

than merely as an excised or decontextualized letter, and the epigram explicitly refers to it in

those terms. That is, the Sütterlin-i icon, prefaced by the lemma, is not referenced by the epigram

as the letter i, Sütterlin or otherwise, but rather material given a particular visual form and design

through a bodily performance; for Schwitters, a reinforcement of the primordial materiality of

the letter. In whole, this is not merely a descriptive or explanatory epigram, but rather a

command: read. Here we see our third letter i of the work in the switch from the infinitive to the

imperative, from lesen to lies. In this way, the very letter i creates and clarifies the command and

therefore the (explicit) interpellation that makes of us the reader, or rather, creates a subject

position which we believe we have always already possessed. That is, we have already been

interpellated as, and as with any successful interpellation knew ourselves to be readers from the

16 “The sign i means » I «. It is a small » I « from the German alphabet….” 17 Despite its longtime status as the official handwritten script of printed Fraktur, Kurrent was used more or less

interchangeably with English script, more often associated with the so-called Latin, or Antiqua, typeface. As we will

see, the intersection between Fraktur, its official handwritten counterparts, Kurrent and Sütterlin, and Antiqua will

play a decisive role in our reading of “Das i-Gedicht.” 18 “[read: »up, down, up, Little dot on it.«]”

48

beginning, for if the title/lemma is to be believed, this is a poem and therefore is meant to be read

rather than merely beheld.19 We are now, however, interpellated as a particular type of reader:

the reader. This subject position, however, remains unstable.

Throughout the work, we read the dual nature of the iconic Sütterlin-i as simultaneously

letter and as material design, as i (as in the title and command lies) and as “up, down, up, Little

dot on it” (in the icon and epigram). In this way, we interpellated readers are similarly decentered

subjects through our split and decentered interpellated reading process. This dual nature is, for

Schwitters, not unique to this letter, but rather foundational to written language. Schwitters wrote

later: “i ist der erste Buchstabe, i ist der einfachste Buchstabe”20 (V.139). Traditionally, of

course, the letter i is neither of these things—the ninth letter in the Latin alphabet and German, in

so much as there is or was one—no more simple or complex as a letter than any other letter.

However, as a material, graphic design—a simple point and a line—it is exceedingly simple,

practically unchanged between German and Latin typefaces, their handwritten counterparts, and

even between mechanical type and handwritten script. Sybille Krämer and Rainer Totzke note its

initial, simple, and above all its elemental role: “Kern des Graphismus ist der Strich bzw. die

Linie, die – zusammen mit dem Punkt – das Elementarrepertoire von Notationen bildet”21 (18).

19 Here again, we see the Genette’s horizon of expectation built into the title. See Seuils 88-89. Though “Das i-

Gedicht” has not garnered a particularly large amount of critical attention, those critics who have investigated it are

unanimous in framing the poem mentioned in the title/lemma as the iconic Sütterlin-i alone. One example: “Ein

herausgeschnittenes Stück Sprachmaterial repräsentiert das ganze Gedicht” (Winkelmann 202). [“An excised piece

of the material of language represents the entire poem.”] As we see here, what constitutes the ‘poem’ may be more

complex. John Manning notes that this is a difficulty for the form of the emblem in general: “… does the verse

epigram ‘accompany’ the emblem, or is the epigram the emblem?” (20). 20 “i is the first letter. i is the easiest letter.” 21 “The core of graphism is the dash or the line, which – together with the dot – forms the elemental repertoire of

notations.” It is worth noting here that “Das i-Gedicht” was not the sole work that appears to have intimated the

point and line of the letter i as the two necessary elements, not only of written graphicism but of delineated visual

form. Schwitters also utilized the form i in an untitled Merz-drawing from 1922 (fig. 2.3) which prominently

features two lower case i-forms next to each other, reproduced in his Catalogue raisonné I.478; I.501, as work

number 1036. Hans Arp’s 1920 Tableau i (fig. 2.4) also prominently features the single, black letter i in an abstract

grid of white, beige, yellow, and black, a similar color scheme as that of Schwitters’ work. Arp’s work, however,

includes serifs. It is reproduced in Dietmar Elgar’s Dadaism, 32-33. Given the close friendship between Schwitters

and Arp, this can hardly be seen as a coincidence.

49

The interpellative epigram, then, demands not simply that we read (the letter), but how we read

(the letter specifically as material design). That is, we are commanded to read a letter i as a

description of the design of the Sütterlin-i rather than simply as i, as material unto itself rather

than as transparent medium, though on account of the introduction of the letter i to be read in

(and through to) the command, lies, read. This complex of reading, materiality, and transparency;

the so-called German alphabet, handwritten scripts, and typefaces; and all of their intricate

relations to ideology, is oddly mirrored and clarified in the work’s, and its material’s, peculiar

historical origins, namely the heated Fraktur-Antiqua debate at the beginning of the 20th century.

While the Fraktur-Antiqua debate was fiercely renewed at the beginning of the 20th century,22

its roots extended deeply into the history of German printing, notably with the 1534 publication

of Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, in Fraktur.23 The choice was of course

deliberate.24 Luther set the German language and German type, printed in his Bible and spoken

in the Protestant educational programs that would surround it, against the Latin Antiqua: “…die

lateinischen Buchstaben hindern uns über die Maßen sehr, gut Deutsch zu reden”25 (qtd. in

Wehde 219). Over the course of the next 400-odd years, these two concerns, national identity

and education through language, which is to say the national and educational ideological

22 Two excellent studies of the Fraktur-Antiqua debate are Silvia Hartmann’s Fraktur oder Antiqua: der Schriftstreit

von 1881 bis 1941 and section 6.2 of Susanne Wehde’s Typographische Kultur entitled “Der Streit um Fraktur und

Antiqua,” from which much of our discussion of the debate will be pulled. 23 Luther’s 1522 translation of the New Testament was printed in a Schwabacher typeface, a family of typefaces to

which Fraktur belongs. The 1534 printing was after Luther had translated both Old and New Testaments. See Burke

79-80. Interestingly, Heinrich Steyner printed an unauthorized edition of the Italian Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata

(also known as Emblematum liber) in 1531, the first book of tripartite emblems, printed in Latin language and type.

We can then count Schwitters’s choice of an emblematic structure for “Das i-Gedicht” as yet another unique tie to

the Fraktur-Antiqua debate. 24 For a deeper discussion of Luther’s choice of typeface, see John L. Flood’s “Nationalistic Currents in Early

German Typography.” 25 “… the Latin letters hinder us beyond measure from expressing ourselves in good German.” For further context of

this famous quote, see Wehde 218-20, and Flood 132f.

50

apparatuses, continued throughout Fraktur-Antiqua debates.26 These converged and culminated

when the debate earnestly began again in the decade leading up to “Das i-Gedicht.” Fraktur was

seen as a national heritage, namely from the Medieval and Gothic periods, thought to have been

an apex of German language and culture, and was therefore a symbol of national pride. This

pride often slipped into xenophobia, particularly on the eve of World War I. Not only was

Fraktur considered to be “das Wahrzeichen bewußten Deutschtums,” but was also a “Bollwerk

gegen die Entdeutschung, ein Schutzmittel zur Erhaltung der deutschen Art”27 (qtd. in Wehde

254). For advocates of Fraktur, the typeface was inextricably bound to Germanness, not only

from the past and in the present but also into the future. Germanness was forced to reproduce

itself for future generations, and the Fibelfrage, the question of the children’s school primer or

work book, became a central theme of the debate, for were Antiqua and Latin script to be taught

before Fraktur and German script would show “eine Mißachtung gegenüber dem Deutschtum in

[der] Seele des Kindes”28 (qtd. in Wehde 253). It is not only within this framework that

Schwitters couched “Das i-Gedicht,” but rather the poem actively and brazenly evokes that

framework, indeed that battleground, through its juxtaposition of the Antiqua title and epigram

26 In many ways, the religious aspect of the Fraktur/Antiqua debate was subsumed by the national, which took

Fraktur’s association with German Protestantism as a bulwark against the foreign Catholicism represented by

Antiqua. (Anti–)Nationalist rhetoric became the dominant lens through which the debate was seen. For example,

Johannes Grimm remarked, in the forward to his and his brother’s dictionary printed in Antiqua typeface, that

Fraktur hinders the expansion of German books in other countries and cultures, is in its own right difficult to read,

and hindered a child’s education in the necessary doubling of typefaces the children must learn to read, as well as

the often complex rules required to properly write, most notably ligatures and long vs. short s. Otto von Bismark, for

his part, refused to read German words in Latin script. See Wehde 245-46. 27 “the landmark of aware Germanness” ; “bulwark against de-Germanization, a means of protection for the

conservation of the German way.” Quoted from Gustav Ruprecht’s Das Kleid der deutschen Sprache, 45, and

Mitteilungen des deutschen Schriftbundes, 82, respectively. These are but two citations among many in Wehde’s

discussion of “Die Schriftfrage als nationale Frage” [The Question of Typeface as National Question], 251-24.

Indeed, Wehde sets “deutsch/nichtdeutch als fundamentale Basisopposition” [“german/notgerman as the

fundamental base opposition”] of the Fraktur/Antiqua debate (255). 28 “a contempt for the Germanness of the child’s soul”

51

and the Sütterlin icon, and their interaction in the work’s interpellation of us as readers of

Sütterlin in Antiqua.29

A year after its publication, Schwitters would make explicit the implicit origin of the work—

the children’s classroom and work book. “Das Kind lernt ihn [den Buchstaben i] in der Schule

als ersten Buchstaben. Der Klassenchor singt »Rauf, runter, rauf, Pünktchen drauf«. […] i ist der

einfältigste Buchstabe”30 (V.139). Here, Schwitters describes the moment in which a child is

made into a writer, directed by her teacher and work book to trace out “rauf, runter, rauf,

pünktchen darauf” with her hand and therefore create a Sütterlin-i, an initial bodily performance,

a formation of the body as a writing instrument. However, she is also made into a reader, able to

differentiate the design of the letter i from others, specifically through its material, visual

configuration, “up, down, up, Little dot on it,” whether chalk on slate, ink on paper, or paint on a

wall. Schwitters, marks this initial moment, the ur-scene of reading as a moment fraught with

ideological interpellation, a scene with which Schwitters must have been intimately aware,

himself a writer of and in Sütterlin in both his professional works and personal correspondence.31

Beyond the mere locale of the classroom, which Althusser convincingly argued to be the

epicenter of “l’appareil idéologique scolaire… qui a été mis en position dominante dans les

29 This juxtaposition of Fraktur and Antiqua was a regular theme in the work of Schwitters. Perhaps the most

notable example would be his Merz-Collage Untitled (Mai 191) (fig. 2.5), completed at approximately the same time

as many i-Zeichnungen [i-drawings], and reproduced as work 732 in Catologue raisonée 355, which prominently

features Fraktur, aside from the jarring “191” in the lower right corner, necessarily in Antiqua, as Fraktur had no

Arabic numerals. His i-Zeichnungen from 1920, which consisted of printers’ spoiled sheets, paper printed over

multiple times, often contained both Fraktur and Antiqua “levels” of print superimposed one upon the other. See fig.

2.6; Schwitters’s Catalogue raisonée I.334, 363. 30 “The child learns it [the letter i] in school as the first letter. The class sings ‘up, down, up, little dot on it.’ […] i is

the simplest letter.” Originally published in the second (Number i) Merz as the first text, 19. 31 Perhaps Schwitters’s most well know work to feature the Sütterlin script is his self-designed title page for his

collection of poems, Anna Blume, published by Paul Steegmann Verlag in 1920 (fig. 2.7). The work is reproduced in

Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné, I.256, work number 547. Schwitters’s personal use of Sütterlin is seen in

another piece of i-Kunst [i-art] from 1920, an i-drawing on a personal postcard to Oskar Schlemmer (fig. 2.8),

reproduced in Cataloque Raisonné I.364, as work number 755.

52

formations capitalistes mûres”32 (SLR 289), Schwitters describes the scene, where school

children are formed into a chorus and sing the Sütterlin-i verse in harmonious unison,

presumably lead by the schoolmaster. This quasi-militaristic scene that appears to stand in

contradistinction to the quiet and solitary command lies of the poem’s epigram is in fact its

originary touchstone, the moment when reading began, when the interpellation inherent in the

written word, made explicit in lies, becomes possible. As with any school practice book or

school-choir mnemonic, the goal is repetition towards mastery—of what? For Althusser,

“l’Ecole […] ensigne des « savoir-faire », mais dans des formes qui assurent l’assujettissement à

l’idéologie dominante, ou la maîtrise de sa « practique »”33 (SLR 274). Schwitters’s Sütterlin-i

and the command to read it are the first step into the interpellative, subjugating know-how and

mastery, not only for the design’s primacy and ease, but their seeming uncritical simplicity and

naïveté, the design’s einfältigkeit. The credulous malleability of the interpellated school children

is mirrored in the easily manipulable material, visual design of the letter i, the point and line, the

foundational material, visual elements of every other letter, and indeed visual design itself.34 In

this way, the letter i can be seen as the very catalyst of ideological interpellation. The history of

32 “the educational ideological apparatus… which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist

formations” (ROC 250). It is perhaps no surprise then that the first book length study of Althusser’s conception of

interpellation, Renée Balibar’s Les français fictifs, focused on how so-called high and low French were taught in the

French school system. Foucault was also unequivocal regarding the role of the educational system: “Qu’est-ce, après

tout, qu’un système d’enseignement, sinon une ritualisation de la parole; sinon une qualification et une fixation des

rôles pour les sujets parlants; sinon la constitution d’un groupe doctrinal au moins diffus; sinon une distribution et

une appropriation du discours avec ses pouvoirs et ses savoirs?” (L’ordre 46-47). [“What, after all, is an education

system, other than a ritualisation of speech, a qualification and a fixing of the roles for speaking subjects, the

constitution of a doctrinal group, however diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its powers

and knowledges?”] 33 “the school […] teaches ‘know-how’ but in forms which ensure subjections to the ruling ideology or the mastery

of its ‘practice’” (ROC 236). 34 Other readers of “Das i-Gedicht” have gone further. For example, Helmut Heißenbüttel wrote: “In sie [die Merz

Wende] eingeschlossen ist die Reduzierung der Literatur auf i. In dem Fibelvers, der das alte deutsche Schreib-i

begleitete, findet der i-Künstler die Erklärung nicht nur der Literatur und Kunst, sondern der ganzen Welt…”

(“Gertrude Stein” 186). [“Included in it [the turn towards Merz] is the reduction of literature to i. In the school

primer verse, which accompanied the old German written i, the i-artist finds the explanation of not only literature

and art, but the whole world…”]

53

the Sütterlin-i design, the iconic center of the poem, includes and combines many of these

themes.

In 1911 Ludwig Sütterlin, a graphic designer, was commissioned by the Prussian minister of

culture and education to create a new handwritten script to replace the instruction of Kurrent in

schools.35 Sütterlin radically simplified the ornate Kurrent. All ornamental swashes and tails

were removed, inclination made vertical, its 2-1-2 relation between ascender, x-height, and

descender was simplified to 1-1-1.36 These were simplifications directed specifically at the

difficulties that primary students had as they learned to write, namely those that resulted from

their smaller hands.37 While these simplifications did little to address the many arguments of

primary teachers, one of the larger and more vocal factions of Antiqua proponents, who saw the

ease with which students learned to read and write Antiqua before Fraktur script,38 the

introduction of the simplified Sütterlin script did, however, give the proponents of Fraktur a new

point of reference, a counter argument that the simplicity of writing Sütterlin functioned as an

effective bridge to reading Fraktur, which it more closely resembled, in its uniform 1-1-1

lineatur, vertical orientation, and lack of ornamentation, than the ostentatious Kurrent which

more closely resembled English handwriting than any blackletter typeface. For Fraktur

35 By 1914, Sütterlin script was taught on a provisional basis in Berlin, and expanded throughout Prussia during the

remainder of the decade, and quickly supplanted Kurrent as the most taught script in primary schools. In 1924

Sütterlin became the mandatory script taught in schools in Prussia, which in turn influenced the majority of other

states throughout the Weimar Republic. 36 See figs. 2.9; 2.10. For example, the height of the Sütterlin letters b, d, f, h, k, and l is twice that of the letter x,

which is to say a letter with neither ascender nor descender. The drop depth of the letters g, j. p, q, y similarly make

them twice as long. In contrast, Kurrent’s letters with as ascender or descender are three times as long as the letter x. 37 Another notable simplification from Kurrent was the abandonment of differing widths between up and down

strokes, a relative impossibility with the introduction of steel-nibbed fountain pens into the classroom. This

simplification, however, was not followed in “Das i-Gedicht,” as the down-stroke is decidedly thicker than the two

up-strokes. In later works, Schwitters often abandoned the mechanical reproduction of the Sütterlin script from “Das

i-Gedicht,” and simply placed two forward slashes to each side of an Antiqua-i, such as /i/. 38 Wehde notes that “Lehrer und Augenärzte für die Antiqua als Erstschrift in der Schule plädierten” …, “weil

Kinder die einfacheren Formen der Antiqua schneller und leichter lernten” (51). [“teachers and optometrists pleaded

for Antiqua as the primary typeface in school” …, “because children learned the simpler forms of Antiqua quicker

and easier.”]

54

proponents, the integration of hand-writing and type-reading, which we see Schwitters playfully

reproduce in “Das i-Gedicht,” through not only the introduction of Sütterlin but the ostensible

source of the poem/emblem as a school child’s writing primer that the spectator is commanded to

read, lies at the heart of the Fraktur-Antiqua debate. That is, the intersection of writing, reading,

and the overlapping complex of ideologies—religious, national, educational, etc.—inherent to

the Fraktur-Antiqua debate and occupied by “Das i-Gedicht” continually alludes to the

elementary ideological effect of transparency that undergirds them.

The nationalist bravado that foreshadowed World War I often framed the Fraktur-Antiqua

debate in those terms, only to be heightened as the war began. Specifically for Frakur

proponents, the German script had become as important as the German language to the German

people. “Nation und Volk werden nicht nur als Sprachgemeinschaft, sondern auch als

Schriftgemeinschaft erachtet”39 (Wehde 252-53). Fraktur was the well-fitted “Kleid der

deutschen Sprache”40 (qtd. in Wehde 251). In this way, the Havelockian thesis of transparency is

refocused. It is not merely that a transparent alphabet is necessary for a speaker to learn to read,

but rather that particular typefaces are particularly suited to certain languages over others; that

Fraktur, or the German alphabet as many Fraktur proponents called it, is an alphabet, a typeface

which better suits the German language, is less opaque, interrupts and interferes less than other

typefaces with the language it transmits.41 In other words, Fraktur is the most readable of scripts

specifically for the German language. As Adolf Reinecke argued in 1910, the year before the

39 “Nation and people are regarded not only as a linguistic community, but also as a script-community.” Thought

Wehde’s context here does not mention it specifically, Schriftgemeinschaft could similarly be seen in the religious

context of a community based upon not only script but scripture. In many ways throughout the Antiqua-Fraktur

debate, and from its very inception with Luther’s German translation of the Bible printed in Fraktur, proponents of

Fraktur saw the national character of Germany as implicitly tied to its religious heritage. 40 “dress of the German language.” This was a common phrase employed by Gustav Ruprecht, whom Wehde quotes

here, and was used as the title of his 1912 book. 41 It is perhaps important here to mention that this line of argument is in reference to typefaces in particular and not

writing in general.

55

Fratkur-Antiqua debate broke out on the floor of the Reichstag: “Die deutsche Schrift [Fraktur]

ist eine wirkliche Leseschrift; sie ist lesbarer, d.h. in den Wortbildern klarer und deutlicher, als

die lateinische Schrift” (39), which is to say that words written in Fraktur give to the reader

“größere Klarheit und Übersichtlichkeit”42 (41). Thanks to the overlapped and intertwined nature

of reading and ideology, the deployment of the ideological arguments for the well-suited

readability of Fraktur to the German language gives a unique insight into ideology itself. Rather

than a typeface uniquely created to transmit a language transparently, arguments for Fraktur as

the German alphabet reversed the causality: “Die Sprache zwingt die Schrift, sich ihr

anzupassen”43 (qtd. in Wehde 251). This is an historical process: “Unsere Schrift ist ein

historisch naturgemäß Gewachsenes”44 (qtd. in Wehde 256, my emphasis). This ontological

conflation gives Fraktur “[das] organisch[e] … natürlich[e] und lebendig[e] Sprachgefühl”45

(qtd. in Wehde 263, my emphasis), which Antiqua so sorely lacks. As Wehde herself

summarizes: “Die Beziehung zwischen deutscher Sprache und gebrochenen Schriftformen wird

naturalisiert und damit sozialer Verfügbarkeit entzogen”46 (251, my emphasis). For proponents

of Fraktur, the relationship between German and Fraktur is not a social or even personal opinion,

but a natural fact, moreover, Selbstevidenz, a self-evident fact.47 Here, we see not only that

proponents of Fraktur are fully within ideology, or even that they appear firmly grounded in the

concept of Althusserian évidence, e.g. the self-evident fact of the transparency of language,48 but

42 “The German script [Fraktur] is a true reading script; it is more readable, that is clearer and more distinct in its

word-images, than the Latin script” ; “greater clarity and transparency.” Here, the translation of “Übersichtlichkeit”

as transparency is not necessarily to imply a connection with the transparency of either Havelock or Althusser.

Literally, it translates to “overseeability” as in its ability to be comprehended quickly and with minimal difficulty. 43 “The language forces the type to adapt itself to it.” Here Wehde quotes Sammer et al, 8. 44 “Our type is a historically, naturally grown thing.” Here Wehde quotes Den Gegnern, 9. 45 “organic … natural and vivid sense of speech” Here Wehde quotes Niemeyer, 626. 46 “The relationship between the German language and broken typefaces is naturalized and thus withdrawn from

social availability.” 47 See Wehde 256. As we will see shortly, self-evidence is central to that elementary ideological effect. 48 See above, page 44f.; SLR 224; ROC 189.

56

additionally a unique view of ideology from the standpoint of semiotics, for which Roland

Barthes’s concept of myth, a close analogue of Althusser’s interpellation,49 may be the most

insightful.

Within the semiological system of myth as conceived by Barthes, the signifier “n’est plus ni

exemple, ni symbole, encore moins alibi; [elle] est la présence même”50 (Mythologies 201),

much as we saw the argument for the erasure of any border, any lacuna between Fraktur and the

German language. It is less a transparency between signifier and signified, than a tactic presence,

a collapse of the two into one, with no between at all. Importantly, however, “Le myth ne cache

rien, et il n’affiche rien,” but rather mythological language “va le [le concept signifié]

naturaliser. […] Il transforme l’histoire en nature”51 (202). The reader of myths, or rather the

reader within mythology, finds “un clarté qui n’est pas celle d’une explicaton, mais celle du

constat… [;] un monde étalé dans l’évidence… [;] une clarté heureuse”52 (217). In this way, “le

mythe est lu comme un système factuel alors qu’il n’est qu’un système sémiologique”53 (204).

Here we can see the connection to Althusser’s concept of the first ideological effect of linguistic

transparency. A semiological system presents itself as transparent, as a perfect transmission of

nature, because the system is no longer read as semiological, as social, as signifying, but rather

as natural in itself. As Paul de Man summarizes: “What we call ideology is precisely the

confusion of linguistic with natural reality” (Resistance 11).54 As we have seen, proponents of

49 For a brief discussion regarding the parallels between Barthes’ myth and Althusser’s interpellation, see for

instance Slavoj Žižek’s “Introduction” to Mapping Ideologies, 11. As Žižek points out, this connection is all the

more apparent in the work of Pêcheux, who further highlighted the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of Althusser’s

interpellation. 50 “is no longer an example or a symbol, still less an alibi; [it] is the very presence…” (Mythologies[en] 127). 51 “Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing” ; “it will naturalize it [the signified concept]. […] it transforms history

into nature” (128). 52 “a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact… [;] a world wide open and

wallowing in the self-evident; a blissful clarity” (143, translation slightly altered). 53 “myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system” (130). 54 For a concise, if exceedingly derisive, discussion of the so-called “‘naturalization’ thesis” shared by Barthes and

de Man, with which Althusser would certainly agree, see Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction, 199-201. For an

57

Fraktur argue from almost wholly within this confusion of the historically linguistic with nature.

For Barthes and de Man, this confusion is the problem of reading itself. Proponents of Fraktur

see as unproblematic de Man’s description of ideological reading: “In a hermeneutic exercise,

reading necessarily intervenes but, like the computation in algebraic proof, it is a means towards

an end, a means that should finally become transparent and superfluous; the ultimate aim of a

hermeneutically successful reading is to do away with reading altogether” (56). This is precisely

what “Das i-Gedicht” attempts to prevent.

Schwitters recognizes, reintroduces and indeed pointedly recreates, through the jolted

intersection of Antiqua and Sütterlin within the work, the social, historical, and political

dimensions of reading and, in this way, attempts to denaturalize the letter as alphabet through the

deployment of a script recently designed at the behest of the Prussian minister and taught in

elementary schools. The naturalized Fraktur defended in the Reichstag debates is returned, then,

to the corporeal, personal, social, historical, political. Within this ideologically turbulent

environment, Schwitters pointedly interpellates us as a reader who recognizes who is forced to

recognize the materiality of reading. We are made the reader of the Sütterlin-i, though not simply

as the letter i or even some representation of that letter, but as the reader of its material, graphic

representation that is therefore anything but transparent or superfluous. In a way, Schwitters

turns interpellation against itself, against ideology, through the interpellation of us as reader-

subjects who begin to question interpellation’s own elementary ideological effect. Beyond the

particularities of the Sütterlin-i and “Das i-Gedicht,” this perceptive reading of elemental

material is at the very heart of Schwitters’s genre i itself.

overview of the more direct parallels between de Man and Althusser, see Michael Sprinker’s “Art and Ideology:

Althusser and de Man” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, 32-48.

58

Work to Genre; /i/ to i

While we have, up to now, read “Das i-Gedicht” as a poem centered around, or at least

evocative of, the theme of the material design of the Sütterlin-i and its ideological complications,

we can simultaneously read the “i” and its connective hyphen in the title as rhematic, in that

Schwitters chose “diesen Buchstaben zur Bezeichnung einer speziellen Gattung von

Kunstwerken”55 (V.139), namely i.56 That is, just as “Gedicht” indicates the form of the work as

a poem, so too does “i” announce the work as an exemplary embodiment of i; it is not merely a

poem, but an i-poem, moreover, the i-poem. What, then, constitutes i for Schwitters and in what

ways does “Das i-Gedicht” conform to those expectations? In his “i (Ein Manifest),”57 Schwitters

explains that, while Merz creates artistic works through a collage or complex of ready-made

materials, the combination of which thereby shortens the distance “von der Intuition zur

Sichtbarmachung der künstlerischen Idee”58 (V.120), that is, with fewer instances of

(un)necessary (re)presentation, where the artist resists the invitation to transform the elements of

the collage in order to represent something which they themselves are not already, i nullifies this

distance all together. “i setzt diesen Weg = null. Idee, Material und Kunstwerk sind dasselbe”59

(ibid). Through the refusal of a (re)contextualization of the ready-made material into a Merz-ian

collage or complex, Schwitters sees the artistic process of i as something of a collage of one,

55 “this letter as label of a special genre of works of art” 56 In an effort to avoid confusion and follow Schwitters’s own convention, which he himself would often and

perhaps purposefully flaunt, I will continue to utilize “Sütterlin-i” when I discuss the icon at the center of “Das i-

Gedicht,” a bolded i when I discuss this genre of art of Schwitters’s, and the typographical approximation of the

Sütterlin-i, “/i/” when I discuss particular works or instantiations of this genre. In many ways, as we will shortly see,

these three and particularly the latter two, often bleed into one-another. 57 “i (A Manifesto)” Originally printed in Der Sturm 13.5 (May 1922), it is reproduced in DLW V.120. 58 “from the intuition to the visualization of the artistic idea” 59 “from intuition to the visualization of the artistic idea” … “i sets this distance = zero. Idea, material, and work of

art are one and the same” (V.411, translation slightly altered).

59

singular fragment. If Merz is the creation of art with scissors and glue, i requires only scissors. In

“Banalitäten (3)” Schwitters summarizes i: “es ist das Auffinden eines künstlerischen Komplexes

in der unkünstlerischen Welt und das Schaffen eines Kunstwerkes aus diesem Komplex durch

Begrenzung, sonst nichts”60 (V.148).

In his longest critical discussion of i, titled simply “/i/” from the second issue of Merz,

Schwitters considers as example Pierre Reverdy’s poem “Regard” which begins “Assis sur

l’horizon / Les autres vont chanter”61 (Dada I.57), to which Schwitters writes: “Das chanson des

autres ist mir i”62 (V.137). As Schwitters again emphasized, the i-Künstlerin “erkennt, daß in der

[sie] umgebenden Welt von Erscheinungsformen irgend eine Einzelheit nur begrenzt … zu

werden braucht, damit ein Kunstwerk entsteht…”63 (V. 139). Here we can begin to see the

unique mode of reading in which the i-artist necessarily engages. Initially, there exists some

fragment of the world, whether from a school room, a hospital, a tram ticket, a store catalogue, or

a group of jovial autres singing a song, which is to say, some fragment of history, of a human or

group of human autres, of a social system, from which every work that Schwitters designated as

i-art was called.64 While this fragment need not be particularly significant or meaningful, as we

saw with the singular letter i or in the radically imbricated letters and words of so-called spoiled

60 “it is the detection of an artistic complex in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this

complex through demarcation.” 61 “Seated on the horizon / The others begin to sing” This poem was originally printed in the third issue of Dada, 5. 62 “The song of the others is for me i.” In my translations of Schwitters’s discussion of Reverdy’s poem, I will

italicize the French within the otherwise German citation. 63 … i-artist “recognizes, that some individual detail in the world of appearances around [her] need only… be

bordered for a work of art to emerge…” 64 The number of works of i are surprisingly small. Within “/i/” from the second edition of Merz, Schwitters inserted

two i-poems, “Unsittliches i-Gedicht” and “Pornographisches i-Gedicht” [“Indecent i-Poem” and “Pornographic i-

Poem”] taken from a price list within an advertisement for a clothes cleaning service and from a children’s picture

book, respectively (V.139 & 140). The first “i-Zeichnungen” [“i-drawings”] are mentioned in “i (Ein Manifest) as

being shown in the May 22 exhibition, numbered 108, by Der Sturm. Schwitters referenced 22 works as “i-

Zeichnungen” from 1920 and three from 1922 that may have been displayed at that Sturm exhibition, from which

unfortunately no catalogue appears to have survived. By and large, these are excised elements of sheets of printers’

errors, sometimes called spoiled sheets. These works are reproduced in Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné I.357-

I.365; I.515-I.516, as art works numbered 737-759 and 1072-1075, respectively. See, e.g., fig. 2.8.

60

sheets of printers that constituted many of Schwitters’s i-drawings, the i-artist recognizes the

material fragment in some way.65 This recognition is more a simple perception—a kind of

reading without interpretation, a recognition of the material as material, an i as “up, down, up

Little dot on it” rather than the letter-i, the distance between what it is and what it represents

reduced to zero. Schwitters reads the material as nothing other than the potential material of a

future work of i-art. We see, however, the dual movement, the full reading or recognition

[Erkennung] that precedes the production of a work of i. Not only does the i-artist read some,

almost arbitrary [irgend eine], though necessarily material particularity, but she also reads the

(necessary) boundary in order for an artwork to emerge.66

This is less a dual reading, two readings one after another, than what Derrida, from his 1971

essay “Signature, Événement, Contexte,” might consider simply an actual or complete reading, a

reading of not only “[u]n signe écrit” but also a reading of the “espacement qui le sépare des

autres éléments de la chaîne contextuelle interne [et qui…] n’est pas la simple négativité d’une

lacune, mais le surgissement de la marque”67 (Marges 377-78), a reading of not only the “up,

down, up” and “Little dot on it” but also a reading of the space, which happens to physically

separate these marks from others and from each other on the white page.68 That is, the i-artist

reads not only the material what to excise but also the where to cut. This where, however, is

more than a simple productive spacing of an emergence, but also, and for our current discussion

65 Aside from the occasional synonym, such as we saw above with auffinden [to detect], Schwitters almost

exclusively uses the formulation of Erkennung to describe the initial movement of the i-artist. In this way, I mean to

set erkennen in contradistinction to bemerken, a simple noticing of something present. Here, we see a kind of

converse to Peirce’s dictum that a sign is only a sign if it is recognized as a sign. See above, page 29n62; CP II.172. 66 The double emphasis on reading the material of the inartistic world and reading the possibilities for excision and

border is repeated regularly in Schwitters’ discussions of i. 67 “a written sign, a mark” ; “spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain [and

which…] is not the simple negativity of a lacuna but rather the emergence of the mark” (Limited 9-10). In

combination with his concept of the supposed transparency of reading, of its confusion with natural reality, Paul de

Man praised such Derridian, actual reading: “the only French theoretician who actually reads texts, in the full

theoretical sense of the term, is Jacques Derrida” (Resistance 33). 68 Here we see the spacing to which the letter as a whole alludes embodied within the letter itself.

61

far more importantly, the necessary pre-condition of the Derridian complex of différance,

iteration, and dissemination. The possibility of this border is what allows the particular raw

material—whether a song sung or a simple letter—to be extracted from a particular context—

whether a group of autres sitting on the horizon or a student’s alphabet book—and placed into

another. It allows material to be differentiated from other material and deferred in time, allows

for that excised material to be duplicated without the loss of its original material form, and

therefore allows for that material to extend far beyond its original, authorial context. This where

is, however, both the material border from which preferred material springs, such as Reverdy’s

otherwise quiet horizon or the alphabet book’s white paper, as well as it is something inherent to

textual events as such, something that allows material text to function at all.69 Derrida describes

this intrinsic element of textual events as an inherent “force de rupture [qui] tient à l’espacement

qui constitue le signe écrit” but in fact “n’est pas un prédicat accidentel, mais la structure même

de l’écrit”70 (Marges 377). In his reading of de Man some thirty years later, Derrida would

further clarify this material spacing that simultaneously constitutes the structure of the written

text itself as the mechanical or machine-like element of a text, a “materiality without material” or

“formality without form” (“Typewriter Ribbon” 350).

Derrida quotes de Man: “There can be no use of language which is not, within a certain

perspective, thus radically formal, i.e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be

69 Here, I use the term material text in the widest possible sense, for instance to include both Reverdy’s experience

of the song of the autres as well as that of the singular letter i in an alphabet book. As Derrida notes, these

arguments which surround the written text “vaudraient non seulement pour tous les ordres de « signes » et pour tous

les langages en général mais même, au-delà de la communication sémio-linguistique, pour tout le champ de ce que

la philosophie appellerait l’expérience” (Marges 377). [“are valid not only for all ‘signs’ and for all languages in

general but moreover, beyond semio-linguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call

experience” (Limited 9).] 70 “force of rupture [which] is tied to the spacing that constitutes the written sign” ; “is not an accidental predicate

but the very structure of the written text” (Limited 9). I have attempted here to reconstruct, in nuce, the argument

that begins Derrida’s “Signature, Événement, Contexte.” See in particular Marges 377ff., Limited 7ff.

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concealed by aesthetic, formalistic delusions. The machine not only generates, but also

suppresses, and not always in an innocent or balanced way.” (Allegories 294, qtd. in

“Typewriter” 352). While the written mark springs from the spacing surrounding it, it cannot

move beyond it, cannot be thought without it, or as Derrida states: “The textual event is

inseparable from this formal materiality of the letter” (351). That is, the mark springs, but is

never able to separate itself, from the formal materiality (without matter) that allows it to

function. This ballast or anchor of machine-like materiality “resists both beautiful form and

matter as substantial and organic totality” (350). De Man clarified the structure and function of

this machine-like materiality by way of analogy: “The machine is like the grammar of the text

when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be

generated” (Allegories 294, qtd. in “Typewriter” 352).71 This machine-like grammar or

grammar-like machine is, therefore, not simply the necessary spacing of the white page from

which the mark arises, but rather is the materiality-without-matter grammar of the mark itself,

the grammar that resists or suppresses that mark’s aesthetic form or material totalization in every

textual event. As this materiality without matter “is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or

intelligible)” (“Typewriter” 350), it therefore necessarily exerts its force quietly and

imperceptibly, from within the material of both the spacing and the mark. The delusional

attempts of the material mark to aesthetically or formalistically conceal the materiality of this

machine-like grammar may further remove it from the view of a potential reader, but never

weaken the resistant and suppressive force of that grammar on the material, never separate the

71 For a deeper discussion of this concept of grammaricity in de Man’s thought, see Andrzej Warminski’s

introduction to de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, 1-33, esp. 17ff. In his quotation of de Man, Derrida adds to the “like

the grammar” as proviso: “I would be tempted to insist heavily, perhaps beyond what de Man himself would have

wanted on this word like that marks an analogy, the ‘like’ of a resemblance or of an ‘as if,’ rather than an ‘as’”

(“Typewriter” 352). As we will see, this “like” does not degrade the grammatical nature that will prove most

important for us.

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materiality from the matter. The material, therefore, almost necessarily deludes itself into a

position of transparency, where what you see is what you get, without hidden grammar pulling

any strings. From the point of the reader, however, the material mark does not so much delude

itself, but rather is the delusion materialized in so far as it functions as a material curtain of

supposed transparency that conceals the materiality of machine-like grammar that constitutes the

material itself. Here we see the connection to, and expansion of, our previous discussion of

material and its relation to Althusser’s ideological interpellation.72 Ideology, then, is the

materialization of materiality without matter. As every textual event is necessarily a material

interpellation, this machine-like materiality without matter functions then as the machine-like

ideological grammar that generates and regulates, suppresses, restricts it, an ideological grammar

from which that interpellation delusively asserts its separation, and therefore asserts its

transparency, its self evidence.73

This expansion in our concept of materiality, namely with and without material, is therefore

an expansion in our conception of ideology, namely both the material interpellation and the

ideological machine/grammar without matter. We see, however, that Schwitters’s i-process

indeed anticipated this expansion. That is, not only does Schwitters read, and in turn interpellate

us as readers of, the material instantiation, the mark of interpellation, but also where that mark

ends, its borders, its almost imperceptible grammatical and formalistic constraints, the

materiality (without matter) of ideology from which the material mark of interpellation itself

72 See above, page 31ff. Žižek, with recourse to Lacan, criticized Althusser’s orthodox materialist conception of

ideology along these same lines, in that Althusser specifically places ideology itself within the material

interpellation while he fails to identify “the immanent materiality of the ideal order itself,” where “Lacan here goes

one step further than Althusser: there is a specific materiality of ideas themselves, immanent to the ‘ideal’ symbolic

order, insofar as this order cannot be reduced to (an expression of) meaning but functions as a “meaningless”

machine, the machine that is the big Other beyond any concrete materialization in institutions or material practices,”

(Absolute Recoil 55f). In “The Althusserian Battlegrounds,” Robert Pfaller convincingly argues that Althusser’s

materialism may already account for what Žižek sees as failure, in Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism, 23-42. 73 See above, page 30f.; SLR 232; ROC 197.

64

springs and to which it is bound. This reading of the grammatical where, the materiality without

matter, is made particularly explicit in “Das i-Gedicht.” While this materiality without material is

meant to be neither sensible nor meaningful, Schwitters represents it, transforms it in a unique

way into something recognizable [erkennbar], positioned, marked, a readability not of material,

but rather of an excision. The otherwise unintelligible background of white paper is specifically

highlighted by the iconic Sütterlin-i’s two “rauf”s, its two diagonal lines, which not only

conspicuously pierce the non-material materiality of the page, the location of the excision, but in

a way mark it as ornaments to the central letter i that would serve as connectors were there

something, some material, to which it could connect. That is, the materiality without matter to

the left and right of the “runter,” the vertical element of the Sütterlin-i itself, is marked by the

“rauf” on each side. This materiality is highlighted again, though as a potential but un-actualized

excision in the separation inherent to the design of the letter itself, the space between the “runter”

and the “Pünktchen drauf.” While this focus on materiality of excision is inherent in the icon, the

poem’s epigram makes it explicit. The two brackets signal a form of separation from the icon.

However, the double guillemets that surround the children’s song mark, even materialize in a

particular way, the location of excision, the materiality without material, now materialized,

marked. They make the materiality without matter of excision recognizable. Schwitters

commands us: lies, read these punctuation/grammatical marks that both site and cite the material

within them along with that material itself. Read not only the what (rauf, runter…) but also the

where (» «). The newly readable locale of ideological grammar represented in “Das i-Gedicht” is

further highlighted as ideological in its relationship to the what of material interpellation. This

where, however, is always the location of the machine-like grammar, the materiality without

matter, the aesthetic and formalistic borders and constraints of the material what. Therefore, the

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where is the location of a possible grammatical, ideological disruption, an excision that itself

takes on the role of an ideologically critical instrument. As we’ve seen in “Das i-Gedicht,” the

excision is the tool of fragmentation that any aesthetic or formalistic totalization, any

unperturbed cloak of transparency, the foundation of Althusser’s elementary ideological effect.74

Thanks to the poem’s innocuousness, simplicity, even banality as an elemental excerpt of a

children’s work book, all of which is to say a radically singular fragment, it largely avoids those

rhetoric, aesthetic, and formalistic delusions of a totalized material text. The work’s Sütterlin-i

icon and imperative epigram are marked as fragments by the interjection of the brackets and shift

to Antiqua typeface, which disallow any continuum or aesthetic totalization of the work. The

location of excision marked by brackets, guillemets, “rauf”s, is a mark of fragmentation, and

therefore a disruption and disturbance of any ideological potential of aesthetic totalization. That

is, the material does little to obscure the materiality without matter, or in other words, the

material interpellation does little to obscure its ideological grammar. Indeed, what little aesthetic

or formalistic material appears in “Das i-Gedicht,” specifically the violent juxtaposition of a

Fraktur-based handwriting with an Antiqua typeface, highlights the radical ideological

arguments that surrounded the subject at the time. Here we can begin to see the larger

revolutionary character of “Das i-Gedicht” as a work of both interpellation and i.

“Das i-Gedicht” both performs and manifests the very genre it means to exemplify as that

genre’s, we could then say, performative manifesto. It is performative in two senses of the word.

It performs, i.e. executes or satisfies, the aspects of i set out by Schwitters, not only in works

such as “i (Ein Manifest),” “/i/,” or his “Banalitäten,” but also the very aspects set out within

74 As Derrida notes: “The literality of the letter situates in fact this materiality not so much because it would be a

physical or sensible (aesthetic) substance, or even matter, but because it is the place of prosaic resistance […] to any

organic and aesthetic totalization.” He continues: “[Materiality] resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial

and organic totality” (“Typewriter” 350).

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“Das i-Gedicht” itself, not merely one among many, but the i-poem. The epigrammatic command

lies can be seen as instructive and directive, a helpful answer to “How do I read this icon?” and a

command to read in itself, to read i, to read an individual detail and the location of its excision,

all of which combines to become a type of self-fulfillment. Through this dual lies, the work then

becomes notably performative in the Austinian sense,75 in that it makes readers of us, not only of

the material what (rauf, runter, rauf…), but also readers of the materiality (without material) of

the where (» «). As readers of the work, readers of both what and where, we do not merely repeat

or (re)iterate it, but we (re)cite it. That is, we recreate the very act of artistic citation that

Schwitters has pronounced to create a work of i-art. We become the poem’s most recent

(co)author. Through the work’s command for us to read the what and the where, we are

irrevocably interpellated and recruited as i-artists in our very reading of “Das i-Gedicht,” now an

author-subject, part of the club, whether we like it or not. The initiation into this club is to be a

critical reader of ideology and disruptive (re)citer of interpellation, accomplished by reading, by

(re)citing the poem.

“Das i-Gedicht” critically reverses interpellation to work against itself, stages interpellation

itself as a tool against ideological interpellation. In its interpellation of us as i-artists, “Das i-

Gedicht” further reasserts itself as a work of i-art, namely the product of the most recent act of i-

artistry, our (re)citation of it. For Schwitters: “Wichtig für i ist, […] daß es durch mich etwas ist,

obgleich es die Anderen gemacht haben, daß ich es zum Kunstwerk gestempelt habe, durch mein

Erkennen…”76 (V.137). “Das i-Gedicht” includes within itself that very recognition [erkennen]

through which it is created, indeed a recognition that each reader is commanded to repeat. It

75 See J.L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words, 6ff. 76 “Important for i is, […] that it is something through me, even if the others have made it, that I have stamped it as

artwork, through my recognition.” Here, of course, we see a forerunner to later criticism that had refused the

intensions and other biographical contexts of a work’s author, most notably Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “Le mort

d’auteur.”

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simultaneously exemplifies and recruits, as we simultaneously read and write. This occurs by

simple act of our encounter of, and ensnarement by the work, simultaneously interpellated as

reader and author, which is to say (re)citer, an i-artist. This dual, or complete, interpellation of

us, however, is not meant to terminate there, but rather propagate further, recruit others to both

(re)read and (re)write/(re)cite “ein Kunstwerk […], d.h. Rhythmus, der auch von anderen

künstlerisch denkenden Menschen als Kunstwerk empfunden werden kann”77 (V.139). “Das i-

Gedicht,” as self-critical interpellation then, recruits individuals as subject of a self-critical

ideology; it becomes then a germ of self-reproductive critical thought within ideology. Like

Derrida’s mark, which together with its symbiotic spacing, or analogously de Man’s material

together with its symbiotic (immaterial) materiality, “peut donner lieu à une itération en

l’absence et au-delà de la présence du sujet empiriquement déterminé qui l’a, dans une contexte

donné, émise ou produite”78 (Marges 377), the work of i-art is meant to be read, written, read

again, and so on, the two activities in fact now melded into one and the same action, the exact

same side of the exact same coin, each freshly stamped “i-Kunst” or simply “i.” This final stamp

by the most recent reader/author completes the process and (momentarily) finishes the work:

“Das ist (mir) i” [(To me) that is i].

From 1922 to 1924, Schwitters punctuated many of his critical texts with some variation of

“[Das] ist (mir) i.”79 Schwitters also titled his many works of i-art as such, e.g. “Das i-Gedicht,”

“Unsittliches i-Gedicht,” “Pornographisches i-Gedicht,” or his 22 “i-Zeichnungen.”80 Indeed,

77 “an artwork [], i.e. rhythm, which can also be perceived as artwork by others who think artistically” 78 “which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject

who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it” (Limited 9). 79 “(For me,) [that] is i.” As we have already seen, Schwitters used this formulation in reference to Reverdy’s

“Regard.” In this work, “/i/,” similar constructions appear, such as “Es ist für mich i, …” (V.137), “Das ist nicht i”

and “Hier ist i” (V.138). [“It is for me i,” “That is not i,” and “Here is i.”] 80 See DLW V.206; 139; 140 and Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné I.357-365 and I.515-516, as works numbered

737-759 and 1072-1075, respectively.

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this ultimate stamp of “ist (mir) i” is, by definition, inherent in the very act of reading/writing a

work of i-art, spoken with, and by the final cut of the excision. The stamp is, therefore, less a

brand or seal impressed into the work than it is a molding or casting; an excision. In the creative

process of a work of i-art, where the artist does nothing but reads the materiality, both with and

without material, and excises some Rhythmus, the so-called writing of i-art cannot be a stamp in

terms of some symbol or seal attached or appended by the author/artist, but rather only by her

excision. “[Das] ist (mir) i” is written with scissors. The final stamp itself then is the excision

staged, made visible. The process finalized by this excision is only the momentary finality of a

particular iteration, a temporary but forever repeatable closure, the completion of that particular

iteration of reading/writing, which both momentarily ends and allows for further (re)iterations, at

the heart of the very process of i, and for Derrida, language itself.81 It is the conclusive

punctuation at the end of every work of i-art. This final move signals and specifies the

(momentary) completion of the work of i-art, (re)orients the excised/cited material and the

machine-like materiality that came before it as no longer merely a child’s school book, a song

sung nearby, a department store’s price list, or a mis-printed label for table salt.82 Rather, they

are now, only through this act of citation/reading/writing/(re)citation (re)oriented and

(re)contextualized into the realm of i-art or the i-artistic, or rather as Schwitters seemed to value,

the rhythmic. In other words, the final stamp closes and thereby momentarily (re)affixes the

signification of the raw material and immaterial materiality, the text and grammar, of the citation

81 See our discussion of différance and iteration above, page 60ff. 82 These are the so-called raw materials and materialities of “Das i-Gedicht,” Reverdy’s chant des autres discussed

in Schwitters’s “/i/,” “Unsittliches i-Gedicht” and the i-drawing Tafelsalz [Table Salt] (fig. 2.11), respectively. See

DLW I.206; V.137; V.139; and Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné no. 1072, 515.

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that came before as i-art. In this way, Schwitters’s written-excision of i functions like the

Lacanian point de capiton.83

As Schwitters’s cut closes the (new) signification of a rhythmic citation of, and from

previously raw, readable material as a work of i-art, points de capiton are moments where “le

signifiant arrête le glissement autrement indéfini de la signification”84 (Écrits 805), if only for a

moment. For Lacan, this momentary halting of signification occurred only diachronically or

retroactively, with the final term or punctuation of the phrase or chain of signifiers.85 That is, “Il

faut vraiment que ce soit terminé pour qu’on sache de quoi il s’agit. La phrase n’existe

qu’achevée, et son sens lui vient après coup”86 (Séminare III.297f.). This point de capiton gives a

momentary, retroactive meaning to that which came before it. ‘One’ [on] can only believe herself

to have understood the significant meaning of a given chain of signifiers at this final anchoring

moment–only then has she fully received the meaningful message. As Žižek notes, this is

precisely the moment of interpellation. “The point de capiton is […] the point which interpellates

individual into subject by addressing it with the call of a certain master-signifier (‘Communism’,

‘God’, ‘Freedom’, ‘America’ [in our case ‘i’]) - in a word it is the point of subjectivation of the

signifier’s chain” (Sublime Object 112).87 We’ve already seen this process with “Das i-Gedicht”

83 Point de capiton is variously translated into English as “anchoring point,” “quilting point,” or “upholstery button.”

In an attempt to avoid any potential confusion, we will continue to utilize the French term. Lacan discusses the

concept in multiple works. See specifically Lacan’s seminar from June 6, 1956, from Séminaire III.293-306,

translated in English as “The Quilting Point” in Seminar III: The Psychoses 258-270. 84 “the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification” (Écrits[en] 681). 85 Lacan writes: “Ce point de capiton, trouvez-en la fonction diachronique dans la phrase, pour autant qu’elle ne

boucle sa signification qu’avec son dernier terme, chaque terme étant anticipé dans la construction des autres, et

inversement scellant leur sens par son effet rétroactif” (Écrits 805). [“The diachronic function of this button tie can

be found in a sentence, insofar as a sentence closes its signification only with its last term, each term being

anticipated in the construction constituted by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive

effect” (Ecrits[en] 682).] For a clarifying, if brief, overview of the diachronic, or retroactive, process of points de

capiton, see Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology 95ff. 86 “It does have to be completed before one knows what’s going on. The sentence only exists as completed and its

sense comes to it retroactively” (Seminar III 262). 87 This master-signifier is analogous to that particular ordering point de capiton of the symbolic order of an

Althusserian, localized ideology, e.g. Father in patriarchy, Capital in capitalism, etc. For a brief overview of Žižek’s

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and i. Whether the explicit “[Das] ist (mir) i” in Schwitters’s critical texts or the implicit written-

excision-stamp of i in the closure of citation, this i-point de capiton, “fixes retroactively the

meaning of the chain” (Sublime Object 113), gives (new) diachronic meaning to the Sütterlin-i,

the song of les autres, etc. as embodiments of i, and therefore interpellates, recruits us as

readers/writer-excisors of both interpellative material and ideological materiality, as i-artists.

What makes this i-interpellation unique, however, is its refusal to obscure itself, to hide itself as

ideological interpellation. That is, our i-interpellation as readers/writer-excisors of ideological

interpellation requires us to recognize the ideological interpellation, with and within which we

are now bound.

The process of the point de capiton, which is the process of interpellation itself, is laid bare

through the act of artistic/rhythmic citation, in that our horizon of expectation which manifests

itself through our reading of the work is radically, conspicuously shifted from a student’s work

book to i, for example, in the final “rauf”-bar’s disappearance into the white page, the conclusive

guillemet ‘«,’ and the final bracket, which anchor, stabilize, package, or close the work’s own

signification as a complete, ideologically interpellative unit. i performs ideological interpellation

in such a way that we are implicitly compelled to critically recognize it as ideological

interpellation. The visible final cut that marks the work of i-art, the i-point de capiton, becomes a

moment of ideologically critical potential, a momentary excision that disrupts the smooth and

slick interpellation within the material’s original context. “Das i-Gedicht” is explicit in this way,

focused on the conspicuously ideological and interpellative battles that reverberated around the

Fraktur-Antiqua debate in the first two decades of the twentieth century, both within the work as

a radical juxtaposition of Fraktur and Antiqua, as well as the excision of the work itself, a single

use of the term, see The Ticklish Subject 190ff, esp. 194. See also Lacan’s “Le maître et l’hystérique” in Séminaire

XVII.31-42, translated as “The Master and the Hysteric” in Seminar XVII 29-38.

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letter and epigram now visible in a fluctuating series of uncertain contexts. That is, both implicit

process and explicit theme undo the Althusserian presage that interpellation never calls itself

such. In its very materiality, “Das i-Gedicht” analyzes and displays, indeed positively performs,

produces, makes visible, and highlights, the processes necessary for ideological interpellation to

function. For us then, interpellated as readers/writers of this unit of ideological interpellation as

ideological interpellation, we are not merely interpellated as the most recent (re)citers of

ideology, but rather also as the most recent analysts and critics of that ideology, writers with

ideologically critical scissors. That process of reading/writing, momentarily solidified with an

anchoring cut, must necessarily inhabit this final retrospective position, only to transform just as

quickly to the next phrase, the next work, the next iteration, the next interpellation, recruitment,

reproduction. To a certain extent, however, the question remains: “Aber was ist i?”88 (DLW

V.120). When viewed from the side of the materiality of what, it is potentially everything, some

element of a child’s school book, or a label for table salt, or a department store’s price list—from

the side of the materiality of where, it is nothing, that is no–thing.89 For his part, Schwitters gave

but one positive and prescriptive equivalence to this genre: “i = dada” (V.150).

88 “But what is i?” 89 See above, page 12.

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The Word dada

Few words have engendered as much sustained interest in the history of literature as dada

and, at least initially, Schwitters’s enigmatic equation does little to solve the so-called riddle.90

The word dada as we know it today was first written down in Hugo Ball’s journal on 18 April

1916. “Tzara quält wegen der Zeitschrift. Mein Vorschlag, sie Dada zu nennen, wird

angenommen”91 (Flucht 95). He continues: “Dada heißt im Rumänischen Ja Ja, im

Französischen Hotto– und Steckenpferd. Für Deutsche ist es ein Signum alberner Naivität und

zeugungsfroher Verbundenheit mit dem Kinderwagen”92 (ibid). English speakers would likely

add that it is a toddler’s word for her father and often an infant’s first word. For a cabaret that

Hennings and Ball had opened little more than two months earlier, Ball’s proposal for such an

infantile word, both in the sense that it denotes elements of an infant’s world (hobbyhorse,

naïveté, stroller) and as a word that a toddler might utilize (yes yes, father) is surprisingly

fitting.93 However, Ball somewhat moved away from this aspect as he introduced the word in his

“Eröffnungs– Manifest” on 14 July, France’s Bastille Day, of the same year: “Im Franzoesischen

bedeutets Steckenpferd. Im Deutschen: Addio, steigt mir bitte den Ruecken runter, auf

Wiedersehen ein ander Mal! Im Rumaenischen: ‘Ja wahrhaftig, Sie haben Recht, so ist es.

Jawohl, wirklich. Machen wir’. Und so weiter”94 (Zinn 12). In addition to the transformation of

the German definition of the word dada from naïveté and an extreme stroller-attachment to an

90 For the time being, I will refrain from capitalizing the word “dada” as a type of shorthand to show that we are

interested in dada as word, rather than the so-called artistic and literary movement it has come to signify. 91 “Tzara keeps on worrying about the periodical. My proposal to call it ‘Dada’ is accepted” (Flight 63). 92 “Dada is yes yes in Romanian, rocking horse and hobbyhorse in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish

naïveté and happily procreative attachment to the stroller.” 93 We will return to this holophrastic or protolinguistic aspect of the word dada shortly. 94 “In French, it means ‘hobby horse.’ In German it means ‘Good-bye,’ ‘Get off my back,’ ‘Be seeing you

sometime.’ In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely right.’ And so forth”

(Flight 220).

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exuberant form of goodbye, as the Romanian double affirmative had also been embellished for

the manifesto,95 the order of the word’s radical multilingual iterability was rearranged, newly

simplified French and German definitions first, then the Romanian affirmative. While the word’s

so-called meanings cover the three native languages of the main participants of Cabaret

Voltaire,96 to foreground the French and German definitions underscores their unique relation at

the time, namely as the two languages of the primary belligerents of the war, or more specifically

the Battle of Verdun which was unfolding at the time.97

Between diary and manifesto, Ball published the word dada for the first time in the middle of

May, at the end of a kind of introduction as epitaph to Cabaret Voltaire, which collected many

works from those first months of the cabaret. It was the goal of the cabaret, “dessen ganze

Absicht darauf gerichtet ist, über den Krieg und die Vaterländer hinweg an die wenigen

Unabhängigen zu erinnern, die anderen Idealen leben. Das nächste Ziel der hier vereinigten

Künstler ist die Herausgabe einer Revue Internationale. La rêvue paraitre à Zurich et portera le

nom »DADA«”98 (Zinn 11). This immediate shift in language comes at the end of Ball’s text,

otherwise written fully in German, an abrupt shift from the preceding war and Fatherland to

95 This exuberance, in addition to the remaining French definition of the word as hobbyhorse, may be one of the

ways in which Ball preserves the infantile within the word, in that it highlights dada as a holophrastic abbreviation

of the otherwise complex ideas expressed in German and Romanian, just as a toddler might say “Food” rather than

“Pardon me, but I am currently hungry and I would appreciate it if you could procure some nourishment, that I could

vanquish this craving.” 96 While fully one half of the main attendees of Cabaret Voltaire were born and raised in Romania, all were fluent in

either French or German. See Sandqvist 42. For a brief discussion of the radical changes that had befallen the

Romanian language, namely its de-slavicization, or rather latinization, which oddly mirrored Fraktur’s eventual

defeat to Antiqua, see Sandqvist 51ff. 97 This 1916 battle, from 21 February to 20 December, would have been well known to the Dadaists in Zürich as it

unfolded, given their relative obsession with the press, which we will discuss later, and the constant reports, often

many in a single day, from the Neue Züricher Zeitung, beginning with a front-page report on 25 February. Tzara’s

inclusion of English as the third language in his simultaneous poem “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer,” also

strongly hinted at the use of various languages in connection with the main belligerents of the war, in that case

focused on naval warfare. 98 “…whose whole purpose is to recall, beyond the war and the fatherland, the few independents who live other

ideals. The next goal of the here united artists is the publishing of an international review. The review will come out

in Zürich at will have the name ‘DADA’” (italicization indicates original French).

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internationality and France. That members of the Cabaret Voltaire in general, or Ball in

particular, saw a deep connection between language and the First World War, along with its

attendant nationalisms, is hardly novel.99 Here we see, however, that Ball did not exempt the

word dada from this implication. Indeed, Ball’s “Eröffnungs– Manifest” appears to place dada

directly into the fray. “Dada Weltkrieg und kein Ende, Dada Revolution und kein Anfang”100

(Zinn 12). While this could easily be taken as an indictment of the Kunstrichtung, the artistic

movement rather than the word that functioned as its label, Ball was quick to remind that dada is

“Ein internationales Wort. Nur ein Wort, und das Wort als Bewegung”101 (ibid). That is, there is

no separation between the two, as though one wouldn’t exist without the other and to indict one

is to indict the other. Indeed, Ball’s manifesto is uniquely concerned with the word in and of

itself. “Das Wort, meine Herren, ist eine öffentliche Angelegenheit ersten Ranges”102 (13).

Ball ties dada as word not only to the war, but rather a litany of ideological apparatuses

which includes aesthetics, nationality, religion, capitalism, etc. That is, Ball’s manifesto was

concerned with the word itself, and moreover how that specific word had been implicated,

seemingly by its status as word, within those ideological apparatuses. Due to its very locale, that

“Dada … aus dem Lexikon [stammt],” due to the fact that it was among the “Worte, die andere

erfunden haben,” the word has already been infected, merely another element from “Diese[r]

vermaledeite[n] Sprache, an der Schmutz klebt wie von Maklerhändn, die die Muenzen

abgegriffen haben”103 (Zinn 12f.). For Ball, who introduced the very word, dada is anything but

99 The number of Dadaist citations that connect language with the First World War is far too extensive for here. See,

for instance, T. J. Demos’s article “Circulations: In and Around Dada Zürich.” 100 “Dada world war without end. Dada revolution without beginning” (Flight 221). 101 “An international word. Just a word, and the word as movement” (Flight 220). 102 “The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first order” (Flight 221). 103 “Dada comes from the dictionary” ; “words that others have discovered” ; “this accursed language, to which filth

clings, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins” (Flight 220f., translation modified).

Here, Ball plays on the term abgegriffen, which could be translated as either worn, as a smooth coin long since in

circulation, or a word or phrase, which has become cliché or hackneyed.

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immune from this ideological filth. It appears to have been for this very reason that Ball

described his manifesto as a refutation of Dadaism and his involvement with it. Ball wanted only

parts of the word; “Schultern von Worten; Beine, Arme, Haende von Worten,” “wo es [das

Wort] aufhört und wo es anfängt”104 (ibid). In radical contrast, however, “Dada ist das Herz der

Worte”105 (Der Künstler 40). Here we can begin to see the equivalences to Schwitters’s i. Just as

the point and line of i are the basis, the core, the center, the essential heart of all possible,

productive written marks, Ball now describes the infantile, holophrastic word dada as the first,

the easiest word? That is, both i and dada represent the definitive step into the protolinguistic. As

Ball puts it: “Da kann man nun so recht sehen, wie die artikulierte Sprache entsteht”106 (Zinn 13).

This initial step into the protolinguistic by i and dada, with Althusser in mind, simply represent

an initial step into the protoideological.

Ball’s manifesto marks this step into proto– linguistics and ideology with his juxtaposition of

dada, the dictionary, and rabid nationalism; that is, the word dada, the literal book of words, and

the dominant ISA during and immediately following World War I, along with an array of other

ideologies. Unlike the inherent ideological nature of Schwitters’s Sütterlin-i and “Das i-

Gedicht,” at the intersection of the written mark and educational and nationalist ideologies, little

immediately or inextricably marked dada itself as unique, either linguistically or ideologically.

Rather, Ball evoked the juxtaposition of language and ideology through the use of i-ist praxis:

excision and iteration. The word dada comes from, has been removed, excised from the

dictionary, and is here repeated, (re)written for us readers to (re)read at our leisure. Derrida

considered such an excision or retrieval to exemplify the very heart of the written mark: “iter,

104 “shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words” … “where [the word] ends and where it begins” (Flight 221). 105 “Dada is the heart of words” (Flight 221). This is from the second, edited version of the “Eröffnungs– Manifest,”

now under the title of “Das erste dadaistische Manifest” [“The First Dadaist Manifesto”]. 106 “Now there one can really see how articulated language comes into being” (Flight 221, translation modified).

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derechef, viendrait de itara, autre en sanskrit, et tout ce qui suit peut être lu comme

l’exploitation de cette logique qui lie la répétition à l’altérité”107 (Marges 375). For Derrida, this

alterity manifests itself as absence, both “l’absence absolue du destinataire ou de l’ensemble

empiriquement déterminable des destinataires” (ibid) and “l’absence et au-delà de la présence du

sujet empiriquement déterminé qui l’a, dans un contexte donné, émise ou produite”108 (Marges

377). That is to say, a mark is not a mark, a word is not a word unless it is able to be repeated,

iterated, unless it is iterable in the absolute absence of both its author and its addressee.

Repeatable or repeated by whom? “[I]térable pour un tiers”109 (Marges 375), which is to say, the

one who excised it, the one who removed it from its original contexts. This quasi-mythical

excision of dada from the dictionary, whether with Tzara’s letter-opener piercing the page of the

classic French Larousse dictionary, the juxtaposition of violence and language made apparent, or

a German-French dictionary on Ball’s lap during his research for Zur Kritik der deutschen

Intelligenz [Critique of the German Intelligentsia], which attempted to map how the German

religious and philosophical intelligentsia created the First World War, here again language and

ideology juxtaposed,110 is always already a form of iteration. That is, excision is iteration by a

107 “iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working

out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity” (Limited 7). 108 “the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers” (Limited 7) …

“the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or

produced it” (9). 109 “iterable for a third” (Limited 8). 110 Of course, it is unimportant to us whether or not the word dada really or actually or factually came from the

dictionary. Important is that these two competing histories, the former recounted by George Ribemont-Dessaignes,

George Hugnet, Tzara himself, and others involved with Dada Paris; the latter recounted by Huelsenbeck, Christian

Schaad, and Ball and others, center around the (violent) excision of a word from the very book of words. The two

most prominent accounts are Hugnet’s “L’Ésprit dada dans le peinture” and Huelsenbeck’s “Dada Lives,”

respectively. Both are translated in Motherwell 123-140 and 279-281, respectively. For an overview of the

consequences of this split, see Elderfield 241ff. For two popular literary historical accounts of the word’s excision

from popular culture rather than dictionary, see Raimund Meyer’s “Dada ist groß, Dada ist schön: Zur Geschichte

von Dada Zürich” in Dada in Zürich, and Arno Widmann’s article “Dada-Rätsel gelöst!” in Die Tageszeitung.

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third, in this case here, members of Dada Zürich. This inceptive movement of dada’s excision

opened something of a Pandora’s box of radical (re)iteration.

Ball’s introductory statement that named dada, its first time printed for public consumption in

this new pseudo-context, repeats the word six times: “»DADA«. (»Dada«) Dada Dada Dada

Dada” (Zinn 11). Directly after his assurance that dada is indeed a word, Ball’s “Eröffnungs–

Manifest” repeats the word in a paratactic string of associations with various themes or

ideologies (psychology, literature, bourgeoisie, Buddha, etc.) and authors (Goethe, Stendhal,

Rubiner, Tzara), twice punctuated by “a sequence of increasingly nonsensical sounds, among

which Dada itself figures as the repetitive core element” (Wilke 642), as though the word itself

can’t help but be repeated, “Dada m’dada, Dada m’dada, Dada mhm’ dada” (Zinn 12f.). Tzara

would mirror, to a certain extent, this same pattern with his “Dégoût dadaïste” which concludes

his “Manifeste Dada 1918” with a series of typographically unique “dada”s, each before a

proposed abolition (of logic, hierarchy, memory, prophets, futures, etc.), only to end: “Liberté :

DADA DADA DADA…”111 (OC I.367). Of course, the word’s most obvious iteration is in fact

itself, a single syllable of one consonant and one vowel, da, repeated, doubled, da-da. That is,

this form of repetition is built into the word, and for Raoul Hausmann, indeed approved to be

among the very defining characteristics. “Eine Namengebung ist keine Erfindung - es bliebe für

den Dadaismus gleichgültig, ob er dada oder bebe, sisi oder ollolo benannt worden wäre - die

affaire bliebe die gleiche”112 (Texte I.166). As other Dadaists noted at the time, the spirit of Dada

was there long before the word dada had been chosen—it was no invention. Hausmann however

111 “Dadaist Disgust.” The three dadas are underlined in its original, printed in Dada 3, though oddly, not as it is

reprinted in his Oeuvres Complètes. The unique typography of the eleven dadas before these final three further

highlight themselves as excised, not entirely congruent with the otherwise unremarkable typography of the other

words that constitute the text, as though they were plucked from advertisements or propaganda to be found

elsewhere. 112 “An act of naming is not an invention, it would make no difference to Dadaism if it had been named dada or

bebe, sisi or ollolo, the situation would still be the same” (qtd. in Wilke 640, translation modified).

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implicitly notes two apparent requirements: that there is a name, that a name be given, and that

that name is based upon some type of repetition. From the multiple mythologies surrounding its

so-called discovery, its multilingual uses, its radical repetition in the initial texts that introduced

it, to the very word itself, iteration and immeasurable contextualization are staged in and by the

word dada.

Tobias Wilke points out that this is not an unbounded repetition, but rather dada is a

suspension of “the chain of potentially indefinite repetitions in a bounded structure of

reduplication” (663), as are bebe, sisi, and ollolo, structured as self-contained double-sounds.

This is, as it was for Ball, “the ‘transition to articulate speech’ the moment when the initial but

inarticulate ‘vocal gesture’ gives way to an ‘articulate gesture’ of clearly defined syllabic units”

(649),113 or as we have put it, protolinguistic. However, this protoword, due to its very liminality,

is necessarily without an assigned, designated, unique referent, signified, or even meaning, and

according to Wilke must therefore align “itself with the manual gesture of pointing” (ibid).114 For

Derrida, this loss of the referent, signified, or meaning, which is to say context, is the end result

of the radical possibility of a mark’s absence from not only its sender and receiver, but also its

absence from any referent, signified, or meaning. For such an example, Derrida invokes the

“sinnlos” and “Sinnlosigkeit” from Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen: “Hierher gehören

wortartige klingende artikulierte Lautgebilde, wie Abracadabra”115 (II.54), a protoword of

reduplication (abra-cad-abra) that has no stable, determined referent, signified, or meaning.

Derrida expands what for Wilke was the articulatory gesture into citation, the combination of

113 Here, Wilke is quoting James Sully’s Studies of Childhood 138. As we saw with Ball’s preliminary infantile

definitions of dada, Wilke draws heavily from the theories of contemporaneous infantile language acquisition, such

as those by Sully, Wilhelm Wundt, Michel Bréal, and Roman Jakobson. 114 Wilke cleverly associates this with Dada’s propensity to use the icon of a pointing hand in their works, from

Hausmann’s OFFEAH (fig. 2.1) to Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918,” (OC I.368). See above, page 12. 115 “nonsense”; “absuridity”; “Here belong articulate, word-like sound-patterns such as ‘Abracadabra’” (Logical

Investigations I.201). Derrida cites this section of Husserl in Marges 379ff., translated into English in Limited 10ff.

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excision and iteration: “Tout signe, linguistique ou non linguistique, parlé ou écrit […], en petite

ou en grande unité, peut être cité, mis entre guillemets; par là il peut rompre avec tout contexte

donné”116 (Marges 381). This is precisely what we saw in dada’s first printed appearance: “La

rêvue paraitre à Zurich et portera le nom »DADA«. (»Dada«)”117 (Zinn 11). The goal of both the

articulatory gesture of a pointed finger and the citation is the same; “Tout signe[… peut]

engendrer à l’infini de nouveaux contextes, de façon absolument non saturable”118 (Marges 381),

“to designate a potentially infinite number of different objects” (Wilke 649). That is, while every

mark may possibly be cited, break with their original context and attach to an illimitable number

of new contexts, protowords such as dada necessarily do so, as they are always already broken

off from any original context. Every context is a new context. They are deictic, par excellence.

That the word dada radically questions the idea of an original context, i.e. referent, signified,

or meaning, that dada is perhaps only new contexts, has been previously suggested. According to

Adorno: “Noch Dada war, als die aufs pure Dies hinweisende Gebärde, so allgemein wie das

Demonstrativpronomen”119 (270). Indeed, for so-called Dadaists, the very import of its mythical

first citation is that it had no specific, singular, immediate context, in that it spanned multiple

national languages, to which were quickly augmented still further contexts. In addition to yes,

hobbyhorse, naïveté, and goodbye, Ball adds in his manifesto that “Dada ist die Weltseele, Dada

ist der Clou, Dada ist die beste Lilienmilchseife der Welt”120 (Zinn 12). Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada

116 “Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguisitic, spoken or written […], in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between

quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context.” 117 “The review will come out in Zürich at will have the name »DADA«. (»Dada«).” As we saw with Schwitters’s

“Das i-Gedicht,” the guillemets and parentheses mark the location of the excision. 118 “Every sign[… can] engender an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable” (Limited

12, translation slightly modified). 119 “Even Dada, as the purely deictic gesture, was as universal as the demonstrative pronoun.” For an in depth

discussion of da as the German deictic word there and its relation to Freud’s Fort/Da, dada and Dada, see W.G.

Kudszus’s “Translating Transition: Dada, Fort/Da, Grimm’s Da.” 120 “Dada is the world soul, Dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap” (Flight 221).

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1918” adds that, dependent upon linguistic context, dada can mean “la queue d’une vache

sainte… Le cube et la mère… la nourrice, double affirmation”121 (OC I.360). Tzara, Raoul

Hausmann, Walter Serner, and others mocked journalists and literary critics, who had been

continually consumed by the question of the initial meaning, the original context, that might have

given clarification, to which Hausmann chided: “Ob Gott oder Tao, Identität und Zahl,

Individuum und Ding an sich - für Dada sind dies noch nicht einmal exakt gestellte Fragen, denn

Dada ist alles dies zugleich und als ebenso sicher nicht existent bewußt”122 (Texte I.168). Later,

Hausmann would infamously summarize this: “Was ist dada? Eine Kunst? Eine Philosophie?

eine Politik? Eine Feuerversicherung? Oder: Staatsreligion? ist dada wirkliche Energie? oder ist

es ☞ Garnichts, d.h. alles?”123 (Am Anfang 8). To which, just as we had with i, we can only

answer in the affirmative. Dada is nothing at all, no-thing, the citation/articulation, the location

of the excision, which is the same as potentially everything, the thing excised, in that literally

everything can conceivably be called dada. Tzara would later summarize: “Dada s’applique à

tout, et pourtant il n’est rien; [… D]ada est un microbe vierge qui s’introduit avec l’insistance de

l’air dans tous les espaces que la raison n’a pu compler de mots ou de conventions”124 (OC

I.424). In other words, dada is, or at the very least is seen to be, created or conceived as

“furchtbar einfach”125 (Zinn 11), an infantile, foundational word that has zero original context

and therefore infinite possible citation, infinite citational contexts.

121 “the tail of a sacred cow… A cube and a mother… a children’s nurse, a double affirmative” (Seven Manifestos

4). 122 “If god or tao, identity and number, individual and thing-in-itself – for Dada, these are not yet precisely posed

questions, for Dada is all of these simultaneously and just as surely, consciously non-existent.” 123 “What is dada? An art? A philosophy? a politics? A fire insurance? Or state religion? is dada absolute energy? or

is it ☞ nothing at all, i.e. everything?” 124 “Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing. […] Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the

insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions” (Motherwell

251). 125 “terribly simple”

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While Derrida rhetorically asks, “Que serait une marque que l’on ne pourrait pas citer? Et

dont l’origine ne saurait être perdue en chemin?”126 (Marges 381), our question for dada

becomes: What of the mark that can only be cited, whose radical simplicity as protoword and

radically deictic nature appear to severely diminish, if not wholly preclude the possibility of an

origin? How does this function and what does this allow, and specifically for our purposes, in

relation to ideology and interpellation? Perhaps most immediately, it protected, to a certain

extent, Dadaist works and their artists from the criticism of self-contradiction. That is, while

Cubism was immediately associated, through the so-called original context of the word cube

after which the movement was labeled, with geometric form, or Futurism with technological

progress, Dada had no such necessary allegiances. As Roman Jakobson wrote: “The name

[dada], along with the commentaries that followed, at once knocked out of the hands of critics

their main weapon—the accusation of charlatanism and trickery. […] No matter what you accuse

Dada of, you can’t accuse it of being dishonest, of concealment, of hedging its bets” (“Dada”

167f.).127 There can be no self-contradiction when everything is on the table, when the Dadaist

can do anything because dada is everything, perhaps even especially when they contradict

themselves. This becomes something of a self-interpellation, specifically through the radical

disorientation and therefore attenuation of interpellation as such. That is, it appears as an

interpellation that destabilizes, disorients, disturbs its own form and function as interpellation

thanks to its radical deictic universality. If everything is dada, then everyone is a dadaist, and the

interpellation loses its interpellative force. Hausmann, for instance, writes in his “Der deutsche

Spießer ärgert sich” in the second edition of Der Dada: “Wir dudeln, quietschen, fluchen, lachen

126 “What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?”

(Limited 12). 127 Jakobson wrote “Dada” at the end of 1920, likely after seeing the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe [First

International Dada Fair], which took place in Berlin from the end of June through the 25th of August that same

year. See chapter three.

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die Ironie: Dada! Denn wir sind – ANTIDADAISTEN!”128 (Texte I.82). The ineluctability of

such archetypically Dadaist and dadaist statements was not lost on the multitudes of press in

attendance nor those reporting from further afield. “If you say Yea to the proclamation, you

become a Dadaist by assent; if you say it Nay, you become one through your spirit of opposition,

which is a form of self-assertion, which, being an immediate adjustment to reality, is Dada-ism

par excellence” (qtd. in Watts 3). There is no context in which you are not dadaist.

Derrida is quick to note the intricacies of this infinite context: “Cela ne suppose pas que la

marque vaut hors contexte, mais au contraire qu’il n’y a que des contextes sans aucun centre

d’ancrage absolu”129 (Marges 381). That is, the infinitude of dada does not move it beyond

context, but rather allows it to function as a potential anchor in every context. This is precisely

what dada and its use in, and as interpellation makes apparent. It is an anchor that shows itself as

anchor because it doesn’t work, because no original context gives it weight, not because it

simply floats from one context to another, but rather because it always already functions in every

context. This is true of every deictic word within its given language in that the deictic word

creates its context. For dada, however, it is both new and international, a truly universal deictic

word that announces itself, and is proclaimed as, vacuously, radically, infinitely deictic. Dada,

then, functions not only retrospectively as i had in Schwitters’s “[Das] ist (mir) i,”130 a point de

capiton that “produces the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning” (Evans 151) as illusion, but

also prospectively, reproductively as interpellation. Althusser’s Hé, vous là bas is in fact

equivalent to Hé, dadaïste là bas. Just as you always believe yourself to be You, you are also

always a Dadaist. With the latter, however, you are made aware of, you are able to read your

128 “We tootle, squeak, curse, laugh out the irony: Dada! For we are ANTI-DADAISTS!” (Ades Ed. 88). 129 “This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts

without any absolute center or absolute anchoring” (Limited 12). 130 “(For me,) [that] is i.” See above, page 67f.

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own interpellation in the awkwardness of the interpellation itself. It draws attention to itself as

interpellation, where the misrecognition of “I am a You and therefore the You to which the

police officer called” is subverted, where the presumed obviousness, self-evidence, naturalness

of you as You, the Althusserian elementary ideological effect, is shown as presumption, one

which does not transfer without hiccups and stutters and conspicuity to you as Dadaist. All of

which is to say, the word dada, the only possible center of Dada, is nothing if not a radical

subversion of the function of ideological interpellation.

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Chapter Three

“A Specter is Haunting Dadaism”:

Manifestos, Theater, and Irony

“All the world’s a stage.”1

–William Shakespeare

“Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation”2

–Raoul Hausmann

“Die Bühnen füllen sich mit Königen, Dichtern und faustischen Naturen jeder Art, die

Theorie einer melioristischen Weltauffassung […] durchgeistert die tatenlosen Köpfe.”3

-Richard Huelsenbeck

“… werden Sie Dadaist und Sie erwerben sich Heiterkeit

und die unbesiegbare Macht der Ironie!”4

–Raoul Hausmann

As we saw in the previous chapter, the act of naming is in fact an essential element in the act

of the founding and establishment of a subject or group, in our case immediately undercut and

problematized by the name given—dada, a radically deictic word free from any immediate

traditional associations and a word consistently refused functional new ones by those who

proposed it. This act of naming is, however, only the first step in the act of founding a

movement. In addition to the difficulties of radical and purposeful ambiguity in which the word

dada revels, the act of foundation adds difficulties inherent in the attempt to define and delineate

the disordered movement of artists or radicals under this word, as well as the principles, aims,

and goals of that group. That is to say, the act of founding is, at the very least, something of a

1 As You Like It 2.5.1 2 Quoted in Asholt & Fähnders’s »Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation«: Die europäische Avantgarde und ihre

Manifeste. 3 Dada Almanach 37. [“Their stages are cluttered with every matter of kings, poets and Faustian characters, and a

theoretical melioristic understanding of life […] lurking at the back of their idle minds” (Dada Almanac 45).] 4 Texte I.96. [“become a Dadaist and you acquire serenity and the invincible power of irony!”]

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double move. It begins with the act of naming—there is a movement, an institution, etc. and I

will designate this group, this thing with this name, which often signals, or alludes to, a major

tenet of the movement, e.g. Futurism and technological development, Cubism and geometric

abstraction. However, the shift into the second movement of the act of founding begins to reveal

the ideologically fraught nature of this founding. There exists a complex entanglement of unique

presumptions within seemingly transparent statements that often begin the documents of

foundation: “This new movement believes in…” or “We aim to…” or “We are guided by…”

Implicit in such statements, is the notion of membership—I belong to this movement, whether as

literal founder and/or member—who is therefore given the role as representative of, a

spokesperson for this new institution. In his reading of the United States Declaration of

Independence as a speech act, Jacques Derrida asks: “qui signe, et de quel nom soi-disant propre,

l’acte déclaratif qui fonde une institution?”5 (Otobiographies 16). In other words, who is granted

the authority to sign, to endorse and on whose behalf does this person sign the text that creates,

that founds, that performs the textual act of founding an institution?

As a representative of a group of people who mean to form an institution, the signer must be

a member of this group of people, must belong in order to be allowed, to speak on behalf of, to

represent the newly minted institution. However, the people whom the author represents do not

yet exist as institution. A representative cannot represent a group of people until that group has

been formed, which is the initial and initiating task of this very representative’s speech act. The

representative represents within a structure that her own representation founds. “Il [ce peuple]

n’existe pas avant cette déclaration, pas comme tel”6 (21). In a kind of self-symbiotic

5 “who signs and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act which founds an institution?” (Negotiations

47). 6 “They [this people] do not exist as an entity, before this declaration, not as such” (49).

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relationship, a self-birth, what Derrida calls a “rétroactivité fablueuse”7 (22), the signature given

to a foundational text, confers upon the very author of that signature a certain amount of

representative authority over that movement as a whole, an authority that the author had

necessarily already assumed for herself before she began to write, to sign, to endorse. Derrida

continues: “Par cet événement fabuleux, […] une signature se donne un nom. Elle s’ouvre un

crédit, son propre crédit, d’elle-même à elle-même. [… U]ne signature se fait crédit, d’un seul

coup de force, qui est aussi un coup d’écriture, comme droit à l’écriture”8 (23). This

entanglement of membership, representation, authority, and ultimately definitional

differentiation from other institutions, all of which is to say the complex internal entanglements

of the act of foundation through a foundational text itself, takes place within what Derrida calls

“tout le jeu qui tend à présenter des énoncés performatifs comme des énoncés constatifs”9 (25).

That is, the act of founding confuses the differentiation between a performative speech act and a

constative speech act, an act that creates and an act that reports, an act described in degrees of

success or felicity and an act described as factual, as true or false. For Derrida, however, this

game is directional, it is the confusion of the performative as a constative, of a linguistic creation

as a demonstrable fact, a kind of repositioning or recontextualization of de Man’s conception of

ideology, that “confusion of linguistic with natural reality” (Resistance 11).

This act of foundation, then, an act that requires this confusion, is a unique performance of

ideology. Althusser makes this explicit in his reading of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: “un

7 “fabulous retroactivity” (50). 8 “With this fabulous event, […] a signature gives itself a name. It opens for itself a line of credit, its own credit for

itself to itself [… A] signature gives or extends credit to itself, in a single ‘coup de force,’ which is also a stroke of

writing, as the right to writing” (ibid). 9 “the whole game which tends to present performative utterances as constative utterances” (51). Here Derrida of

course speaks in terms of J.L. Austin’s performative speech act theory, which we touched upon in the previous

chapter (see above, page 66), and his differentiation between performative speech acts and constative speech acts.

See Austin’s How to Do Things with Words 4ff.

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texte qui appartient au monde de la littérature idéologique et politique, qui y prend position et

parti”10 (Écrits phil II.65). We will focus, then, on this intersection, where the internal intricacies

of the act of founding meet the interpellative and ideological complexities of performative

linguistic acts. Nowhere does Dadaist praxis more thoroughly confront this intersection than with

their manifestos. With its simple use of the subversive word-name dada, Dadaist praxis already

encounters this act of foundation as saboteur of the act’s own smooth and stable operation.11 This

was but the first in a series of confrontations and confusions of this act given by, and within

Dadaist manifestos.12 Situated at the height of what Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders called

“Manifestantismus”13 or Mary Ann Caws dubbed “The Great Manifesto Moment” (xxii), there is

no shortage of Dadaist manifestos to investigate. Indeed, they riddle Dadaist literary reviews,

exhibition catalogues, and other ephemera, whether specifically named as such or given as

theory, explanation, clarification, or lecture.14 Alfons Backes-Haase notes the radical

interdependence between Dada and the manifesto: “Dada ist das Produkt seiner Manifeste, und

so sind auch alle übrigen Dada-Produktionen erst im Kontext des konstitutiven

manifestantistischen Charakters der Bewegung zu begreifen. Dada ist avantgardistischer

10 “a text which belongs to the world of ideological and political literature, which takes sides and a stand in that

world” (Machiavelli 23). 11 In this way, we can see the word dada and its deployment by Dadaists as not only a word, but also as the first

Dadaist work, an act of subverted interpellation in its own right, and therefore, the first instance of a truly Dadaist

praxis. 12 As Martin Puchner states, the manifesto is “the genre that is interested in nothing but precisely such foundational

acts” (Poetry 28). As Janet Lyon puts it: “The manifesto’s conventions help a group to script its identity…” (16).

Marx and Engels wrote that a manifesto means “die Bildung einer Partei, einer Fraktion, einer ‘Masse’ zu

versuchen” (MEW IIX.274). [“to attempt the formation of a party, a fraction, a ‘mass’.”] 13 This neologism comes from the editor of Die Aktion, Franz Pfemfert’s 1913 “Aufruf zum Manifestantismus,”

written under the pseudonym August Stech. See Asholt & Fähnders 63-65, and for their particular use of the term,

119f. 14 Given the staggering number of Dadaist manifestos, it is impossible to survey each and every one of them. Our

goal rather is to attempt to find a balance between the affinities of both a large number of manifestos and those of

particular theoretical value in order to better understand Dadaist praxis as such, which as we will see, tend to be

those of Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, and Richard Huelsenbeck.

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Manifestantismus in Reinkultur”15 (“Wir wollen triezen” 257). In other words, to investigate

Dada is to investigate the manifesto, to investigate Dada’s intervention into the genre and vice

versa. The concept of the manifesto, however, has a long history.

15 “Dada is the product of its manifestos, and as such all other Dada productions are to be understood only in the

context of the constitutive, manifestoist character of the movement. Dada is Manifestoism at its purist.”

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The Manifesto

The term manifesto first appeared, simultaneously in English, German, and French around

the turn of the 16th century and originally designated the mode of address reserved for those with

absolute political or theological power, and often some combination of the two. I am the king, I

have been chosen by god, and given this position of authority, my speech makes manifest,

through my speech it is so.16 While this mode of the authoritarian manifesto continued into the

20th century,17 our current conception of the manifesto as a radical or revolutionary discourse

against the state or those in power began with the monumental publication of Marx and Engels’s

1848 Manifest der kommunistischen Partei.18 Indeed, the immense success of the Manifest

“defined for many subsequent writers what a manifesto should be” (Puchner 11), and even

motivated the retroactive designation of manifesto for a series of texts, such as Martin Luther’s

1517 95 Thesen [95 Theses], the texts of Thomas Münzer, those of English Diggers and

Levellers around the middle of the 17th century, or even Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of

Independence at the end of the 18th century.19 The Manifest’s success created a “Manifestwut,”

an endless “Fabrikation von Manifesten, Proklamationen und Pronunziamientos”20 (MEW

16 For a thorough discussion of the history of the manifesto in this early, authoritarian form, see Somigli 29ff. See

also Lyon 13f. 17 Emperor Franz Josef I of Austro-Hungary declared war in 1914 with “An meine Völker!” [“To My Peoples!”],

which was popularly referred to as a manifesto, and often carried the subtitle “Das Manifest des Kaisers 28. Juni,

1914” [“The Manifesto of the King 28th July, 1914”]. See Poetry 12. 18 MEW IV.459-590; Manifesto of the Communist Party in MECW VI.477-519. 19 For an excellent overview of the manifestos of the Protestant revolution, see Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution

13ff. For a discussion of the texts of the Diggers and Levellers on England, see Lyon 16ff. and again Puchner’s

Poetry 15ff., or for a deeper discussion, see John Rees’s The Leveller’s Revolution. For a discussion of the

Declaration of Independence as a manifesto, see Anne Sinkey’s “The Rhetoric of the Manifesto,” esp. chapter one.

This is not to suggest that these texts were not already occasionally considered manifestos in their own time. For

instance in his Common Sense, Thomas Paine called for “a manifesto to be published, and dispatched to foreign

courts, setting forth the miseries we have endured…” (45), while Münzer laid out his program in Prague in his 1521

text widely known at the time as the Prager Manifest [Prague Manifesto]. 20 “fury of manifestos” … “fabrication of manifestos, proclamations, and pronunciamentos.”

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IIX.274). This explosive outburst of manifestos became most prominent upon their expansion to

include the literary and aesthetic.21 Of course, the Manifest was itself already aesthetic and

literary, punctuated with metaphor and symbolism.22 These new art manifestos were certainly not

free of politics, beyond even their appropriation of a so-called political form. As Puchner notes:

“The Manifesto and other political manifestos cast a long, political shadow over the art

manifestos of the twentieth century, which no art manifesto […] could escape” (76).

If we take Jacques Derrida’s suggestion that an individual work does not simply belong to a

genre but rather participates or enacts that genre,23 the genre of the manifesto is its very action.

In this way, to inquire about the genre of the manifesto is to ask what the manifesto does? Just as

importantly, however, is how the manifesto does, how it functions as a genre of foundation.

Marx and Engels’s Manifest is exemplary not merely for its historical importance, but also for

the lucidity of its act of foundation. The first sentence names: “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa –

das Gespenst des Kommunismus”24 (MEW IV.461). While the act of naming has taken place, the

institution remains as yet borderless, undifferentiated, fleeting, and unsubstantial; a ghost. It is,

as an institution, not quite yet cemented, corporealized, founded, manifested. The Manifest

makes this second move immediately explicit. “Es ist hohe Zeit, daß die Kommunisten ihre

Anschauungsweise, ihre Zwecke, ihre Tendenzen vor der ganzen Welt offen darlegen und dem

21 For a persuasive discussion of the political in the aesthetic, specifically in regards to the manifestos of the avant-

garde, see Hubert van den Berg’s “Zwischen Totalitarismus und Subversion: Anmerkungen zur politischen

Dimension des avantgardistischen Manifests.” 22 The Manifest infamously begins with the metaphor of the specter haunting Europe. For a deeper discussion of the

role of metaphor and the Manifest’s appropriation of literary styles and tropes, see Darko Suvin’s Demystification

and Critique. The Manifest itself alludes to the literary: “Die nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit wird mehr

und mehr unmöglich, und aus den vielen nationalen und lokalen Literaturen bildet sich eine Weltliteratur” (MEW

IV.466). [“National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the

numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (MECW VI.488).] 23 See Derrida’s “La loi du genre” in Parages 249-87. The essay appears in English translation, appropriately

enough, in Acts of Literature 221-52. 24 “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism” (MECW VI.481).

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Märchen vom Gespenst des Kommunismus ein Manifest der Partei selbst entgegenstellen”25

(ibid). This is the decisive moment of the manifesto. Within the span of a few sentences of the

Manifest’s preface, Communism went from amorphous specter that had been haunting the

powers of Europe, a nursery tale frightfully told, to an incarnated party with their own views,

aims, and tendencies that needed merely to be published in a manifesto. “Zu diesem Zweck

haben sich Kommunisten […] in London versammelt und das folgende Manifest entworfen, das

[…] veröffentlicht wird”26 (ibid). As founding-members, Marx and Engels found an institution to

which they seemingly always already belonged. That is, their own membership bestowed upon

them the authority to found the institution to which they were always already members. The

performative act of founding is then confused as the constative act of describing the history of

that founding. In certain ways, we recognize this same confusion in the preeminent manifesto:

Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.”27

Famously printed on the front page of the Parisian Le Figaro on the 20th of February, 1909,

the text was titled simply “Le futurisme” [“The Futurism”].28 Bombastic in tone, the manifesto

praised war in a time of rapid escalation of European nationalist tensions on the eve of World

War I; it celebrated technological progress in the wake of the Taylorist and Fordist revolutions; it

25 “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims,

their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself” (ibid). 26 “To this end, Communists […] have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be

published…” (MECW VI.481). 27 Translated into English in Rainey et al’s Futurism: An Anthology 49-53. Marinetti’s manifesto was not the first of

the “new” art manifestos, nor even the first published in Le Figaro, which was accomplished by Jean Moréas’s “Le

symbolisme” printed as a literary supplement on the 18 September 1886, though this is in fact another case of the

label manifesto attached retrospectively by art historians and critics. Similarly, Marinetti’s manifesto was only

labeled as such retrospectively, though in this case by Marinetti himself. For a brief overview of these two

publications, see Puchner 71f. This retroactive manifesto-ing of artistic texts extends back to Gustav Courbet’s 1855

“Le realisme,” originally the introduction to the catalogue of an independent, personal exhibition of his works, now

almost exclusively known as “The Realist Manifesto.” 28 This was not, however, the original form of the text, which was first printed as a pamphlet for the journal Poesia,

in early February 1909. Indeed, the version printed in Le Figaro was forced to change or shorten particular portions.

See Marinetti’s Critical Writings, edited by Günter Berghaus, 16f. The most complete edition of the manifesto in its

various forms is de Villers edited volume Le premier manifeste du futurism: édition critique, which we will use

here. See p. 105.

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appeared on the front page of an influential right-wing newspaper—all abundantly clear signals

of a new and radical form of aesthetic manifesto which conscientiously blurred the line that had

presumed to separate it from the political manifesto. Beyond the fevered political tone of

Marinetti’s manifesto, the structure mirrored, to a certain extent, that of Marx and Engels’s

Manifest. It “was a bipartite document” (Rainey et al 44). The act of naming established by the

very title of the text—this that follows is Futurism—Marinetti then narrates, as was evident from

the original title given to the text before its edited reprinting on the front page of Le Figaro: “La

fondation du Futurisme et son manifeste”29 (Premier manifeste 41). This text begins: “Nous

avions veillé toute la nuit, mes amis et moi…”30 (ibid). Here, from the very first word, we, the

performative act of founding is already shown as constative, as if the group had already been

founded. However, much like the specter of Communism, a group Nous has been introduced and

to a certain extent named under the banner of the work’s title, but it remains for this brief, initial

moment amorphous, a simple amalgamation of individuals, an indefinite Nous.

This amorphous nous had stayed up late into the night, or rather watched or held vigil over

the night as one would a corpse, the dual meaning of both veiller in French and vegliare in

Italian, only to be roused from the stasis of the night by “le premier soleil levant sur la terre!”31

(43). This figurative new day was made explicit: “Nous allons assister à la naissance du

Centaure…”32 (ibid). This centaur was in fact themselves, the Futurists, a hybrid of man and

machine. In their early morning joy ride, Marinetti had rolled his car into a mud– and slime-filled

ditch. “Oh! maternel fossé, à moitié plein d’une eau vaseuse! Fossé d’usine! J’ai savouré à pleine

bouche ta boue fortifiante! / Le visage masqué de la bonne boue des usines, pleine de scories de

29 “The Foundation of Futurism and its Manifesto” 30 “We had stayed up all night—my friends and I—…” (Rainey et al 49). 31 “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” (Rainey et al 49). 32 “We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur” (ibid)

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métal, de sueurs inutiles et de suie céleste, portant nos bras foulés en écharpe”33 (ibid). From the

watched-over night comes the new, exuberant dawn, and with it the new birth from the maternal

ditch, the now founded group. As with Marx and Engels’s Manifest, however, there is a

movement from amorphous nous to founded Nous, a performative birth of Futurism packaged as

a constative narrative. Indeed, Marinetti later highlights, as the narrative frame of the text returns

after its eleven theses, the performative function of that birth-narrative: “nous lançons ce

manifeste […], par laquel nous fondons aujourd’hui le Futurisme”34 (53, first emphasis mine).

That is, though we are given the allegorical figures of the new dawn and the new birth from the

maternal ditch, the constative, if highly stylized or outright fictitious, narrative of a group

(already) founded, it is in fact only the linguistic, performative act, the act of “launching this

manifesto” that in fact founds the group; once again the presentation of performative acts as

constative acts. This is taken even further for Marinetti’s text, which narrates the birth of

Futurism rather than its founding; an organic, natural, constative event rather than a more

evidently ideological, linguistic, performative act. Only after this performative act is

accomplished, though, disguised as constative, only after there exists a Nous-as-group, can

Marinetti write, indeed is allowed to write: “nous dictâmes nos premières volontés à tous les

hommes vivant de la terre:”35 (ibid), followed by the second section of the text, subtitled

“Manifeste du Futurisme,” the infamous eleven theses that outlined the programmatic views,

aims, and tendencies of the just now founded Futurism.

33 “Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your bracing slime! […/…]

Our faces covered with the good factory slime—a mix of metallic scum, useless sweat, heavenly soot—our arms

bruised and bandaged” (Rainey et al 50f, translation slightly modified). This section was edited in its publication in

Le Figaro. Its full version adds: “J’ai savouré à pleine bouche ta boue fortifiante qui me rappelle la sainte mamelle

noire de ma nourrice soudanaise!” (45). [“I gulped down your bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black

breast of my Sudanese nurse” (Rainey 50).] 34 “we launch this manifesto […], by which we found today Futurism” 35 “we have dictated our first intentions to all the living men of the earth:” (Rainey et al 51).

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There is then, something of an uneasy tension between the act of founding and the act of

manifesting. For Derrida, the first is “à l’instant où il [le « bon peuple »] s’invente une identité

signante”36 (Otobiographies 26), that is when the author, the signatory grants herself the required

authority to manifest, to sign, to write on behalf of the institution, the very institution which that

signature, that writing will found. The manifesto proper of the programmatic dictation of first

intentions, of views, aims, and tendencies, necessarily requires an already founded institution for

whom that program applies. As Marjorie Perloff summarized with Marinetti’s text: “[W]hen the

eleven ‘theses’ that follow in the body of the manifesto are placed within the narrative frame,

their ‘validity’ has already […] been established” (Futurist Moment 86). That is, Marinetti

prefaced Futurism’s programmatic theses with the narrative of the foundation of Futurism as a

fait accompli, before the first intention was, or indeed could be written. This, however, is less a

simple dichotomy between a necessarily prefatory act of founding only then to be followed by a

programmatic act of manifesting. The consistent confusion of the performative act of founding as

a constative act blurs any potential paratextual barrier between founding and manifesto, as

implied by Marinetti’s title. Rather, every utterance of a manifesto carries with it some act of

founding; an amount of invented authority on behalf of an as-yet not fully founded group in

order to found, further cement, clarify, and demarcate, which is to say simultaneously manifest,

that same group. Rather than the constative, singular, past fact that it so often purports to be, the

act of founding requires something of a continual series of reaffirmations throughout the text;

reaffirmations only authorized by what it means to reaffirm, the symbiosis of Derrida’s fabulous

retroactivity. It is precisely this symbiotic mechanism, this retroactive complex of performative

as constative, of founding and manifesting at the heart of the genre of manifestos, and

36 “at the moment at which they invent for themselves a signing identity”

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particularly as it is formed in Marinetti’s manifesto as a narrativized dawn and birth, listed

intentions, etc., that Dadaist praxis takes as the target of their own parodic manifestos.

While we focused in the previous chapter on Ball’s “Eröffnungs– Manifest” as primarily

concerned with the word dada and its use in the act of naming, Ball’s text also performs an

enigmatic act of founding. Rather than recount one of the multiple narratives of the act of

naming and its importance to the act of founding, or some scene of Dadaist birth, the text begins

simply as a string of direct constatives: “Dada ist eine neue Kunstrichtung. Das kann man daran

erkennen, dass bisher niemand etwas davon wusste und morgen ganz Zuerich davon reden wird.

Dada stammt aus dem Lexikon. Es ist furchtbar einfach.”37 (Zinn 12). Here, Ball seems to imply

that this particular evening, the first public Dada soirée at the Waag Hall in Zürich on 14 July

1916, indeed the particular moment of his speech, “Indem man Dada sagt”38 (ibid), is the very

act of founding of Dada as movement. Beyond the difficulties of the name itself, which Ball

recognizes, even highlights in the text, Ball begins to undercut the seriousness of his initial act.

He continues: “Nur ein Wort und das Wort als Bewegung. Es ist einfach furchtbar. Wenn man

eine Kunstrichtung daraus macht, muss das bedeuten, man will Komplikationen wegnehmen”39

(ibid). In a surprisingly candid anastrophe, Ball inverts his initial description of the word dada as

“terribly simple” to describe the utilization of the word as a movement, which is to say not

merely the act of naming but the act of founding a movement itself, as “simply terrible.” Rather

than confront or clarify complications, this act of founding, to make an art movement from a

word, merely removes them, hides them, and thereby leaves only simple, constative statements

like the very one that opens Ball’s manifesto: “Dada is a new tendency in art.” Ball’s manifesto

37 “Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and

tomorrow everyone in Zürich will be talking about it […]” (Flight 220). 38 “By saying dada” (ibid). 39 “Just a word and the word a movement. It is simply terrible. To make an art movement of it must means that one

wants to remove complications.”

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functions then as something of a self-contradiction, a text ostensibly meant to function as an act

of founding which argues against that very act.

As Ball would write in his diary, his was a text that as “das erste Manifest einer neu

gegründeten Sache die Sache selbst […] widerrief”40 (Flucht 109). While Ball was

unequivocally critical, in both his diary and his manifesto, of Dada as movement, his manifesto’s

performance of the act of founding and its subsequent denunciation of that very same

performative act indicates that Ball’s true target was perhaps less the founded Dada than the act

of founding itself. Ball further exacerbates these initial confusions of the act of founding with his

complex relation to the supposed art-movement that he may or may not have just founded. He

writes later: “Mein Manifest beim ersten öffentlichen Dada-Abend (im Zunfthaus Waag) war

eine kaum verhüllte Absage an die Freunde. Sie haben’s auch so gefunden”41 (ibid). That is, not

only had the text itself undercut its own act of founding, but had simultaneously served to sever

Ball from any authority as founder or representative member that would allow him to perform it.

“By the time he read his first Dada manifesto […] he was ‘no longer’ a Dadaist” (White 3).

Indeed, soon after the performance at the Waag Hall, Ball and Emmy Hennings left Zürich for a

series of performances at hotels along the Lake Lucerne, eventually living on the Swiss banks of

Lake Maggiore in Vira-Magadino, later Ascona, and only occasionally corresponding with the

Dadaists he left behind in Zürich.42 Dadaist performance of an act of founding was off to a

resolutely self-parodical, and therefore infelicitous start. In fact, wholly fictional and highly

parodic foundings abound throughout Dadaist manifestos.

40 “the first manifesto of a newly founded cause refutes the cause itself” (Flight 73, translation modified). 41 “My manifesto on the first public dada evening (in the Waag Hall) was a thinly disguised break with friends. They

felt so too” (ibid). 42 Ball wrote: “Wenn die Dinge erschöpft sind, kann ich nicht länger dabei [bei den Dadaisten] verweilen” (Flucht

109f). [“When things are finished, I cannot spend any more time with them [the Dadaists]” (Flight 73).

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Raoul Hausmann’s “Tretet dada bei” [“Join Dada”] founds a fictional club (Club Dada), to

which one can purchase varying levels of membership with varying levels of benefits, and his

“Legen Sie ihr Geld in dada an” [“Invest in dada”], founds a fictional bank office (Zentralamt),

in which one can invest their money.43 Both of these fictional organizations recur regularly

through Der Dada, functioning almost as inter-textual characters. That is, the strongest moments

of foundation within many Dadaist manifestos are not the acts of founding Dada, almost wholly

ignored, but rather of fictional entities, at best fictionally Dada-adjacent.44 Dadaist’s series of

fictional foundings of financial, economic, political, and intellectual groups or clubs can be seen

as ironic parodies of the political and historical conditions at the time, namely the flood of

foundings necessary in the wake of World War I, the unsuccessful 1918/19 German Revolution,

and the subsequent founding of the Weimar Republic. Hausmann’s text “Tretet dada bei” [“Join

Dada”] highlights this seemingly ubiquitous series of foundings, allegiances, and memberships:

“[Wir haben] uns entschlossen, über dem esoterischen Club Dada einen exoterischen Club mit

gesellschaftlichem Zusammenhang herauszubilden”45 (Texte I.85). This social relevance,

however, turned out to be infinite. Everyone was already a potential member of the club, the

exoteric club’s connections to, and cohesion with society so radicalized that to be a member of

society makes you a member of Club Dada and vice versa.46 Club Dada was society, and to

found the former consisted in nothing other than adding an exceedingly complex name to the

43 See Texte I.85 and Der Dada I.7, respectively. 44 Without question, the most thorough primary account of the founding of Dada would be Richard Heulsenbeck’s

“Erste Dadarede in Deutschland” [“First Dada Lecture in Germany”] (Dada Almanach 140; Dada Almanac 110).

This text is, however, far from a manifesto, and this performance, a reading at an Expressionist soirée in Berlin,

meant to lay out the history of the founding rather than function as an act of founding itself. This historical

viewpoint of a supposed founding is also discussed in Raoul Hausmann’s “Dada empört sich, regt sich, und stirbt in

Berlin” [“Dada Rebels, Wells Up, and Dies in Berlin”] and “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?” [“What does

Dadaism Want in Europe?”], reprinted in Bergius & Riha 3-12 and Texte I.94-100, respectively. 45 “For this reason we have decided to build upon the esoteric Dadaist club an exoteric Dadaist club with social

relevance” (ibid). 46 See Texte I.85.

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former. However, most Dadaist manifestos focused their ironic distaste on the more recent trend

of founding a literary or aesthetic movement, perhaps nowhere more incisively actualized than in

the Dadaist manifestos of Tristan Tzara, for whom Hans Richter noted “war die Form des

Manifests, der aggressiven Polemik, wie geschaffen”47 (DK 32).

In the texts published as the Sept Manifestes by Tzara,48 there is but one brief mention of

some historical founding of Dada in his masterpiece “Manifeste dada 1918.” “Ainsi naiquit

DADA…” with the attached footnote: “En 1916 dans le Cabaret Voltaire à Zurich”49 (OC

I.361). Tzara, however, immediately complicates this, as the quote continues “d’un besoin

d’indépendance, de méfiance envers la commaunité”50 (ibid). Already, a series of complications

of the act of founding arise: repetition of manifestos and therefore foundings; ironic allusion to

the manifestos of earlier movements, particularly Futurism, in this case Marinetti’s metaphor of a

new birth of his movement; and perhaps most importantly, a self-paradoxical act of founding

which is based upon the very distrust of foundings themselves. Tzara repeats this ironic

complication of the act of founding, coupled with a renewal of the radical deictic ambiguity of

the word dada, in an note appended for the manifesto’s publication in the third issue of Dada:

“Pour introduire l’idée de folie passagère en mal de scandale et de publicité d’un « isme »

nouveau — si banal, avec le manque de sérieux inné à ces sortes de manifestations, les

journalistes nommèrent Dadaïsme ce que l’intensité d’un art nouveau leur rendit impossible

47 “The aggressive, polemical manifesto was a literary genre which suited Tzara perfectly” (DA 33). It was not

simply the polemics, however, that drew Tzara to the manifesto, but rather his seeming acumen in regards to the

theory of manifestos themselves. As Leah Dickerman noted: “Despite his fame, Tzara’s role as a theoretician of

Dada remains underutilized” (“Dada Gambits” 10). 48 These seven manifestos were originally published as Sept manifestes dada in 1921, and Tzara’s Lampisteries were

added in 1963. Reprinted in OC I.355-424. See also OC I.694 for a summary of the publishing history of these

manifestos. Translated into English as Seven Manifestos and Lampisteries, hereafter abbreviated SML. 49 “Thus DADA was born” ; “In 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich” (SML 5). 50 “out of a need for independence, out of a mistrust for the community” (ibid).

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compréhension et puissance de s’élever à l’abstraction”51 (OC I.699f.). Tzara mocks the

seriousness of previous manifestos, while he simultaneously undercuts the initial movement of

the act of foundation, in his apparent concession of the act of naming to journalists in a

paratextual note to its publication at least 4 months after its initial performance in July 1918.

These journalists are unable to understand Dada, to the extent that they name Dada

everything that they don’t understand. The very idea of naming is derided as something that

lowly journalists attempt, poorly, and ultimately in the case of Dada, unnecessarily. Tzara here

ties this distaste for the act of founding, those who feel compelled to perform this act, and those,

journalists, who compulsively attempt to situate artists and/or their works within such a context,

with the very word dada itself. Here, the word dada functions as a litmus test to determine who in

fact requires this apparatus of naming, founding, and categorization. “[L]a magie d’une parole

(DADA) les [journalistes] ayant mis (par sa simplicité de ne rien signifier), veaux devant la porte

d’un monde présent”52 (OC I.700). The word/work dada was therefore not merely a signifier

utilized to undermine signification, but in its transition to new contexts within manifestos and

their acts of founding, simultaneously functioned as a self-parodic basis for the performance of

that act, which signaled the irony inherent within any so-called Dadaist founding. Indeed, it

became a label that did little other than identify those who used the label falsely, which is to say

used it as label, which for Tzara was journalists.53 Those who didn’t, who eschewed labels and

51 “To introduce the idea of a temporary folly, lacking the scandal and publicity of a new ‘–ism’ — so banal with a

lack of innate seriousness to these kinds of manifestations, journalists named Dadaism that intensity of a new art

which made comprehension and the power to rise to abstraction impossible for them.” 52 “The magic of a word (DADA) having put them [journalists] (by its simplicity of not signifying anything), calves

before the door of an actual world.” 53 From this vantage point, we can reexamine the polemic between Tzara and Huelsenback regarding the

“discovery” of the word dada (see above, page 76n110). That is, we can imagine Tzara of Huelsenbeck as less

concerned with having actually discovered the word than he was concerned with Huelsenbeck presuming to have

actually discovered it, to have the authority or ability to perform the act of founding, what Tzara seemed determined

to challenge, and vice versa.

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foundings, were given the possibility to view the world as it was, unlabeled, undivided, in all its

chaos. All of which is to say, this act of founding that prefaces manifestos, if not textually as in

Marx’s and Marinetti’s texts then necessarily as the formation of the institution that manifests,

appears to be anathema to Dadaist praxis itself.

As we’ve seen, the theses that comprise the “Manifesto of Futurism” had to some extent

already been validated by the narrative act of founding Futurism that immediately preceded it,

that gives it a slightly, though critically, amorphous group to solidify and champion. Perloff

clarifies this validation: “the theses [of Marinetti’s manifesto] are not enumerated until the

narrative has already presented them in action” (89). This is not merely the violence, speed, or

technology that the theses promote on the back of a narrative that had already involved all three,

but rather more simply, the fact that the theses did not simply self-generate from the ether but are

supported, literally framed within the context of a founded and defined institution. These theses

presented by someone, not simply the author of these particular statements, but rather by the

spokesperson of the founded group. This began with the text’s first word. “Marinetti’s selfhood

is subordinated to the communal ‘we’ (the first word of the manifesto)”54 (87). Indeed,

Marinetti’s hand written manuscript of the text, makes this subordination manifest, the initial

words of the text as “J’avais veillé toute la nuit…”55 only to be crossed out and replaced with the

Nous that would include his friends (Premier manifeste 40f). This switch, however, from Je [I] to

Nous [We] is not only one from the individual to the group or institution, but also the switch

from an individual opinion or affinity towards the constitution of a group’s ideological stances.

54 Here, it is important to note that Perloff refers to the whole text, which begins “We had stayed up all night…”

though it also applies to the first word of the eleven theses which immediately follow the subtitle “Manifeste du

Futurism” and begin “Nous voulons chanter…” (Premier manifeste 46f). [“We intend to sing…”] Indeed, just as in

the narrative founding, here the original hand-written manuscript originally began differently, “L’amour du danger”

(47) [“The love of danger”], only to be crossed out by Marinetti and the Nous prominently inserted into the premier

position. 55 “I had stayed up all night…”

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Nous then is the attempt to create an internally harmonic association, distinct from other

associations, groups, or institutions. Neither this required We, nor its regular presentation as

natural and constative, is particularly unique to Marinetti’s text but rather, as Janet Lyon strongly

argues in her Manifestoes (23ff.), We is elemental to both foundings and manifestos as such.

Unlike Marx and Engels’s association of communists in London (MEW IV.461), or

Marinetti’s Nous, Dadaist manifestos not only refuse to define and therefore delineate the

radically deictic word dada, but actively avoid founding the conceptual group Dada as a We, as a

group. The manifesto, which “[a]t its height, […] is the deictic genre par excellence: LOOK! it

says. NOW! HERE!” (Caws xx), is further radicalized by Dadaists in their refusal of any

definitional WE! In place of the truly deictic dada. The first of Tzara’s Sept Manifestes,

“Manifeste de monsieur Antipyrine,”56 utilizes so-called We-speak, the discourse of both the

founding and founded institution as well as its authorized and authorial spokesperson, more than

any other Dadaist manifesto, though once again in self-contradictory fashion: “DADA n’existe

pour personne et nous voulons que tout le monde comprenne cela”57 (OC I.357). If DADA exists

for no one, and it is imperative that everyone know that fact, then DADA exists, indeed has

paradoxically been formed for everyone; again a founding that radically confuses the act of

founding itself. Here, Tzara’s use of nous [we] loses any institutional power, stuck between no

one and everyone it has nowhere to expand, no way to differentiate itself from other groups of

nous, but rather simultaneously and paradoxically becomes that same no one and everyone rather

than any potential DADA distinct from either. While his 1916 “Antipyrine” serves as a proto-

manifesto for his far more successful and ultimately radicalized second, “Manifeste dada 1918,”

56 “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto.” This manifesto was originally read at the Waag Hall on the 14 July 1916, the

same day that Ball gave his “Eröffnungs– Manifest” 57 “DADA doesn’t exist for anyone, and we want everyone to understand this” (SML 1). As we will see below, this

manifesto’s original context as an element of a larger performed theatrical piece at the first Dada soirée in 1916

further complicates the proto-manifesto’s use of We-speak.

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the latter’s We-speak begins to make its non-localization between, and as no one and everyone

explicit. “Ainsi naquit DADA d’un besoin d’indépendance, de méfiance envers la communauté.

Ceux qui appartiennent à nous gardent leur liberté”58 (OC I.361). Here again, nous no longer

functions as it is often imagined in light of the sentence that precedes it. Nous is no longer the

group unified by common conviction or intension. Rather, this We is nothing more than a

mathematical addition of wholly independent individuals, neither association nor institution,

group nor gang.

Tzara goes still further: “je parle toujours de moi […] je n’ai pas le droit d’entraîner d’autres

dans mon fleuve, je n’oblige personne à me suivre”59 (ibid). Tzara not only cedes any act of

founding a group, but preemptively cedes any authority that membership in any potential group

should give, here most obviously, the authority to write a foundational manifesto. With such

sacred independence, the few moments in which Tzara implicitly or explicitly utilizes the word

nous in his manifestos, it is signaled as something other than an idealized manifesto-We, but

rather an I-centered We. Émile Benveniste describes this as “non pas une multiplication d’objets

identiques main une jonction entre « je » et le « non-je » […] où les composantes ne s’équivalent

pas : dans « nous », c’est toujours « je » qui prédomine puisqu’il n’y a de « nous » qu’à partir de

« je »”60 (Problèmes 233). The performance of any act of Dada’s founding then becomes a

purposeful and significant complication of the constitution of an I-centered We, of the creation

of a spokesperson of a group created by that same spokesperson. Dadaist manifestos appear to

further confuse and contort, as Lyon put it, the “pronomial slight of hand, whereby ‘we’

58 “Thus DADA was born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community. People who join us

keep their freedom” (SML 5). 59 “I always speak about myself […] I have no right to drag others in my wake, I’m not compelling anyone to follow

me” (SML 5). 60 “not a multiplication of identical objects but a junction between ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’ […] whose components are not

equivalent: in ‘we’ it is always ‘I’ which predominates since there cannot be ‘we’ except by starting with ‘I’”

(Problems 202).

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disguises the metonymic function of the small group of composite ‘I’s who claim to speak for a

whole” (26). This is then something of a double confusion, of both the constitution of a group

and the seizure of authority to speak on behalf of that group. For Pierre Bourdieu, this is the

confusion of Austinian performativity.61

In his Ce que parler veut dire,62 Bourdieu recontextualizes Benveniste and Lyon’s position,

“c’est–à–dire dans l’alchemie de la représentation (aux differents sense du terme) par laquelle le

représentant fait le group qui le fait”63 (101), into the question of the performative speech act,

where one can “do things with words,” so long as, according to J.L. Austin, there “exist[s] an

accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include

the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances” (14). Bourdieu

clarifies, however, to what precisely this series of “certain”s refers: “[L]e porte-parol autorisé ne

put agir par les mots sur d’autres agents et, par l’intermédiaire de leur travail, sur les choses

mêmes, que parce que sa parole concentre le capital symbolique accumulé par le groupe qui l’a

mandate et dont il est le fondé de pouvoir”64 (Ce que parler 107-09). For the revolutionary

manifesto that speaks against the power of the status quo, loosely the manifesto after the

Manifest, its speech is unauthorized and its performance therefore always already infelicitous

until and unless the group, and therefore its symbolic capital and authority, are created and

further reinforced by the spokesperson of that same group, which is to say, the author of the

revolutionary manifesto herself. The act of founding that, through Derrida’s fabulous

61 Here, of course, we mean the theory outlined in J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. As Michael Puchner

notes: “If any genre attempts to do things with words, it is the genre of the manifesto” (Screeching 120). 62 That Which Speaking Means to Say. Many but not all essays from this collection are translated in Language and

Symbolic Power. 63 “i.e. in the alchemy of representation (in the different senses of the term) through which the representative creates

the group which creates him” (Language 106). 64 “[T]he authorized spokesperson is only able to use words to act on other agents and, through their action, on

things themselves, because his speech concentrates within it the accumulated symbolic capital of the group which

has delegated him and of which he is the authorized representative” (Language 109-11).

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retroactivity, precedes and pre-validates an institution and the ability of a spokesperson or

representative to speak on that institution’s behalf, is therefore something of a dual-level

metalepsis.65 Not only does the author of the manifesto, I, create the We of the founding, the We

on whose behalf the author-I presumes to speak throughout that manifesto, but also creates the

authority for that speech, the accumulated symbolic capital of that just–, or simultaneously-

founded We, an authority immediately assumed by the author-I in the performance of writing the

manifesto, of speaking on the institution’s behalf. This peculiar performative creation and

presumption of a future authority to speak on its own behalf in the present is what Martin

Puchner calls theatricality.

65 This line of argument coincides with Paul de Man’s discussion of metalepsis in his reading of Nietzsche’s Der

Wille zur Macht. See de Man’s Allegories of Reading 107f.

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Theatricality

This concept of theatricality comes from, but is not necessarily or exclusively bound to the

theater. As Ethel Matala de Mazza and Clemens Pornschlegel summarize: “Theatralität ist […]

zu verstehen als eine Mimesis, die sich selbst als Mimesis öffentlich zu erkennen gibt”66 (14).

While this mode of discourse, then, is most evident in the context of a piece of theater, played by

actors on a stage before an audience, which fully understands that they are viewing a piece of

theater, it is not exclusively found there, “sondern sie [die Theatralität] ist überall dort wirksam,

wo Zeichen in ihrer Abständigkeit von der Wirklichkeit als Zeichen ausgestellt werden und ihr

eigenes Zeichen-Sein exponieren: Im Theater […] aber ebenso in der Literatur, die sich als

szenisch dargebotene Rede begreifen läßt”67 (ibid). For a genre such as the manifesto, and

perhaps more specifically the act of founding on which it is based, an act that perpetually

requires the auto-creation of its own foundation, its own discursive stage or soapbox from, and

for which it can and is allowed to speak, theatricality plays a prerequisite and essential role.

However, as a text that means to do things with words, to found an institution or association with

the linguistic performance of the act of founding, it faces an Austinain predicament. In his theory

of performative speech acts, J.L. Austin infamously excluded such theatrical forms of speech

from his investigation: “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow

or void if said by an actor of the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (22),

which is to say that the theatrical performative is necessarily unhappy, infelicitous. After all,

Austin would argue, the actors who play Romeo and Juliet did not really get married any more

66 “Theatricality is […] to be understood as a mimesis, which reveals itself publicly as a mimesis.” 67 “Rather, it [theatricality] is effective everywhere that signs are exhibited in their distantiation from the reality as

signs and expose their own sign-being: In the theater [...] but also in literature that can be understood as a formally

presented speech.” See as well, Gerhard Neumann’s “Einleitung” to Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der

Literaturwissenschaft, esp. 12ff.

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than the actors really died. Those actors, however, assumed the authority to play such roles in a

way not entirely dissimilar to that of the priests, magistrates, or judges, all of whom assumed the

authority given to them by their audience. Theatricality, then, is something of the initial

condition, or perhaps as Austin might put it the original sin, of all performative speech acts; a

speaker’s assumption of authority that is created with, and simultaneously utilized within the

initiation of any performative speech act.68

Austin ends his lecture series on the performative speech act with the hope that he has “been

sorting out a bit the way things have already begun to go and are going with increasing

momentum in some parts of philosophy, rather than proclaiming an individual manifesto” (163).

Austin hopes, with his lectures, to describe rather than create, to make a constative rather than

performative statement, an explanation rather than a manifesto, “a genre that gives the

appearance of being at once both word and deed” (Lyon 14). The successful manifesto, which at

least preliminarily is to say the happy or felicitous performance of founding an institution,

explicating its intentions, and changing the world with that explication, requires an initial boost

of theatricality that simultaneously creates the necessary authority to begin to speak and is the

speech itself, only to eventually overcome that “pronomial slight of hand” and the We which is

no longer a performance, no longer an ongoing constitution, but an institution founded, the

manifesto’s authority cemented. Althusser’s incisive lecture of The Prince highlighted precisely

this dynamic, something of Derrida’s fabulous retroactivity as utilized specifically in the

manifesto.

68 This is a condensed version of Bourdieu’s argument in “Le langage autorisé: les conditions sociales de l’efficacité

du discours rituel” in Ce que parler veut dire, 103-119, translated as “Authorized Language” in Language and

Symbolic Power, 107-115. For this reason, Puchner begins to abandon Austin’s theory for that of Kenneth Burke’s

dramatism. See Poetry of the Revolution 24ff.

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Althusser notes Machiavelli’s use of this authorial simultaneity. “Il traite à son tour, et en

même temps, son propre texte comme un moyen, […] un moyen dans le combat qu’il annonce et

engage”69 (Écrits phil II.66). Althusser continues: “[C]’est que le lieu fixé par Machiavel pour

son text, le lieu de son point de vue, n’est pas le Prince, qui est pourtant déterminé comme le

‘sujet’ de la practique politique décisive, mais le peuple”70 (67). That is, Machiavelli had to

speak as though he were authorized, as though the surely soon-to-be new Prince of the people,

perhaps upon reading the manifesto, will have had authorized him to speak on his behalf against

the old Prince, the future ancien régime, from a place initially without power: the people.

Moreover, the manifesto itself meant to hasten that future. As Marx had infamously put it: “Die

Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu

verändern”71 (MEW III.7). Some two years later, Marx took his own advice with the Manifest.

While the Manifest was published rather than performed, Marx and Engels were not demure in

highlighting the theatricality of their text, in many ways framing their act of founding within the

context of the most explicit theatricality, the theater itself.72 Derrida, for example, links the

Gespenst that opens the Manifest, “ce premier nom [qui] ouvre donc le première scène du

premier acte”73 (Spectres 22), to that of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose appearance

suddenly opens the first scene of the first act of Shakespeare’s play. The Specter of Communism

takes on “L’anticipation […] à la fois impatiente, angoissée et fascinée cela, la chose (this thing)

69 “Machiavelli… treats his own text, in its turn and at the same time, as one of those means, making it serve as a

means in the struggle he announces and engages” (Machiavelli 23). 70 “[T]he place fixed upon by Machiavelli for his text, the place of his viewpoint, is not the Prince, who is

nevertheless determined as the ‘subject’ of the decisive political practice, but the people” (24). 71 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it” (MECW

V.5; 8; 9). 72 For an extensive overview of the Manifest and theater, specifically melodrama, see Elisabeth Anker’s “The

Manifesto in a Late-Capitalist Era: Melancholy and Melodrama.” 73 “this first noun [that] opens, then, the first scene of the first act” (Specters 2)

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va finir par arriver. Le revenant va venir. Il ne saurait tarder”74 (ibid). Here Derrida immediately

ties the Manifest to the theater (of Hamlet) and its explicit theatricality (of Hamlet’s anticipated

authorization for revenge in the name of his father’s Ghost). As Werner Hamacher summarizes

it: “Im »Manifest«, so proklamiert dies »Manifest« selber, manifestiert sich die Partei und damit

die Zukunft. Ihr Versprechen, ihr performativer Akt, ist also im Marx’schen Text als instantane

Setzung dessen inszeniert, was noch nicht – und vielleicht niemals – gegenwärtig ist”75

(“Lingua” 93, my emphasis). In this moment of anticipation, however, Marx and Engels assume

the authority to act out, as if on stage, the formation of the Communist Party.

Just as any revolutionary manifesto must encounter the Manifest, so too can we then trace

their encounters with theatricality. Perhaps most explicitly, a great majority of revolutionary,

especially avant-garde, manifestos were literally performed on stage, in a theater. With the series

of Futurist serate [evening performances] in early 1910, for instance, the implicit theatricality,

the anticipated promise, of the manifestos became their explicit theatrical performances of “The

Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (Trieste, 12 January and Milan, 15 February) and the

“Manifesto of Futurist Painters” (Turin, 8 March).76 While, these readings were often of pre-

published materials surrounding an art movement founded some time earlier, readings by

Armando Mazza and Umberto Boccioni, respectively, were met with shouts, cheers, and all too

often in later readings, with violence, all of which ultimately served as a theatrical framework for

Dadaists to explore, expand, confront, confuse, and corrupt. Theatrical performance was

74 “The anticipation […] at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing (‘this thing’) will end up coming.

The revenant is going to come. It won’t be long” (ibid). The prologue of the Manifest, of course, ends with the call

to end this anticipation, to incarnate this Gespenst into the manifesto of an actual political party. Poor Hamlet must

wait until scene five of act one. 75 “In the Manifesto, as this ‘manifesto’ itself proclaims, the party manifests itself and thereby the future. Its

promise, its performative act, is thus staged in the text as the instantaneous positing of what is not yet - and perhaps

never will be - present” (“Lingua” [en] 190, my emphasis) 76 For a brief history of this series of Futurist serate as scenes of performance, including the performances of

manifestos, see Rainey 9f.

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certainly imbued into Dadaist praxis from the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire. While its co-

founder, Hugo Ball, had gained considerable theatrical experience in Berlin, Plauen, and

Munich,77 he and his partner Emmy Hennings opted for their unique “alternative to the bourgeois

theatre, […] political, rough, […] a place for satire, spontaneity, and brevity” (“Screeching”

125).78 While the Cabaret served its role as a place for “loud, screeching direct speech” (ibid), as

a brash avant-garde extension of the theater, so too did it function as it had since antiquity, as a

singularly international place, and more specifically one of the asylum seeker,79 as the Zürich

Dadaists often described themselves.80 Similarly, the Manifest itself staked its claim to a radical

internationality, a place to bring together the wandering ghosts of Communism.81 Whether

performed in the Cabaret or at various Dada soirées in Zürich and Paris, Tristan Tzara’s Sept

Manifestes, provide perhaps the most theoretically incisive model of Dadaist theatricality.82

Theatricality played a foundational and decisive role in Tzara’s manifestos. This is perhaps

nowhere more apparent than the opening Dadaist soirée in Zürich’s Waag Hall on Bastille Day.

In his Chronique Zurichoise, Tzara described the night: “(Musique, danses, Théories,

Manifestes, poèmes, tableaux, costumes, masques) / Devant une foule compacte, Tzara

77 See Bähr’s Die Funktion des Theaters im Leben Hugo Balls and Berghaus’s “Dada Theater.” 78 For a more thorough overview of the importance of the Cabaret to Zürich Dada, see Harold Segel’s Turn of the

Century Cabaret, esp. Chapter 7 and Günter Berghaus’s Avant-Garde Performance, esp. Chapter 2. 79 See, for instance, Christian Traulsen’s Das sakrale Asyl in der Alten Welt or Gerhard Ute’s Nomadische

Bewegungen und die Symbolik der Krise and “Literarische Transit-Räume” The list of internationalist gestures

within Dadaist manifestos is far too long to list here. For a pointed example, however, see Picabia’s “Manifeste

cannibale dada.” For a larger overview, see Demos’s “Circulations Dada.” 80 As Ball wrote in his “Eröffnungs– Manifest”: “die Gastfreundschaft der Schweiz ist über alles zu schätzen” (Zinn

12). [“The hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated” (Flight 221). 81 In the prologue of the Manifest, Marx and Engels outline their ambitious translation program in order to broaden

its international reach. “Zu diesem Zweck haben sich Kommunisten der verschiedensten Nationalität in London

versammelt und das folgenden Manifest entworfen, das in englischer, französischer, deutscher, italienischer,

flämischer und dänischer Sprache veröffentlich wird” (MEW IV.461). [“To this end, Communists of various

nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English,

French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages” (MECW VI.481).] For an overview of the many

intersections between internationality, theatricality, and Dadaist manifestos, if occasionally at odds with our

observations here, see Puchner’s Poetry 143-153. 82 For a brief summary of the initial performances of each manifesto, see OC I.699-704; SML 115.

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manifeste, nous voulons nous voulons nous voulons pisser en couleurs divers, Huelsenbeck

manifeste, Ball manifeste, Arp Erklärung…”83 (OC I.562f.). Tzara plays on the duality of the

French manifeste, both text and performance, noun and verb, “manifesto” and “manifest.” Indeed

the scatological interjection mirrors that of his own manifesto from that night, the first of Tzara’s

infamous seven manifestos, “Manifeste de Monsieur Antipyrine.”84 “[Dada] est tout de même de

la merde, mais nous voulons dorénavant chier en couleurs divers, pour orner le jardin zoologique

de l’art”85 (OC I.357). At the time of its initial performance, however, it was not quite considered

a manifesto as such, but rather to our Austinian chagrin a soliloquy on stage given by the

character named “Tristan Tzara” within the play La première aventure céléste de Mr. Antipyrine,

performed by the author Tristan Tzara.86 Of course, the author “Tristan Tzara” was already a

character of Samuel Rosenstock, whose pseudonym “Tristan Tzara” famously played on the

Romanian trist en ţară, translated as sad in country.87 Here the theatricality of the manifesto is

stretched well beyond the Austinian breaking point; a soliloquy within a so-called stage play

performed by a character synonymous with, but not equivalent to, the pseudonym of the author

of the speech act. That is, the text of the manifesto is nested in the center of a concentric series of

theaters, from which the text appears to have no intention to be anything but theatrical.

The text and the author appear to playfully wallow in this theatricality, a vortex of ever

increasing auto-generated theatrical authority at the expense of an ever-diminishing potential

83 “(Music, dances, theories, manifestos, poems, paintings, costumes, masks) / In the presence of a compact crowd,

Tzara manifests, we want we want we want to piss diverse colors. Huelsenbeck manifests, Ball manifests, Arp

declares.” 84 OC I.357-58, translated into English as “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto” in SML 1-2. 85 “[Dada] is still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art” (SML 1). 86 The First Celestial Adventure of Monsieur Antipyrine. Originally printed, with wood engravings by Marcel Janco,

as a pamphlet in 1916, and reproduced in OC I.75-84. 87 For a discussion of the possible reasons behind the pseudonym, whether simple boredom or as a protest against

the growing anti-Semitism in turn-of-the-century Romania, see Sandqvist 125. Though this pseudonym was chosen

before his relocation to Zürich and association with Dada, it suits their anti-nationalist rhetoric particularly well.

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performative force, until any pretension towards some future happy or felicitous performative act

of founding becomes moot. Indeed, the theatrical context reimagines any nous [we] within the

work as the play’s cast of characters rather than fellow, if unnamed, artists of some newly

founded movement.88 The listener/reader of Tzara’s text is then unsure of which character gives

this so-called manifesto: Samuel Rosenstock, Tristan Tzara, “Tristan Tzara,” or “Monsieur

Antipyrine.” To whom does this Nous refer? Who is its center? Is this text in fact trying to found

a Nous? Tzara continues to introduce theatrical characters to manifestos, most notably with

“Monsieur Aa” and his (and therefore presumably not Tzara’s?) text, “Manifeste de Monsieur

Aa, l’antiphilosophe” and “Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe nous envoie ce manifeste.”89 The

manifestos of Monsieurs “Antipyrine” and “Aa, the anti-philosopher,” for example, appear to be

unable to move beyond or break free from the overwhelming context of theatricality that they

initially set for themselves, unable or uninterested in escaping that theatricality, or rather in

seizing that theatrical authority in order to become a felicitous speech act. Just over two years

later, Tzara took something of a different, though parallel tack in regards to that authority.

Tzara performed his second and most well known manifesto, “Manifeste dada 1918,” on 23

July in the Miese Hall in Zurich,90 to be published later in the third edition of Dada. As Bourdieu

notes: “[T]ous les discours d’institution [sont] la parole officielle du porte-parole autorisé

s’exprimant en situation solennelle, avec une autorité qui a les mêmes limites que la délégation

88 In addition to the character “Tristan Tzara” characters include Mr. Bleubleu, Mr Cricri, La femme enceinte [The

Pregnant Woman], Pipi, Mr Antipyrine himself, among others. 89 “Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher” and “Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us This

Manifesto.” See OC I.371 & 375 respectively, SML 19 & 27. 90 Curiously, Henri Béhar’s note on the manifesto in Tzara’s Oeuvres Complètes reads: “Lu à Zurich (salle Meise) le

23 mars 1918” (I.699). [“Read in Zürich (Meise Hall) on March 23, 1918.”] Béhar appears to ascribe the July date to

the P.O., or “Pré-Original,” as it was found in its original printing in Dada III, before being placed in a larger

collected volume. To my knowledge, however, July has been accepted as the proper date of its performance.

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de l’institution”91 (Ce que parler 105). When Tzara then states in his “Manifeste dada 1918” that

“je parle toujours de moi”92 etc. (ibid), the regular use of je, I rather than nous or We-speak

leaves the listener/reader unsure as to on behalf of exactly which institution or on whose

authority Tzara speaks. Tzara ties this confusion to the act of writing a manifesto: “J’écris un

manifeste […] et je suis par principe contre les manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les

principes”93 (I.359f.). Tzara is indeed writing a manifesto, which as manifesto is necessarily the

founding of an institution, but is in principle against the very performance he purports to

implement. Tzara redoubles this already paradoxical speaking position with his further

paradoxically principled stand against principles. This final move, then, so radically confuses the

positions and relationships of authority between author, spokesperson, and institution that the

ultimate location of whatever authority generated in this uniquely absurd and self-contradictory

act of founding becomes somehow less clear than if it had never existed at all. In both the

manifesto’s performance and publication, however, these two delegations of authority remain

particularly extraneous for a so-called Dadaist manifesto, in that Tzara himself did little more

than create the institution Tzara, that coincided precisely and without difference with its sole

founder, Tzara, who acted as the sole organizer of what he called the “Soirée Tristan Tzara”94

and the sole editor of the third issue of the Dada literary review. That is to say, the limits of

authority given by the authorizing institution and the authority seized by the authorized

spokesperson were necessarily identical due to the redundancy of the institution and the

spokesperson as one and the same, indeed the only, person, Tristan Tzara. In other words, this is

91 “[A]ll discourses of institution [are] the official speech of the authorized spokesperson expressing himself in a

solemn situation, with an authority whose limits are identical with the extent of delegation by the institution”

(Language 109). 92 “I always speak about myself” (SML 5). 93 “I’m writing a manifesto […] and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles” (SML 3,

translation slightly modified). 94 See OC I.565

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the theatricality of one, the creation of authority by the founding author Tzara in order to speak

as spokesperson Tzara on behalf of institution Tzara, all of whom are and function as precisely

one and the same person. In this utilization of theatricality reserved for groups by an individual,

Tzara does not destroy, but destabilizes the position of the subject-speaker. Two further

manifestos extend this self-same theatrical confusion.

The fifth of Tzara’s seven manifestos is titled “Tristan Tzara.”95 A space most often reserved

for the name of the institution to be founded or its particular intentions, the title here immediately

complicates to confusion the relationship between author, spokesperson, and institution. The text

begins: “Regardez-moi bien! / Je suis idiot, je suis un farceur, je suis un fumiste. […] Je suis laid,

mon visage n’a pas d’expression, je suis petit. / Je suis comme vous tous!” to which he appends

the footnote “Je voulais me faire un peu de réclame”96 (OC I.373). This Moi/Je [Me/I] is staged

in such a way that it becomes uncanny, where the spectator is forced to confront and question

any authentic identity in the face of that identity’s forceful reaffirmation, exacerbated by its

radical self-deprecation. With a single breath, Tzara here identifies this Moi/Je, who may or may

not be either Tzara the author, spokesperson, or institution, with everyone while Moi/Je

simultaneously means to differentiate themselves from the masses through publicity. The text

continues: “DADA propose 2 solutions: / PLUS DE REGARDS! / PLUS DE PAROLES!” to

which Tzara again appends a footnote: “Plus de manifestes”97 (I.374). The imperative is then

personalized to the reader: “Ne regardez plus! / Ne parlez plus! / Car moi, caméléon changement

infiltration aux attitudes commodes – opinions multicolores pour toute occasion dimension et

prix – je fais le contraire de ce que je propose aux autres” to which Tzara appends his final

95 Reprinted in OC I.373-74. 96 “Have a good look at me! / I’m an idiot. I’m a practical joker. I’m a hoaxer. […] I’m ugly, my face has no

expression, I’m small. / I’m like all the rest of you!” ; “I wanted to give myself a bit of publicity” (SML 23). 97 “DADA suggests 2 solutions: / NO MORE LOOKS! / NO MORE WORDS!” ; “No more manifestos” (24).

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footnote: “Parfois”98 (ibid). The disorientation and destabilization overwhelms, embodied finally

in a multicolored speaker and subject superposition fit for every dimension or price.

As he wrote of manifestos and principles in 1918, so too here does Tzara write neither for nor

against, on no side, but rather for every occasion, simultaneously both, neither, and something

else all together. Tzara chides “DADA” for not always taking such liberty: “DADA introduit de

nouveaux points de vue, […] c’est porquoi je suis fâché avec Dada”99 (OC I.374). There should

be no new points of view, no new subject positions, for they should have always already have

been taken, as the radical chameleon Tzara, “Tristan Tzara,” and his pseudo-alternative to Dada,

“Aa” (“demandez partout la suppression des D”100 [ibid]) have. “Aa […] n’a pas besoin de

manifestes ni de livre d’adresses”101 (ibid); a so-called movement that has no need of points of

view to advance, nor members to advance them, nor audience to convince. In this way, the act of

founding the institution “Tristan Tzara” or “Aa” not only radically confronts and confuses the

concept of We, but actively questions the role of I/Me within any potential We, indeed even

when they are one and the same. This dynamic is similarly manifested in the last of Tzara’s

seven “Dada” manifestos, “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer.”102

As one might expect of a Futurist manifesto, this manifesto of feeble and bitter love is

composed of sixteen numbered sections. Seven of these sections, however, contain the

valediction “Tristan Tzara,” a type of signature of the section.103 While most valedictions usually

98 “Stop looking! / Stop talking! / For I, chameleon alteration infiltration with convenient attitudes—multicolored

opinions for every occasion size and price—I do the opposite of what I recommend to other people.” ; “Sometimes”

(25). 99 “DADA introduces new points of view […] That’s why I’ve quarreled with Dada” (ibid). Tzara used a similar

motif in his “Manifeste dada 1918”: “DADA—voilà un mot qui mène les idées à la chasse” (OC I.360). [“DADA—

voilà a word that leads ideas to the hunt…”] 100 “insist everywhere on the suppression of the Ds” (SML 25). 101 “Aa […] needs neither manifestos nor address books” (ibid) 102 OC I.377. “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” (SML 31) 103 This recalls, of course, Derrida’s question: “who signs and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act

which founds an institution?” See above, page 85.

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appear at the end of the text, Tzara places two of his seven in the middle of the sectional texts.

Added, then, to the questions of authority, foundation, and prolocution, is the question of what

precisely has been authorized by “Tristan Tzara.” What of the six without valediction or the post-

valediction text within a section? Tzara radically confuses the authority of a prolocutor, a

spokesperson who takes on, has always already take on every point of view, every subject

position. These confusions are so radical that any potential audience/subject position is unable to

find footing as a single position. That is, when an institution, spokesperson, author, individual, or

some unknown amalgamation of all four appears to be paradoxically for and against something

and neither all simultaneously, any potential audience member is denied a stable apparatus, in

relation to which their own subject position is formed, let alone assumed. This radical confusion

is precisely what the theatricality of the act of founding is meant to overcome, to create in

retrospect the authority necessary to solidify the foundation from which a manifesto is able to

take position. Dadaists appear gleeful in their contortion and confusion of this theatricality,

where the foundation becomes theatrical quicksand. Their refusal to leave the confines of

prefatory theatricality raises the question as to whether so-called Dadaist manifestos want to do

anything as a manifesto in the world outside of the theater.

A manifesto’s theatricality is simultaneously an initial injection of necessary authority and an

ultimate hurdle to overcome and leave behind once that authority has been seized in order to

truly perform, in the Austinian sense, to create the social conditions necessary for its own

performative speech acts to be felicitous. That is, the theatricality of the act of founding is

necessary for that founding, but must immediately be discarded, abandoned, renounced once the

theatrical performance of the act of founding is solidified into a stable constative of a founded

institution, in order for that institution to move off the stage, out of the theater and soliloquy and

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into the real world, to do something it words. As Puchner summarizes: “These theatrical

manifestos […] seem to have given up entirely on the desire for authority and real change and

instead delight in theatrical pranks and the liberties provided by the theater” (Poetry 25). This,

however, is not an ignorant or innocent dalliance with the subversion of the authority of tactical

founding or We-speak, and still less an enjoyment “of founding a movement, […] forming a

collective as an end all in itself” (Poetry 153), but rather a pointed, purposeful investigation of

the genre of manifestos from within, and as one. While we’ve seen Dadaist’s radial confusion of

foundings and foundations, and the theatricality that structures them, what of a manifesto’s

supposed transition to the real world of Austinian perlocutionary speech act, to “produce certain

consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or

of another person: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing

them”104 (Austin 101), to an act that affects real change in the real world?

104 This is in contrast to an illocutionary act, where the linguistic utterance is the effect, exemplified by “I name…”

or “I bet…” or “I swear…” or, interestingly, “I found…” etc. For a deeper discussion of both the perlocutionary and

illocutionary acts, as well as their relationship see Austin 100ff.

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Meliorisms

In the confrontation between Dadaist praxis and the manifesto as genre, we have focused on

the act of founding, specifically founding an institution, a We. This, however, is but the first step.

As the theatricality affords an initial level of authority, it immediately recedes in order to allow a

manifesto to work, to function, to effect change in the real, rather than theatrical world. As

Puchner states: “[T]he manifesto wants […] to turn this speech into an actual instrument of

change” (Poetry 23). It wants to be felicitous in its performance, it wants to do things with

words. Mary Ann Caws gives, perhaps, the most unambiguous summation of the manifesto’s

perlocutionary objectives: “The manifesto [is] a deliberate manipulation of the public view.

Setting out the terms of the faith toward which the listening public is to be swayed, it is a

document of an ideology, crafted to convince and convert” (ixx). After the authority of a staged,

theatrical founding has been created, it is then seized and internalized in order to speak on behalf

of an institution that means to convince and convert its audience that the solution to their

problems lay simply in their acceptance of that institution’s manifesto. This audience is no

longer the audience of the metaphorical stage or theater, however, but rather the deadly serious

audience of the real world in which the institution now already exists, the theatrical performance

already taken as constative. Of course, the confusions and complications that comprise Dadaist

praxis do not stop at the stage’s edge, but doggedly follow the genre from the theater out into the

real world of a manifesto’s ventured perlocutionary objectives. “Wenn ein Autor einen Text als

Manifest ausgibt, so weckt er zumindest den Anschein, daß der betreffende Text eindeutig

Aufklärung über seine Zielsetzungen, seine Pläne, seine Intentionen verschafft”105 (Berg &

105 “When an author issues a text as a manifesto, he awakens at least the appearance that the text in question clearly

provides explanation of its objectives, its plans, its intentions.”

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Grüttemeier 25). Regardless of what precisely the manifesto wants, it is a genre of want, in that

the performance of a manifesto is the unique clarification of those wants. In other words, the

manifesto is a document of performative meliorism. What then of the Dadaist manifestos that

appear to actively and purposefully avoid either the creation or the seizure of that authority

necessary for that performance, if not both?

The question of want appears regularly in Dadaist manifestos, such as Raoul Hausmann’s

“Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” and “Was will der Dadaismus in

Europa?”106 and Richard Huelsenbeck’s preface to his April 1918 “Dadaistisches Manifest” upon

its inclusion in Dada Almanach, “Was wollte der Expressionismus?”107 The former of

Hausmann’s texts sarcastically plays on Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points for world peace.108 It

begins with wildly general, somewhat naive, if not banal utopian goals: “Der Dadaismus fordert /

1. die internationale revolutionäre Vereinigung aller schöpferischen und geistigen Menschen der

ganzen Welt”109 (Texte I.60). The text’s immediate expansion to include the entire world is

precisely the Dadaist parody of the utter banality of manifestos themselves, particularly those

manifestos, political and aesthetic, so clearly doomed to failure as a utopian fantasy, whether

Wilson’s 14 or Expressionist manifestos.110 The text quickly devolves from soft utopian

106 “What is Dadaism and What Does it Want for Germany?” and “What Does Dadaism Want in Europe?” See Texte

I.60 & I.94, respectively. 107 “What did Expressionism Want?” This was also included, in a slightly modified form in Huelsenbeck’s 1920 En

Avant Dada, which also reprinted Hausmann’s “What is Dadaism and What Does it Want for Germany?” See 27f.

Huelsenbeck’s “Dadaistisches Manifest” was also extensively quoted in En Avant Dada, again in a modified and

expanded form, and in Hausmann’s “Was will der Dadaismus in Europe?” creating something of a network of want

among these contemporaneous manifestos. 108 See Texte I.210f. Wilson’s 14 points speech was given to the United States Congress on January 8th, 1918. 109 “Dadaism demands / 1. the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual peoples of the entire

world” 110 Wilson intended his 14 points to become a touchstone during the peace process and Treaty of Versailles to end

the First World War. Wilson’s lack of support from the U.S. Senate, or any of the three major European allies

(Britain, France, and Italy), immediately doomed any of its proposals. This inevitability was only exacerbated by

Wilson’s illness, which kept him from personally advocating on his own text’s behalf and allowed French Prime

Minister Georges Clemenceau to negotiate a much harsher treaty and program of reparations. See Margaret

MacMillan’s Paris 1919, esp. section I.2: “First Impressions.”

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generalizations to bureaucratic authoritarianism: “Der Zentralrat tritt ein für” followed by the

now alphabetized list of appeals, concluded with “k) sofortige Regelung aller Sexualbeziehungen

im international dadaistischen Sinne durch Errichtung einer dadaistischen

Geschlechtszentrale”111 (61). Point by point, the title of the manifesto is undone; Dada becomes

Central Committee, will [want] goes from demand to appeal and Deutschland is never discussed.

Directly following this manifesto’s presentation in his En Avant Dada, Huelsenbeck adds: “Es

will nicht mehr sein als ein Ausdruck der Zeit”112 (31). That is, it refuses the pretension to any

melioristic progress for the future.113 Rather, Dadaist praxis simply cites its own moment.

Hausmann mirrors this sentiment in his second text on want: “[D]er dadaistische Mensch

kennt keine Vergangenheit und kein Ziel, er ist gestrafft von der lebendigen Gegenwart, [… er]

nimmt die Welt, wie sie ist, ohne sie ändern zu wollen”114 (Texte I.95, my emphasis). The

Dadaist cites only her time, breaks radically from the past, with no eye to the future,115 and

therefore no melioristic want, no judgement of the past to enable the desire for a better future.

While Dadaists, especially Berlin Dadaists in the heart of the newly founded Weimar Republic

surrounded by the manifestos and proclamations of both the revolution and its after-effects, often

parodied such political, economic, and social manifestos, the majority of Dadaist ire was

111 “The Central Council advocates” ; “k) immediate regulation of all sexual relations in the international Dadaist

sense through the foundation of a Dadaist gender center.” As with so many Dadaist manifestos, this text quickly

questions the role of the spokesperson with the introduction of the “Central Council.” As well, Hausmann

conspicuously skips any point “j” in this second section of the text and ends with “k” as though there were 14 points,

like Wilson’s famous speech, rather than the 13 that there actually are. 112 “It wants to be nothing more than an expression of the times” 113 Huelsenbeck goes still further in his explanation of the text’s use of Communism as “ein[en] Kommunismus, der

das Prinzip des ‘Bessermachen’ aufgegeben hat” (32). [“a communism, which has abandoned the principle of

‘making things better’” (En Avant [en] 42).] Indeed, “Das Wort ‘Verbesserung’ ist dem Dadaisten in jeder Form

unverständlich” (ibid). [“The word ‘improvement’ is in every for unintelligible to the Dadaist” (En Avant [en] 42).] 114 “The Dadaist knows no past and no aspiration, is bound by the living present, takes the world, as it is, without

wanting to change it.” 115 Tzara also made Dada’s absolute focus on the present explicit in the paratactic end of his “Manifeste dada 1918”:

“abolition de la mémoire: DADA; abolition de l’archéologie: DADA; abolition des prophètes: DADA; abolition du

futur: DADA” (OC I.367). [“the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition of archeology: DADA; the abolition of

prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future: DADA” (SML 13).] Dada’s abolition of both the past and future leaves

then only the citable present.

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reserved for the aesthetic schools and movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namely

the avant-garde itself. Huelsenbeck clarified this in his “Was wollte der Expressionismus?”:

“Dada will nichts; Dada wächst. [… D]er Dadaismus [ist] nichts anderes als ein Ausdruck der

Zeit [, …] ist in der Zeit als das Kind dieser Epoche, die man beschimpfen kann, die sich aber

nicht wegleugnen läßt”116 (Almanach 35). Huelsenbeck adds, in his introduction to Dada

Almanach: “[Dada] wendet […] sich gegen jede Art von Ideologie, d.h. jede Art von

Kampfzustand”117 (5f.). That is, Dada as nothing other than an expression of the times, a citation,

positions itself not merely against banal, naive, or utopian meliorism, but rather also against the

forcible argumentation of a well-defined meliorism of ideological precepts, which is to say

against stable stands, against positions as such. In other words, Dada appears to refuse to engage

in the defining characteristic of the genre of the “real world” manifesto. And yet, Dadaists write

manifestos. This Dadaist refusal, however, is less unequivocal than originally imagined. Once

again, it is Tzara, who most thoroughly investigates the want of the manifesto and Dadaist

criticism of it.

The opening lines of Tzara’s “Manifeste dada 1918,” what Janet Lyon considered “the best

exfoliation of the manifesto form” (41), come right to the point of the meliorist manifesto. “Pour

lancer un manifeste, il faut vouloir A.B.C. foudroyer contre 1.2.3 / s’énerver et aiguiser les ailes

pour conquérir et répandre de petits et de grands a.b.c. / signer, crier, jurer, arranger la prose sous

une forme d’evidence absolue, irréfuatable prouver son nonplusultra”118 (OC I.359). That is, the

116 “Dada wants nothing, Dada grows. […] Dada is nothing but an expression of the times. Dada is one with the

times, it is a child of the present epoch which one may curse, but cannot deny” (Almanac 44). 117 “[Dada] opposes every kind of ideology, i.e. every kind of combative stance” (Almanac 11). 118 “To launch a manifesto, you have to want A.B.C. against 1. 2. 3. / to work yourself up and sharpen your wings in

order to conquer and circulate lower– and uppercase a.b.c. / to sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is

absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its nonplusultra” (SML 3, translation slightly modified).”Nonplusultra” is

something of a Gallicization of the latin nec plus ultra, which designates the best or most extreme example of

something.

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vouloir, the want, is the paramount necessity, il faut. This is not an amorphous want, however,

but an argumentation with a Kampfzustand, a stable combative stance that is performed; signed,

shouted, and promised as absolute self-evidence, as constative.119 Tzara later mocked this

melioristic prétension. “Un manifest est une communication faite au monde entier, où il n’y a

comme prétention que la découverte du moyen de guérir instantanément la syphilis politique,

astronomique, artistique, parlementaire, agronomique, et littéraire. Il […] a toujours raison, il est

fort, vigoureux et logique”120 (OC I.378). That is, the pretension to a strong, logical, and correct

solution to such horrors is, like the manifesto itself, ultimately based the meliorism of some

A.B.C. (solution) against 1.2.3 (varying forms of cultural syphilis). For such pretentious

meliorism, Tzara shows nothing but antipathy. His “Manifeste dada 1918” continues: “Imposer

son A.B.C. est une chose naturelle—, donc regrettable. Tout le monde le fait […] J’écris un

manifeste et je ne veux rien, je dis pourtant certaines choses et je suis par principe contre les

manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les principes”121 (I.359f.). That is, to impose your A.B.C.

against 1.2.3., indeed the want that constitutes the defining element of what a manifesto does,

what the author of a manifesto performs as constative, verifiable obviousness, is for Tzara

deplorable. He therefore declines to participate, to perform the manifesto in this way, as the

exemplary meliorist manifesto that Tzara describes would dictate.

119 Tzara took this to its ad absurdum conclusion in the sixteenth section of his “Feeble Love Manifesto,” which

consists of the word hurle [howl] repeated 275 times in succession. See OC I.387. Austin often utilizes the example

“I promise…” as a performative, namely illocutionary, speech act. See Austin 9ff. As with the English “to swear,”

the French jurer connotes both “to vow” or “to promise” as well as “to curse” or “to cuss.” Here we focus on the

former, though the context of the latter will prove important. 120 “A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is made to the discovery of an

instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, argonomical, and literary syphilis. […] it’s always

right, it’s strong, vigorous and logical” (SML 33). “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” was performed

in Paris on 12 December 1920. 121 “To impose your A.B.C. is a natural thing—therefore regrettable. Everyone does it […] I am writing a manifesto

and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, and I am

against principles” (SML 3, translation slightly modified).

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It is never quite that easy. To impose one’s wanted A.B.C., to perform the manifesto as it

prescribes is a natural thing. Everyone does it. Therefore, it is unavoidable and Tzara is similarly

impelled to write a manifesto, even as he claims to not want anything, or more specifically, does

not want to want A.B.C. as a manifesto demands. Of course, this not want is indeed a want. He

is, in principle against manifestos, which are the genre of want. Principles, however, are also an

expression of want. Tzara is against those as well; again a want. Here again we see Tzara’s

attempted superposition, now within something of a self-constructed, perpetual whirlwind of

want and non-want, which itself is again an expression of want. That is, Tzara refuses to take a

position, singular or stable, to want or not want this or that, to set up a specific A.B.C. against

some specific 1.2.3., but rather to simultaneously want non-want and not want want. The binary

of want and non-want, of for and against is undone, the borders erased. This is the closest Tzara

comes to taking a position within his manifesto, the destruction of these binaries and borders: “Je

detruis les tiroirs du cerveau et ceux de l’organisations sociale”122 (OC I. 363). In other works,

Chronique Zurichoise and “Manifeste de Monsieur Antipyrine,” Tzara summarized this

sentiment, if rather more scatologically: “nous voulons nous voulons nous voulons pisser en

couleurs divers” or “nous voulons dorénavant chier en couleurs divers”123 (OC I.562f.; 357).

Chameleon like, Tzara’s nous refuses any stable, single color; like Dadaist’s definition of the

word dada itself, never this or that, but radically diverse, simultaneously both and neither,

potentially everything.

These Dadaist manifestos are not merely examples of “Manifeste, die ihre eigenen

Forderungen selbst annullieren”124 (Manifeste und Proklamationen xv), but rather manifestos

122 “I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation” (8). 123 “we want we want we want to piss diverse colors” ; “from now on we want to shit in different colors” 124 “manifesto, which themselves annul their own demands”

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that refuse to demand as we expect, that have no demands to annul or establish, nothing to be

against or for, but rather follow Tzara’s own jem’enfoutisme.125 Tzara declines not only the pure

want of A.B.C., but rather declines the pretension of meliorism, that want as solution to the

cultural syphilis of 1.2.3.126 In this way, the Tzara– and Dadaist radical confusion of any

purported imposition of an A.B.C. against a 1.2.3. is consequential not only to the what, against

which one argues, but also the whom. That is, any gesture of imposition of A.B.C., or criticism

of 1.2.3., by We requires that oppositional counterpart 1.2.3., against which We is expected to

fulminate and deploy their sharpened wings, to be defined. No manifesto can impose their

melioristic A.B.C. without an oppositional 1.2.3. and no founded We can impose that A.B.C.

without a targeted someone, a Them.

The ways in which Tzara mockingly described manifestos and meliorism already alludes to

one potential Them. Tzara’s first words of his own manifesto, “To launch a manifesto…”

connote a manifesto’s “ardent disregard for good manners and reasoned civility” (Lyon 12), the

manifesto is launched, as one would an ultimatum, a missile, or military attack. The combination

of Them with a 1.2.3. and the necessity “to work yourself up and sharpen your wings in order to

conquer and circulate…,” mocks the enumerated manifestos of the infamously militaristic

Futurism.127 Moreover, Marinetti was adamant that his own manifestos as well as those of other

Futurists sharpened their wings, with “de la violence et de la précision,” the latter most

125 OC I.359, 364. I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ism. 126 Tzara’s third manifesto, performed just over a year after “Manifeste dada 1918,” was entitled “Proclamation sans

prétension” [“Unpretentious Proclamation”]. See OC I.368; SML 15. 127 Of Marinetti’s infamous eleven theses of the “Manifesto of Futurism,” for example, the ninth stated: “Nous

voulons glofirier la guerre—seule hygiène du monde—le militarisme, le patriotisme […] les belles idées qui tuent”

(Premier manifeste 49). [“We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, […]

beautiful ideas worth dying for” (Rainey 51).] Tzara’s juxtaposition of Them as 1.2.3 and some potential We of

A.B.C. underscores, if only implicitly, the ideological distance between what Tzara saw as a Futurism based upon an

enumerated hierarchy and a horizontal, un-stratified, linguistic Dadaism.

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importantly deployed in “l’accusation précise, l’insulte bien définé”128 (Futurisme 18f.). Such

allusions to Futurism can be seen in many of Tzara’s manifestos, from the first line of his first

manifesto, “DADA est […] décidement contre le futur” (OC I.357), to some of the last lines in

his second, “abolition du futur: DADA”129 (I.367). Later in the same manifesto, Tzara writes:

“Nous déclarons que l’auto est un sentiment qui nous a assez choyé dans les lenteurs de ses

abstractions comme les transatlantiques, les bruits et les idées”130 (ibid), an allusion to

Futurism’s love of speed and metaphorical birth from an overturned car.131 In the last of his

seven manifestos, Tzara makes it quite explicit: “Je sais que ceux qui crient le plus fort contre

elle [la poésie], lui destinent sans le savoir et lui préparent une perfection confortable; —ils

nomment cela futur hygiénique”132 (OC I.379), a connection to the Futurist maxim, “war—the

only hygiene of the world,”133 as well as to the destructive tendencies of Futurism as yet another

meliorism, even if camouflaged as destruction.

These examples, however, remain largely at the level of allusion rather than stable,

combative stances or well-defined insult made with violence and precision. Even Tzara’s most

direct mention is similarly unstable. “Nous avons assez des académies cubistes et futuristes :

128 “some violence and some precision” ; “the precise accusation, the well-defined insult” 129 “Dada is […] definitely against the future” (SM 1) and “abolition of the future: DADA” (13). Indeed, Dada’s

very temporality of want, its obsession with the current moment is predicated upon not only its break with the past,

but its opposition to the future, nothing if not the very focus of Futurism. 130 “We declare that the automobile is a feeling that has pampered us enough in the slowness of its abstractions, as

have transatlantic liners, noises, and ideas.” 131 Béhar similarly notes the direct confrontation of Tzara’s passage with Futurism. See OC I.699. Hausmann

mirrored this allusion as well with his “Seelenautomobile” [“Automobile Souls”], which he originally placed within

the context of “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?” [“What does Dada Want in Europe?”] and later published on its

own. See Texte I.99; I.101, respectively, and Texte I.215 for a description of the work’s publication history. 132 “I know that those who shout loudest against it [poetry] are actually preparing a comfortable perfection for it;

they call it the Future Hygienic” (SML 35). 133 “La guerre, seule hygiène du monde.” The number of times in which war as hygiene appears in Futurist

manifestos is far too large to list here. See, however, Rainey 84. Tzara’s relationship to the concept of hygiene is

also complicated. See Marius Hentea’s “The Education of Samuel Rosenstock, or, How Tristan Tzara Learned His

ABCs.”

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laboratoires des idées formelles […] Nous ne reconnaissons aucune théorie”134 (OC I.361). From

this stand point, Futurism and Cubism themselves are less the target of a well-defined insult or

combative stance as Futurists and Cubists, as groups that stand for a specific 1.2.3., than they are

targeted simply as purveyors of theories, formal ideas, as artists who create works “destiné[s] au

placement des capitaux intellectuels”135 (I.362), as people who have any 1.2.3. at all. That is,

Tzara appears to base the extent to which Futurism and Cubism constitute a Them to the text’s

Nous, in all its confusions, not on the specific 1.2.3.s of these art movements, but rather on the

fact that they are art movements with 1.2.3.s at all. Indeed, “The Founding and Manifesto of

Futurism” literalizes having a 1.2.3. itself. Tzara’s “A.B.C. against 1.2.3.” was less about the

tenets of Futurism, though Dadaists certainly found them odious, than it was about Futurism’s

place as the exemplary authors of meliorist manifestos. This is, of course, not unique to Tzara

and his particular views on Futurism and Cubism.

Berlin Dadaists often took Expressionism as their Them, most pointedly in Huelsenbeck’s

“Was wollte der Expressionismus?,” “Dadaistisches Manifest,” and their modified presentations

in En Avant. To the former’s question, Huelsenbeck answers derisively: “Er [der

Expressionismus] ‘wollte’ etwas, das bleibt für ihn charakteristisch. Dada will nichts…”136

(Almanach 35). The most ruinous accusation is that they wanted. As with Tzara, Huelsenbeck’s

“will nichts” becomes the want of the non-want and vice versa, the removal of the differentiation

between the binary. Within the body of the manifesto itself, he reaffirms the Expressionist’s

relationship to meliorism: “die Theorie einer melioristischen Weltauffassung […] durchgeistert

134 “We’ve had enough of the cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas […] We don’t recognize

any theories” (SML 5). 135 “destined to form an investment for intellectual capital” (6). 136 “It [Expressionism] ‘wanted’ something, that much remains characteristic of it. Dada wants nothing” (Almanac

44). See also En Avant Dada 26ff., translated into English in En Avant [en] 39ff.

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die tatenlosen Köpfe [des Expressionismus]”137 (37). That is, the characteristic that made

Expressionism a Them, was that it held to a melioristic theory of aesthetic and world betterment,

a system of objectives, plans, intentions. Dada, or at the very least the 21 people that signed their

name to Huelsenbeck’s manifesto, proclaimed “Gegen die weltverbessernden Theorien

literarischer Hohlköpfe!”138 (41). For Dada, Them is therefore the amalgamation of those who

hold melioristic objectives, theories, systems at all, which is to say those who want in such a way

that reinforces the binaries want/non-want, A.B.C./1.2.3., We/Them, ideologues who traffic in

pretension and meliorism. For Dadaists, one becomes a Them in so far as they manifest(o), as

they want A.B.C. against 1.2.3. As Henri Béhar summarizes in a note to Tzara’s Oeuvres

complètes, which he edited, “[N]ous insisterons sur l’originalité de ces texts théoriques [les Sept

Manifestes de Tzara] qui, pour la première fois dans ce genre associent la practique [d’écrire un

manifste] à l’énonce idéologique”139 (OC I.697). We saw this already in Tzara’s first lines:

“conquerir et répandre de petits et de grands a.b.c. / signer, crier, jurer, arranger la prose sous une

forme d’évidence absolue…”140 (I.359, my emphasis).

This prototypical, melioristic manifesto, simultaneously described and pilloried in the first

lines of Tzara’s text, as ideological proclamation is performative in that it does not need to

appeal to Althusser’s “effet idéologique élémentaire”141 of self-evidence and obviousness (SLR

229), does not merely reiterate the obviousness of some previous 1.2.3., but rather performs,

137 “a theory of a melioristic understanding of life […] haunts the idle minds [of Expressionism].” Huelsenbeck saw

Kurt Hiller, “der mit seinem Meliorismus, gewollt oder ungewollt, als Theoretiker der expressionistischen Epoche

aufgetreten ist” (En Avant 27). [“Kurt Hiller, with his intentional or unintentional meliorism, is the theoretician of

the expressionist age” (En Avant [en] 40).] 138 “Against the world-reforming theories of literary blockheads” (Almanac 49). As we will see, signing their name

is slightly more complex than simple agreement. 139 “We insist on the originality of these theoretical texts [the Seven Manifestos of Tzara], which for the first time in

the genre links the practice [of writing a manifesto] to the ideological proclamation.” 140 “to conquer and circulate lower– and uppercase a.b.c. / to sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is

absolutely and irrefutably obvious…” (SM 3) 141 “elementary ideological effect” (ROC 189)

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creates its very own irrefutable obviousness for a new A.B.C., presumes to create it in the

arrangement of its prose. This prose of a meliorist manifesto, then, is no retrospective defense of,

or invitation to a pre-formed ideology, but rather the creation and performance of a new

ideology, the “extreme ›Vorhut‹”142 of a new movement (Asholt xvii), simultaneously the

founding of a new institution and the performance of an automatic assumption that this new

institution’s existence, agenda, program, etc. are entirely self-evident, obvious. As Derrida

described the performative hidden as constative: Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self

evident…” entitled to the We of the new United States of America by the godly “Laws of

Nature” against the mere laws of a crown.143 The melioristic manifesto does not merely take a

stand, but rather creates and performs its own standpoint as one of radical-self evidence, a new

ideological niche created in and by that linguistic performance to be circulated, signed, shouted,

sworn.144 The melioristic manifesto, then, is not simply ideological, not of this or that ideology,

but rather is the very creation and performance of a new ideology, the performative creation of

ideology, which is to say, interpellation. Dadaist’s radical confusion and instability of We,

melioristic want, and Them extends to the very interpellative force of the genre of the manifesto.

In the act of founding, which creates, declares, and reinforces a new We, and the act of

manifesting, which further refines the definition, the constituents, and the melioristic wants of

that We, under the umbrella of that foundation’s self-created authority, we see that this We

“becomes not only the nomenclature of a speaking group, but also a rhetorical device to evoke

audiences” (Lyon 23f.). It is the insult, not simply well-defined as Marinetti suggested, but

142 “extreme ›vanguard‹” 143 For an excellent discussion of the ways in which declarations, including the Declaration of Independence, relates

to the form of the manifesto, see Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives 340-44, summarized briefly in Puchner’s

Poetry 17ff. Lyon also notes: “the manifesto aims to expose as aberrancy or mythopoesis or hegemonic opportunism

[that which] the dominant order relies on as ‘the real,’ ‘the natural,’ ‘the thinkable’” (16). The manifesto does not

merely take a stand, but rather creates, inhabits, and performs its own standpoint. 144 See Marinetti’s scolding of Gino Severini’s attempted manifesto for its lack of newness, quoted in Rainey 43.

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necessarily well-defining in its performative evocation, creation, interpellation of Them, against

which We can further sharpen itself. Judith Butler explored this very intersection of insult,

performativity, and interpellation in her 1997 work Excitable Speech.145 She begins her study:

“linguistic injury appears to be the effect not only of the words by which one is addressed but the

mode of the address itself, a mode […] that interpellates and constitutes the subject” (2). To be

insulted is a particular mode in which one is interpellated.146 Though the general aim of a

manifesto, and more specifically the act of manifesting, is meant to be perlocutionary, i.e. to

“initiate a set of consequences” (17), such as extending the reach of some set of political or

aesthetic tenets, the theatrical founding of We requires the interpellation of Them through the

well-defined and well-defining insult, Butler’s linguistic injury of hate speech, an illocutionary

act where “saying is a kind of doing” (ibid). That is, for the subject formation of interpellation,

the utterance itself is the action, it is performative in the Austinian sense. As Butler summarizes:

“The mark interpellation makes is not descriptive, but inaugurative. […] Interpellation is an act

of speech whose ‘content’ is neither true nor false: it does not have description as its primary

task. Its purpose is to indicate and establish a subject in subjections…”147 (33f.). She goes on to

conclude: “The performative is… one of the influential rituals by which subjects are formed and

reformed,” (160). The theatricality of the founding, and therefore ultimately the performativity of

the manifesto, is in fact the creation of the authority to interpellate.

145 See also Pierre Bourdieu’s investigation of insult and its utilization in the formation of groups in his “Éspace

social et genèse des ‘classes’,” translated into English as “Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’” in Language

and Symbolic Power 229-251. 146 In his way, Tzara prefigures Butler: “L’artiste, le poète […] il est heureux en étant injuré: preuve de son

immutabilité” (OC I.365). [“The artist, or the poet […] he is glad to be insulted, it proves his immutability” (SM

10).] Butler reformulates this suggestion: “Thus we sometimes cling to the terms that pain us because, at a

minimum, they offer us some form of social and discursive existence” (Excitable 26). 147 These are indeed the two conditions given by Austin to describe performative speech acts: “they do not

‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’; and / the uttering of the sentence is, or is part

of, the doing of an action” (5).

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In order for the manifesto to achieve something, to effect a perlocutionary act, “to turn this

speech into an actual instrument of change” (Poetry 23), it must first speak theatrically, give

itself the authority to define We. The assumption of this authority not only inaugurates We, but

also necessarily forms, creates, interpellates some Them. This We-Them binary defined through

interpellation is the product of theatrical authority utilized in the perlocutionary act of the

melioristic manifesto, the very foundation upon which the manifesto rests. As we’ve seen,

however, the Them to the Dadaist We, or rather I, is simply anyone who wants, anyone who

melioristically manifests, anyone that imposes their A.B.C., indeed anyone at all. “Imposer son

A.B.C. est une chose naturelle—, donc regrettable. Tout le monde le fait”148 (OC I.359). It is

unavoidable, indeed even for other so-called Dadaists, even indifferent to one’s own volition:

everyone is Them, or perhaps more incisively if no less limiting, everyone within the symbolic

order, everyone with, and within an A.B.C., everyone that has learned their A.B.C.s.149 Tzara

clarifies later in the manifesto: “Chaque spectateur est un intrigant, s’il cherche à explique un

mot: (connaître!) Du refuge ouaté de complications serpentines, il laisse manipuler ses

instincts”150 (I.360). That is, the simple spectator becomes a schemer within that fray the moment

they attempt to explain a word, to know!, the moment they succumb to Althusser’s elementary

ideological effect, “qu’un mot « désigne une chose » ou « possède une signification »”151 (SLR

224), the moment they consider language transparent. The schemer, n the grips of this

148 “To impose one’s A.B.C. is only natural—and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it” (SML 3). 149 As Lyon points out, Tzara highlights the pedagogical aspect of the manifesto, in the circulation and acceptance of

“learning our ABCs and 123s” as one would in a schoolroom (41). We remember, of course, Althusser’s assertion

that the dominant ISA is educational. See SLR 289; ROC 250 150 “Each spectator is a schemer, if he tries to explain a word: (to know!) From the feigned refuge of serpentine

complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated” (SML 4, translation slightly modified). Here again the

original publication in Dada 3 differs from the final edition reprinted in the Oeuvres complètes, which removed the

original emphasis on connaître! and replaced “il laisse manipuler ses instincts” with “il faut manipuler ses instincts”

[“It is necessary to manipulate his instincts”]. See OC I.700. 151 “that a word ‘names a thing’ or ‘has meaning’” (ROC 189, translation slightly modified). Here again, we can see

the word dada as a particularly important litmus test for Dadaist praxis.

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ideological effect, under the presumption that they know, that they have a stable standpoint on a

word’s meaning, becomes the manipulated object of that presumed knowledge, a victim of

interpellation, now a They. Despite Richard Huelsenbeck’s infamous distaste for both Tristan

Tzara and his “Manifeste dada 1918,”152 Huelsenbeck echoed these same ideas in his

introduction to Dada Almanach: “Ideologe ist jeder Mensch, der auf den Schwindel hereinfällt,

den ihm sein eigener Intellekt vormacht, eine Idee, also das Symbol einer augenblicks-

apperzipierten Wirklichkeit habe absolute Realität”153 (Almanach 6). That is to say, everyone is

an ideologue, everyone is a part Them.

Dadaist manifestos appear to work actively against those collective fictionalizations of

imagined communities, against the pretension of a We known to be that Benvenistian I

authorized to interpellate We and Them. Dadaist praxis not only attempts to eschew this We-

Them dichotomy, but to actively undo it, to perpetually contradict it. When Tzara writes that he

is, in principle, against manifestos and principles, it is not only a denigration of the manifesto’s

We-Them binary, but the radical introduction of a whirlwind of contradictions and counter-

contradictions upon which no We or Them can take purchase or stabilize itself. Them becomes

Everyone Else, which leaves space for only a singular I. Indeed, there is no binary, but rather a

radical atomization, no longer an innocent reader-You for the manifesto to convince or

convert,154 but rather simply an endless series of individuals. Here, the very idea of an

152 The majority of this animosity came from their dispute over who “discovered” the word dada. See John

Elderfield’s “‘Dada’: The Mystery of the Word.” Huelsenbeck added the footnote to Tzara’s “Manifeste dada 1918,”

included in Dada Almanach: “Der Herausgeber [Huelsenbeck] betont hierbei, daß er sich als Dadaist mit keiner der

hier vorgetragenen Meinungen identifiziert” (116). [“The editor [Huelsenbeck] stresses that as a Dadaist, he is

unable to identify with any of the opinions expressed here” (Almanac 121).] 153 “Every human is an ideologue, who falls for the swindle, perpetrated by their own intellect, that an idea, and so a

symbol of a momentarily perceived reality, has any absolute reality” (Almanac 11, translation slightly modified). 154 Huelsenbeck writes in his “Dadaistisches Manifest”: “Dada ist ein CLUB, […] in den man eintreten kann, ohne

Verbindlichkeiten zu übernehmen. Hier ist jeder Vorsitzender und jeder kann sein Wort abgeben…” (Almanach 40).

[“Dada is a CLUB, […] which one may join without any obligation. Here everyone is chairman and anyone can

have his say…” (Almanac 47).]

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antagonistic Them or a targeted, interpellated (hey!) You (over there!) begins to fade from the

Dadaist manifesto itself. Tzara is certainly the most forceful in the use of his own personal I: “Il

y a une littérature qui n’arrive pas jusqu’à la masse vorace. Œuvre de créateurs, sortie d’une

vraie nécessité de l’auteur, et pour lui”155 (OC I.362). He goes further, however: “Je nomme

jem’enfoutisme l’état d’une vie où chacun garde ses propres conditions, en sachant toutefois

respecter les autres individualités”156 (I.364). Again Huelsenbeck follows suit in his Almanach’s

introduction: “Dada ist ein Geisteszustand […], der die Persönlichkeit selbst angeht, ohne sie zu

vergewaltigen”157 (3).

The continual confusion of the act of founding and the act of manifesting, the radical

utilization of contradiction and paradox that discounts any stable speaker/subject position,

Dadaist praxis utilizes the manifesto “not to forge a group identity but to flush out a radical

individualism” (Lyon 42). When truly “chacun a dansé d’après son boumboum personnel, et […]

il a raison pour son boumboum”158 (OC I.363), it becomes only impossible “[à] ordonner le

chaos qui constitue cette infinie informe variation : l’homme”159 (I.361). The collapse of Them

and You into a series of individuals is then the disorganization, the erasure of societal and

systemic barriers and borders, radicalized ad absurdum until everyone’s an individual, so no

one’s excluded. This is what Huelsenbeck means by Dada’s opposition to stable ideologies,

theories, schools, systems of division, all of which divide themselves from each other, “gegen

jede Hemmung, Barrière”160 (Almanach 6). Tzara’s rhetoric is, as we’ve come to expect, slightly

155 “There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written

out of the author’s real necessity, and for his own benefit” (SML 7). 156 “I call I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ism the way of life where everyone minds their own business, knowing to always

respect other individualities.” 157 “Dada is a state of mind […] that addresses individuality itself, without doing violence to it” (Almanac 9). 158 “everyone has danced according to their own personal boomboom, and […] they’re right about their boomboom”

(SML 8, translation slightly altered). 159 “to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man” (SML 5). 160 “against every restraint, barrier”

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more forceful: “Je suis contre les systèmes, les plus acceptable des systèmes est celui de n’en

avoir par principe aucun”161 (OC I.364). Of course, Tzara is also against principles, the very

principles that allow him to be against systems, as he is against those who create such systems:

“Les écrivains qui enseignent la morale et discutent ou améliorent la base psychologique ont, à

part un désir caché de gagner, une connaissance ridicule de la vie, qu’ils ont classifiée, partagée,

canalisée; ils s’entêtent à voir danser les catégories lorsqu’ils battent la mesure”162 (OC I.362).

Tzara describes here a writer of theories and ideologies, systems of labels, designations, and

differentiations, a writer who wants something, wants to win, to promulgate and proselytize.

Tzara describes the author of a manifesto, which he himself is, thought he doesn’t want anything.

However: “… je dis pourtant certaines choses”163 (OC I.359). What can we take, then, from

these certain things?

161 “I am against systems, the most acceptable of systems is on principle to have none” (SML 9). See above, page 18.

While this is certainly the most famous, Tzara’s manifestos teem with such sentiment. 162 “Writers who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to

win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they have classified, parceled out, canalised: they are determined to see

its categories dance when they beat time” (SML 7). 163 “… and yet, I’m saying certain things” (SML 3).

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Ironies and Contradictions

Tristan Tzara famously discusses his own role as performer and author of his “Manifeste

dada 1918”: “J’écris un manifeste et je ne veux rien, je dis pourtant certaines choses et je suis par

principe contre les manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les principes […] J’écris ce manifeste

pour montrer qu’on peut faire les actions opposée ensemble, dans une seule fraîche

respiration”164 (OC I.359f.). For Tzara, to author a melioristic manifesto and to want nothing are

antagonistic, oppositional, contradictory actions. Tzara, however, does want, namely the want of

nothing, or rather the want to want nothing, the want to undo the unavoidability of the imposition

of one’s wants on another. Tzara wants to show, to demonstrate, to manifest that one can

perform contradictory actions in one fresh breath, that the systemic binary need not be forever

repeated. This becomes something of a nested series of contradictions. That is, the contradiction

is less that he writes a manifesto and does not want something, but rather that the thing that

Tzara does want is contradiction itself. Ironically, Tzara expresses this from within the genre of

the melioristic manifesto, the genre of want whose argumentation is necessarily opposed to

contradiction. As Lyon points out, the prototypical melioristic manifesto à la Marx, Engels, and

Marinetti, “promulgates the very discourses it critiques: it makes itself intelligible to the

dominant order through a logic that presumes the efficacy of modern democratic ideals” (3). This

is the heart of a manifesto’s A.B.C. against some 1.2.3., a point by point confrontation, a

refutation of that, and justification of this, all played out within the language and logic of insults

and counter-insults, well-defined and defining, readable, knowable, and rational as insults to

164 “I am writing a manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am

against manifestos, and I am against principles […] I’m writing this manifesto to show that you can perform

contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath” (SML 3).

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Them and You, the reader. This is the form of the want that Tzara presumes to avoid, the want of

being understood in one’s meliorism as against this or that, Them or They.

In the few moments throughout Tzara’s manifestos, in which he affirms some positive want,

Tzara proclaims his desire for works which actively eschew such logic, clarity, transparency, or

argumentation: “Il nous faut des œuvres fortes, droites, précises et à jamais incomprises”165 (OC

I.365); or his desired jem’enfoutisme: “respecter toutes les individualités dans leur folie du

moment”166 (I.367). That is, Tzara aligns his want with that which cannot be systematized,

organized, stabilized, whether through radical ambiguity, confusion, folly, or individuality.

Nowhere in his manifestos does Tzara make a logical or rational case or contention for the

contravention of some A.B.C. against the 1.2.3. of logic and rationality as such, but rather a

contradictory action against A.B.C.-against-1.2.3.-ness, against logical and rational argument in

and of itself. Tzara’s contradiction with and within his own manifesto is not an attack of

contradictions against want in general, but rather against melioristic want defined, packaged

against some other series of wants. He wants to not want just as he is, in principle, against

principles, and writes a manifesto to not manifest—Tzara writes a manifesto of contradiction,

which in itself is a contradiction, not merely a set of contrasts or antagonisms, but a nested series

of contradictory negations. This series of (self) contradictions becomes something of a rhetorical

bit of irony, “to say something different from what it means” (Quintillian IV.59). When Tzara

says or writes that he wants nothing, he marks an ironic distance from what it means to author a

manifesto, and vice versa. This is not merely a rhetorical irony, but also a destabilization of the

very position of the modern subject, the one who wants, the locus of want, will, volition.167 That

165 “What we need are strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood” (11). 166 “to respect all individualities in their folly of the moment” (13). 167 One of the earliest and most notable connections between the Will and the (modern) subject comes from the

moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In his Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft [Religion

within the Boundaries of Mere Reason], Kant writes: “die Freiheit der Willkür ist von der ganz eigenthümlichen

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is, to ironize want and non-want, to subvert and perturb their purportedly stable locations, to

simultaneously want non-want, not want want, to displace the border between want and non-

want, to ironically question the very structure of the want/non-want system, is to disturb the

position of the modern subject.

This self and subject-critical irony is not unique to Tzara, but rather takes place throughout

Dadaist manifestos. Huelsenbeck, for example, famously ended his “Dadaistisches Manifest”:

“Gegen dies Manifest sein, heißt Dadaist sein!”168 (Almanach 41), only then to be ironically

signed and endorsed by Huelsenbeck himself, along with Hausmann, Tzara, Ball, and seventeen

others. Not only is the question as to whether or not those who signed were Dadaists rendered

entirely unanswerable, but those who signed positioned themselves in the whirlwind of want and

non-want at the end of a particularly straightforward manifesto: “rundum positiv formulierte

Forderungen [und] durch und durch konstruktive Ästhetik”169 (Manifeste und Proklamationen

xviii). They signal, then, their superposition both for and against, both want and don’t want. In

the hands of Dadaists, however, this rhetorical irony becomes radicalized. This rhetorical basis

for irony functions only in so far as “to say something,” “different from,” and “what it means,”

are all known or knowable qualities; that is, only in so far as the ironic statement, its author-

Beschaffenheit, daß sie durch keine Triebfeder zu einer Handlung bestimmt werden kann, als nur sofern der Mensch

sie in seine Maxime aufgenommen hat (es sich zur allgemeinen Regel gemacht hat, nach der er sich verhalten will)”

(Werke VI.24f.), where a maxim is defined in his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Groundwork of the

Metaphysics of Morals] specifically as “das subjective Princip des Wollens” (IV.400n). [“the freedom of the power

of choice has the quite peculiar characteristic that it cannot be determined to an action by any incentive except

insofar as the human being has admitted the incentive into his maxim (has made this a universal rule for himself,

according to which he wills to conduct himself)” (Religion 23f.).] ; [“A maxim is the subjective principle of willing”

(Groundwork 29).] For an overview of the roll of the will in Kant’s conception of the modern subject, see Henry

Allison’s “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant’s Conception of the Self” in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the

Self in Classical German Philosophy. 168 “If you are against this manifesto you are a Dadaist” (Almanac 49). 169 “roundly positively formulated demands [and] through and through constructive aesthetic.” While the clarity of

the prose utilized by Huelsenbeck’s manifesto lends itself to a positive or constructive aesthetic program, it remains

difficult to consider positive or constructive any text which contains statements such as “Dada will nichts”(Dada

Almanach 35) [“Dada wants nothing”] or “Ja-sagen—Nein-sagen: das gewaltige Hokuspokus des Daseins

beschwingt die Nerven des echten Dadaisten” (40). [“Affirmation—negation: the gigantic hocus-pocus of being

fires the nerves of the true Dadaist” (Dada Almanac 49).]

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subject, and its audience-subjects all exist within a context of stable conventions, assumptions,

meanings, etc.170

Particularly simple passages or citations of Dadaist manifestos occasionally function, at least

to some however fleeting degree, within a rhetorically stable context. This is particularly true of

Dadaist’s discussions of manifestos, and their opposition to them, contradictorily announced

from within a Dadaist manifesto. As a literary form and genre, the manifesto itself is given a

stable context, based upon traditional conventions, assumptions, and meanings, even by the

authors of Dadaist manifestos: “To launch a manifesto you have to…” In his description of the

manifesto, Tzara utilizes Marinetti’s violence, precision, well-defined and defining insult, which

creates the stability of meaning: “to write a manifesto” = “to want A.B.C. against 1.2.3.” Tzara

contradicts this with one fresh breath, to write a manifesto and to want nothing, the stable

meaning between them splintered, the manifesto destabilized. Indeed, Dadaist praxis, as

embodied in the Dadaist manifesto, appears to target precisely this concept of meaningful

equivalence, this stability of meaning on which the very genre of the manifesto is based. Dadaist

manifestos, then, are not stable, rhetorically ironic metamanifestos that contradict themselves in

their discussion of manifestos, but rather are manifestos that contradict the genre of manifesto as

manifesto, to the point that neither the meaning of what is said nor what it means are stable. This

is not merely “turning the manifesto against itself” (Poetry 152), but turning the manifesto

against the genre of manifesto as described from within that manifesto until the very stability of

meaning comes into question. The vortex of multiple and divergent contradictions overwhelms

any simple rhetorical irony. As Friedrich Schlegel noted in his influential expansion of the

concept of irony beyond any presumed stability: “Freilich gibts auch eine rhetorische Ironie,

170 Indeed, this rhetorical form of irony is often termed “stable irony.” See John Searle’s “Literary Theory and its

Discontents” and Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Irony.

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welche sparsam gebraucht vortreffliche Wirkung tut, besonders im Polemischen”171 (Kritische

Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe II.152, hereafter abbreviated KFSA). That is, such rhetorical irony is

most effective in the polemic, with a well-defined 1.2.3., against which one argues. For Dadaist

manifestos, however, the polemic is itself directed against well-defined, logical, polemical

argumentation, the A.B.C.-against-1.2.3.-ness of the manifesto itself, a radical irony based within

the concept of the subject-speaker, a hypertheatrical self-parody.

Directly after Tzara posits his fresh breath of two simultaneous actions opposed, he

continues: “[J]e suis contre l’action, pour la continuelle contradiction, pour l’affirmation aussi, je

ne suis ni pour ni contre et je n’explique pas car je hais le bon sens”172 (I.360). What began as a

simple ironic contradiction has now been scrambled beyond recognition. His desire to show two

contradictory actions is immediately contradicted by his opposition to action. Continual

contradiction and affirmation, he neither affirms nor opposes them, itself a contradiction. This

whirlwind of contradictions and contradictions of contradictions irreparably confuse any

potential stability necessary for rhetorical irony there might have been, whatever possible

explanations or common sense given by shared, assumed, mutual norms and values.173

Therefore, we can see this radical instability and contradiction as another instantiation of Tzara’s

jem’enfoutisme and radical individualism, where he can say certain things without the worry of

appropriation into a group meliorism, or the pejorative journalism of “une œuvre

171 “a rhetorical species of irony which, sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics”

(Philosophical Fragments 5). As Behler notes: “this rhetorical irony, bound to individual instances, to particular

figures, appeared to him [Schlegel] minor and insignificant compared to the philosophical homeland of irony where

it could manifest itself ‘throughout’” (147). 172 “I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I

won’t explain myself because I hate common sense” (SML 4). 173 As Tzara proclaims in “Dégoût dadaïste” to end his 1918 manifesto: “DADA; abolition de la logique […] de

toute hiérarchie et équation sociale installée pour les valeurs” (OC I.367). [“DADA; abolition of logic […] of every

hierarchy and social equation established for values” (SML 13).]

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compréhensible”174 (I.365). In other words, Tzara needn’t worry of being mistaken as a stable

subject-author of a stable melioristic manifesto. He remains truly individual in that no one can

understand him.

In Schlegel’s new expanded sense: “Ironie ist die Form des Paradoxen”175 (KFSA II.153), the

form of an insoluble contradiction. For Dadaist manifestos, such paradoxes abound, particularly

in the manifesto’s creation of a communal We set against some Them. The contradiction

between “write a manifesto” and “want nothing” becomes “I am writing a Dadaist manifesto”

and “I am not a Dadaist.” Tzara proclaims in his “Feeble Love Manifesto”: “Mais les vrais dadas

sont contre DADA”176 (OC I.381). Hausmann’s “Der deutsche Spießer ärgert sich” highlights the

irony of such statements: “Wir dudeln, quietschen, fluchen, lachen die Ironie: Dada! Denn wir

sind – ANTIDADAISTEN!”177 (Texte I.82). This is the complex Romantic irony of Schlegel, a

paradox formed around a “steten Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung”178

(KFSA II.172)—”the dominant theme in the exposition of irony in the Anathaeum” (Behler 149).

This continuous fluctuation between the creation and annihilation of the subject is precisely the

whirlwind of contradictions within Dadaist manifestos, the superposition of their Dadaist

subject-authors. Here, we can begin to see the true theoretical consequences of Dadaist’s

revolutionary use of a theatrical subversion of the act of founding. Dadaists radicalized that

theatricality, that is, radicalized the way in which they created their own authority meant for

group- or self-creation, only to deny, confront, or problematize that authority towards group- or

self-annihilation. That is, the theatricality of the Dadaist acts of founding functions as that

continual fluctuation between self-creation and annihilation, as irony.

174 “a comprehensible work” (SML 10) 175 “Irony is the form of paradox” (Philosophical Fragments 6). 176 “But the real dadas are against DADA” (SML 38). 177 “We tootle, squeak, curse, laugh out the irony: Dada! For we are ANTI-DADAISTS!” (Ades Ed. 88). 178 “continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction” (Philosophical Fragments 24).

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As Puchner notes, Dadaist manifestos are “the high-water mark of this genre’s

theatricalization, the celebration of theatrical overreaching at the expense of its performative and

transformative power[, a …] hypertheatricality” (Poetry 153). This theatricality as a mode of

self-creation and annihilation locates, for Schlegel, irony itself as theatrical: “denn überall wo in

mündlichen oder geschriebenen Gesprächen, und nur nicht ganz systematisch philosophiert wird,

soll man Ironie leisten und fordern”179 (KFSA II.152). A work’s very theatrical performance,

here Schlegel is speaking of Socratic irony in Plato’s dialogues, replete with theatrical

characters, diversions, appearances, and exits, its staging in speech rather than systematic

argumentation, “ist die eigentliche Heimat der Ironie”180 (ibid). Indeed, as Dadaists followed

Futurists onto the stage to perform their manifestos, so too did they ironically theatricalize the

genre of manifesto itself, put it on the stage, and following Austin’s prescription avant la lettre,

freed themselves to explore a form of farcical self-parody. This extended beyond the

hypertheatricality, the parody of the pretension to authority within the internal text of the

manifesto, to the authority of instances of examples of the genre as such.

Whereas socialist manifestos in the wake of Marx and Engel’s Manifest were invariably

concerned that they “would relegate the old and original [manifesto] to the status of a historical

document” (Poetry 2),181 Dadaist manifestos carried no such concern. There simply was no

179 “for wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues —and is not simply confined into rigid systems—

there irony should be asked for and provided” (5). 180 “is the real homeland of irony” (ibid). In his exploration of Romantic irony, Benjamin notes: “Die dramatische

Form läßt sich im höchsten Maße und am eindrucksvollsten unter allen ironisieren, weil sie das höchste Maß von

Illusionskraft enthält und dadurch die Ironie in hohem Grade in sich aufnehmen kann, ohne sich völlig aufzulösen”

(GS I.84). [“Among all literary forms, dramatic form can be ironized to the greatest extent and in the most

impressive way, because it contains the highest measure of the power of illusion and thereby can receive irony into

itself to a high degree without disintegrating.” (Selected Writings I.163, hereafter abbreviated SW).] 181 The most notable case of this concern, which would certainly have been known by Berlin Dadaists, comes from

Rosa Luxembourg’s writings on the Spartacus League, “Our Program and the Political Situation” which explicitly

connects itself to, rather than undermines, Marx and Engels: “[W]ir [treten] heute [heran], unser Programm zu

besprechen und es anzunehmen […] [W]ir knüpfen dabei an den Faden an, den genau vor 70 Jahren Marx und

Engels in dem Kommunistischen Manifest gesponnen hatten” (Gesammelte Werke IV.486). [“Our task today is to

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foundational manifesto, no stable acts of founding nor manifesting to revere or hold sacred, and

the flood of Dadaist manifestos began. Indeed, this radical repetition only served to further the

ironic nature of Dadaist manifestos themselves, already the ironic wink of yet another. For

example, the thirteenth issue of Aragon, Breton, and Soupault’s Littérature contained “Vint-trois

manifestes du mouvement dada.”182 As Marx and Engels fretted with the Manifestwut of their

friend Arnold Ruge,183 this inundation of Dadaist manifestos was not merely a performance of

iterablity, a single manifesto against itself, but rather a theatrical seriality, where each new

manifesto posed an inherent and ironic challenge to any possible melioristic pretensions of

authority created by each previous manifesto, Dadaist or not. While the sheer number of

manifestos and their theatrical effect on the form of the manifesto certainly functioned as a form

of ironic “stete[n] Selbstparodie”184 (KFSA II.160), it also functioned as what Benjamin in his

“Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik” called, “die Ironisierung der Form”185

(GS I.84). Formal irony is critical, not in that it is a “Zerstörung des Werks” as with pure

criticism (I.86), but rather “die Zerstörung der Illusion in der Kunstform”186 (ibid). Schlegel’s

formal irony, as quoted by Benjamin, is this destruction of illusion as a “besonnener Mutwille,”

it “erhöht sie [die Täuschung] vielmehr […] um zu reizen”187 (KFSA I.30, qtd. in GS I.84). That

is, formal irony is the destruction of the illusory nature of theatricalization itself, in so far as that

theatricalization is radicalized to the point that it then necessarily shows itself as theatrical. It is a

destruction of the illusion of the theater, through the radicalization of its very theatricality, the

discuss and adopt a program. […] [W]e connect ourselves to the threads which Marx and Engels spun precisely

seventy years ago in the Communist Manifesto” (Rosa Luxemburg Reader 357). 182 “23 Manifestos of the Dada Movement” are translated in Ades Ed. 180-196. 183 See above, page 89f. 184 “constant self-parody” 185 “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” ; “the ironization of form” (SW I.163). Benjamin separated

romantic irony into this formal irony and material irony, the former of which we will focus on here. 186 “destruction of the work” ; “the destruction of illusion in the art form” (SW I.164) 187 “thought-out wantonness,” it “heightens the deception […] in order to provoke” (I.163).

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knowing wink, which signals that this is all just a masquerade. The form of the manifesto, itself

inherently theatrical in its fundamental act of founding, becomes, through and as formal irony,

theatricalized once more, a play within a play, the hypertheatrical Dadaist manifesto.188

The Dadaist’s further theatricalization of the already theatrical manifesto not only transforms

but reveals any potential constatives as playful, purposefully infelicitous performatives. This

hypertheatricalization ironically subverts the apparatus of the manifesto, which removes not only

the possibility of functional, melioristic performativity but also the performativity necessary to

form a stable, founded, constituted group of performer– and audience-subjects, the manifesto

playfully disarmed. The hypertheatricalization of formal irony “stellt den paradoxen Versuch

dar, am Gebilde noch durch Abbruch zu bauen”189 (GS I.87). That is, through simultaneous

critical analysis and performance of the form of the manifesto, from within the very form of the

manifesto, i.e. as manifesto itself, the inherent theatricality of all, and specifically melioristic

manifestos is theatricalized once more, represented on stage, open to mass critique. The Dadaist

manifesto theatrically represents the theatricality of the meliorist manifesto, a

hypertheatricalization that removes the possibility of functional performativity, of doing things

with words, that is, of itself functioning as a meliorist manifesto. In a way, this brings us full

circle, where the Dadaist manifesto ironically functions as a formulation of Dadaist praxis.

Perhaps surprisingly, Dadaist manifestos appear to follow what Althusser, in his reading of

Machiavelli,190 considered to be definitional for the genre of manifesto: to treat the text of the

manifesto as a means, which is to say a praxis, in the conflict that it announces. Dadaists, and

188 Friedrich Schlegel’s brother, August Wilhelm, also an important theoretician of romantic irony, praised the ironic

play-within-a-play and moreover play-about-a-play structure of the “conscious artistic manipulation of mimetic

representation” of irony in Goethe’s Torquanto Tasso and Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (Burwick 52f.). See

Burwick’s “‘Transcendental Buffoonery’ and the Bifurcated Novel.” 189 “presents a paradoxical venture: through demolition to continue building on the formation” (SW I.165). 190 See above, page 86f.; 106f.

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Tzara in particular, announced with almost surprising clarity the conflict between their own

manifestos and the elements that constitute traditional manifestos, the melioristic and logical

argumentation, the interpellated We-Them of A.B.C.s against 1.2.3s. To be a means in this

conflict then posed the problem of arguing against argumentation, interpellating against

interpellation, to exacerbate the inherent conflicts of the meliorist manifesto without recourse to

meliorism. Dadaist praxis needed to say certain things but not really mean them, or rather, for

them to mean nothing to anyone else. As Austin argued, “a performative utterance will, for

example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor of the stage, or if introduced in a

poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (22). This offers the possibility of a hyperperformative

performance, a performance that shows itself as such and therefore does not mean anything

outside of its theatrical context, off the stage, in the real world. This is how Dadaist manifestos

function as a theatrical performance that does nothing and cannot do anything, that is able to

counter that melioristic and logical argumentation of the traditional manifesto in such a way that

it does not itself become the very meliorism that it means to counter, but rather becomes a

radically ironic theatricalization of it. Dadaists occasionally discussed how the praxis of ironic

hypertheatricalization began to inform all of their works rather than merely their manifestos.

In “Was will der Dadaismus in Europa?,” Hausmann praised Dadaist history in Cabaret

Voltaire, “in dem zwischen Musik, Tanz, Montmartre-Chansons, Kubismus und Futurismus

ironisiert […] wurden”191 (Texte I.94). Huelsenbeck’s “Dadaistisches Manifesto” famously

proclaimed: “Der Dadaismus […] hat den Kubismus zum Tanz auf der Bühne gemacht”192

(Almanach 39). He continues: “Dada ist das internationale Ausdruck dieser Zeit, die große

191 “where, amid music, dance, Montmartre chansons, Cubism and Futurism were ironized” (Ades Ed. 92,

translation slightly modified). 192 “Dada […] turned Cubism into a dance on the stage.”

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Fronde der Kunstbewegungen, der künstlerische Reflex aller dieser Offensiven,

Friedenkongresse, Balgereien am Gemüsemarkt, Soupers im Esplanade etc. etc.”193 (39f.). This

theatrical, reflective expression of such occasions great and small, however, is not faithful or

accurate, but rather the formally ironic de(con)struction of that theatricality.194 Ball, in his diary

Flucht aus der Zeit, further specifies the form of this ironic perturbation to the theatrical

reflection. “Was wir Dada nennen, ist ein Narrenspiel aus dem Nichts; in das alle höheren Fragen

verwickelt sind; eine Gladiatorengeste; ein Spiel mit den schäbigen Überbleibseln; eine

Hinrichtung der posierten Moralität und Fülle”195 (Flucht 98). This farce creates an entanglement

between nothingness and all higher questions, a play with detritus in which postured morality

and abundance are exterminated on the gladiator’s stage. The higher questions, the melioristic

moralism, is brought on stage and stripped of its postures and presumptions through this

Narrenspiel, literally a contradictory, foolish,196 comedic piece of theater. “Was wir zelebrieren,

ist eine Buffonade und eine Totenmesse zugleich”197 (Flucht 86). This is less a simple opposition

between, or even mixture of, low and high, between buffoonery and requiem mass, but rather the

buffoonery as requiem mass, all that remains of Tzara’s proposed “grand travail destructif,

négatif à accomplir. Balayer, nettoyer. La propreté de l’individu s’affirme après l’état de folie, de

193 “Dada is the international expression of our times, the great bitter opposition of the artistic movements, the

artistic reflection of all of these offensives, peace congresses, tussles at the vegetable market, dinners at the

Esplanade, etc. etc.” Fronde refers to a series of revolutions in France between 1648 and 1653 against King Louis

XIV, and later came to mean any bitter political opposition. 194 Benjamin writes: “Es versteht sich von selbst, daß sie [diese Form der (formalen) Ironie], wie die Kritik, sich nur

in der Reflexion darstellen kann” (GS I.85). [“It is obvious that [formal] irony, like criticism, can demonstrate itself

only in reflection” (SW I.164).] 195 “What we call dada is a farce of nothingness; in which all higher questions are implicated; a gladiator’s gesture, a

play with shabby debris, an execution of posturing morality and abundance” (Flight 65, translation modified). 196 Friedrich Karl Forberg, a contemporary of Schlegel, noted the importance of contradiction to Narren or fools:

“noch dawider, - dies ist die Maxime des Narren. Der Widerspruch des allgemeinen Urtheils ist dem Weisen ein

Grund, an dem seinigen zu zweifeln” (Strack 244). [“Even further, — this is the maxim of fools. The contradiction

of the universal judgment is, to the sage, a reason to doubt his own.”] 197 “What we are celebrating is buffoonery and a requiem mass simultaneously” (Flight 56).

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folie agressive, complète […] Sans but ni dessein, sans organisation: la folie indomptable, la

décomposition”198 (OC I.366).

Within the context of a manifesto, where melioristic argumentation of the higher questions is

the mode of discourse meant to prevail, Dadaists chose instead a type of neo-romantic irony of

“transzendentale[r] Buffonerie. Im Innern, die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über

alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst, Tugend, oder Genialität: im Äußern […]

die mimetische Manier eines gewöhnlichen guten italiänischen Buffo”199 (KFSA II.152). That is,

through the mimetic representation, the theatrical reflection, through the Dadaist theatricalization

in contradictory buffoonery and folly of the meliorist manifesto, how it traditionally functions,

and those who traditionally launch them are ironically assailed. This can be seen as a

radicalization of the feigned ignorance of Socratic dialogue. As Huelsenbeck put it: “Dadaist

sein, heißt, sich von den Dingen werfen lassen”200 (Almanach 40), a radical form of strategic

self-annihilation or “stete Selbstparodie” (KFSA II.160), in which one’s so-called opponents take

the bait and fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal, only to expose their own previously

unacknowledged pretensions, their ideology. For Dada, these opponents are Them, namely

everyone who imposes their A.B.C. (“tout le monde le fait”201), everyone who thinks they can

“ordonner le chaos qui constitue cette infinie informe variation : l’homme”202 (OC I.361), or

198 “the great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual

materializes after the state of folly, aggressive folly, complete […] With neither aim nor plan, without organisation:

uncontrollable folly, decomposition” (SML 12). 199 “transcendental buffoonery. Internally, the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations,

even above its own art, virtue, or genius; externally […]: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo”

(Philosophical Fragments 6). 200 “being a Dadaist means allowing oneself to be hurled by things” (Almanac 49). 201 OC I.359. [“Everyone does it.”] 202 “to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite formless variation, man” (SML 5) Schlegel writes often about the

relationship between irony and the propensity for, or recognition of chaos, perhaps most directly in fragment 69 of

Ideen: “Ironie ist klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos” (KFSA II.263). [“Irony is the

clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Philosophical Fragments 100).] In his Letzte

Lockerung Manifest, Walter Serner echoed Tzara’s incredulity at such pretensions of order, if much more

aggressively: “Den Menschenmist ordnend durchduften!!!” (5). [“To perfume and order this human shit!!!”]

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more succinctly, those who manifest. While seemingly only implicitly suggested, the historical

context within which these ironic and hypertheatrical Dadaist manifestos were created, the

shadow in which they ironically labored and indeed more importantly, the very historical context

that these Dadaist manifestos self-parodically and theatrically helped to create and foster,

identifies the avant-garde itself, “eine Bewegung der Manifeste”203 (Manifeste und

Proklamationen xv), as the prey of this ironic Dadaist praxis.

Just as this Dadaist praxis had theatrically turned Cubism into a dance on stage or ironized

Futurism and Expressionism to music and dance, so too did they ironize the very document that

“die ⟩ historische Avantgarde⟨ der 10er, 20er, 30er Jahre” held in such esteem, the “Genre ihr

ureigenes Medium,” to the point that there existed “kein[en] Ismus, keine avantgardistische

Zeitschrift, kaum ein Spektakel […], die ohne Manifeste ausgekommen wären”204 (Manifeste

und Proklamationen xv). All the better if Dada’s ironic and hypertheatrical acts of founding and

manifesting swept up the Kunstrichtung Dada, the art movement that it never was nor wanted to

be, in its own destructive irony. Rather, the Dadaists chose “to de-dogmatize the manifesto, to

parody it, to theatricalize it, and then to publish as many manifestos as possible” (Poetry 152).

While others within the avant-garde had been dismayed at this “Zeit der Ismen” and its flood of

manifestos,205 Dada was the most trenchant and certainly the most ironical. To ironically play or

stage the manifesto against itself is to play it against those who take the manifesto so seriously

that they are unable to see the actors or the stage, those who read and wrote manifestos earnestly.

For Schlegel, Dadaists could take pride in their achievements: “Es ist ein sehr gutes Zeichen,

wenn die harmonisch Platten gar nicht wissen, wie sie diese stete Selbstparodie zu nehmen

203 “a movement of manifestos” 204 “the ‘historical avant-garde’ of the 1910s, 20s and 30s” ; “genre of their very own medium” ; “no Ism, no avant-

gardist journal, barely a spectacle that would have managed without a manifesto” 205 Antoin Artaud, for example, wrote that “il y a trop de manifestes et pas assez d’œuvres. Trop de théories et pas

d’actions” (V.85). [“there are too many manifestos and not enough works of art. Too many theories and no actions.”]

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haben, immer wieder von neuem glauben und mißglauben, bis sie schwindlicht werden, den

Scherz grade für Ernst, und den Ernst für Scherz halten”206 (KFSA II.160). In so far as it radically

disoriented their own subject positions and those of its readers, the Dadaist manifesto functioned,

remained a manifesto, if one of radically ironic hypertheatricalization, in that it treated itself,

indeed performed itself, as a combatant in the very conflict it presented: “Liberté: DADA DADA

DADA, hurlement des douleur crispées, entrelacement des contraires et de toutes les

contradictions, des grotesques, des inconséquences : LA VIE”207 (OC I.367). In this way, Dadaist

manifestos were not merely promotions of other works and praxes, but rather simultaneously one

of those works and its promotion. This is not merely the poeticization of the manifesto, not

merely a one-way road, but rather a cross-pollination, a manifestoization of poetry as well.208 As

Tzara notes: “[L]a reclame et les affaires sont aussi des élements poetiques”209 (I.363). This is

explored nowhere more thoroughly than with the Dadaist photomontage.

206 “It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous

self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as

a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke” (Philosophical Fragments 13). Tzara railed regularly against

harmony, most forcefully in his “Manifeste dada 1918.” “Je hais… l’harmonie, cette science qui se trouve tout en

ordre… tout est en ordre, faites l’amour et cassez vos têtes” (OC I.364). [“I hate… harmony, the science that finds

everything is in order… everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in.”] 207 “Liberty: DADA DADA DADA, the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all

contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE” (SML 13). 208 See above, page 87f. 209 “publicity and business are also poetic elements” (SML 8).

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Chapter Four

“So brauchen wir nur die Schere nehmen”: Painting/Writing the Dadaist Photomontage

“Die revolutionäre Stärke des Dadaismus bestand darin, die Kunst

auf ihre Authentizität zu prüfen. […] Von diesen revolutionären

Gehalten hat sich vieles in die Photomontage hineingerettet.”1

– Walter Benjamin

“[A]us dem abstrakten Künstler ist […] ein böser Materialist geworden. […]

Das ist insofern etwas unerhört Neues, als zum erstenmal aus der Frage: Was ist

die deutsche Kultur? (Antwort: Dreck) die Konsequenz gezogen worden ist,

nun mit allen Mitteln der Satire, des Bluffs, der Ironie, am ende aber auch mit Gewalt

gegen diese Kultur vorzugehen. Und zwar in gemeinsamer großer Aktion.”2

– Richard Huelsenbeck

In his 1931 essay, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,”3 Walter Benjamin briefly traces the

switch in the theoretical discussions surrounding photography from its potential as art towards its

potential as a tool to create scientific evidence.4 For many years, indeed even before the word

photography had arisen, this was one of, if not the widest and most well-known use of the

fledgling technology: the revelation of unbeknownst elements within the world to those who

meant to investigate them. Advancements in the camera’s optics allowed for significant

enlargements, distortions, and variations of elements of the world as though it had been seen by

an unaided observer. “Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche zum Auge

1 GS II.692. [“The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity. […] Much of this

revolutionary content has gone into photomontage” (SW II.774).] 2 En Avant 34f. [“[T]he abstract artist has become […] a wicked materialist. [… I]t is something startlingly new,

since for the first time in history the consequence has been drawn from the question: What is German culture?

(Answer: Shit), and this culture is attacked with all the instruments of satire, bluff, irony, and finally, violence. And

in a great common action” (Motherwell 44).] 3 GS II.368-385. The work is translated in SW II.507-530 as “Little History of Photography.” 4 Benjamin speaks to the debate surrounding photography as a form of art more directly in other essays, specifically

“Der Autor als Produzent” and “Pariser Brief II” in GS II.683-705 and III.495-508, respectively. These are

translated as “The Author as Producer” and “Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography” in SW II.768-782 and

SW III.236-248, respectively.

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spricht”5 (GS II.371). This nature, however, is not merely the hidden minuscule elements, too

small for our human eyes, but all manner of characteristics and perspectives that regularly escape

our attention. With technological advancements in photography, this dissonance was further

complicated.

Slowly, progress in photo-chemical treatments began to increase the plate’s sensitivity to

light and therefore reduced the necessary time for exposure, which brought the camera indoors

and into the studio. This began to open photography to forms of portraiture, “[d]as eigentliche

Opfer der Photographie”6 (II.374). The time necessary for exposure was finally less than what

the photographed human required to remain still so as to ensure a sharp image. During this

intermediary phase of photography, which allowed for portraiture but remained far from instant,

portrait photography continued to utilize, if no longer the formerly necessary “‘Kopfhalter’ und

‘Kniebrille’”7 (II.375), then their equally unnecessary aftereffects: “Noch erinnert die Staffage

solcher Porträts mit ihren Postamenten, Balustraden, und ovalen Tischen an die Zeit, da man

langen Expositionsdauer wegen den Modellen Stützpunkte geben mußte, damit sie fixiert

blieben”8 (ibid). That is, despite the advancements in technology that had removed any necessity

for such props, photographers continued to “stage” their images, “wie es in berühmten Gemälden

vorkam”9 (ibid). Kitsch of this sort continued well after any technological restrictions that had

originally required them had been overcome. The combination of plummeting exposure times for

photographic film by the turn of the century (cumbersome photographic plates were by now

5 “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye” (SW II.510). 6 “[t]he real victim of photography” (SW II.514) 7 “‘head clamps’ and ‘knee braces’” (SW II.515) 8 “The accessories used in these portraits, the pedestals and balustrades and little oval tables, are still reminiscent of

the period when, because of the long exposure time, subjects had to be given supports so that they wouldn’t move”

(ibid). 9 “as were to be seen in famous paintings” (ibid)

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rarely utilized), and technological advances in the realm of photo-realistic printing became the

catalyst for radical change.10

An automated stippling process to create accurate halftones, i.e. greyscale,11 for the mass

reproduction of photo-real images, known as the Ives process, was patented in 1881 and finally

perfected and economized for seamless integration into the industrial-mechanical world of mass

printing at the turn of the century. Rather than photographs from staged studios destined for

family photo albums, photography for the masses became the photography of a mass media that

could remove, thanks to the Ives process, not only the cost, labor, and time necessary for an

engraver to attempt to reproduce a photographic image, but in fact the engraver all together, and

with her, the last vestiges of subjective tampering with the image. This removal was presented,

or rather sold, as an innovative feature of the mechanical reproduction. The very first mass

reproduction of a photographic image, an 1873 advertisement printed in New York’s The Daily

Graphic (fig. 4.1),12 was accompanied by the note: “There has been no intervention of artist or

engraver but the picture is transferred directly from a negative by means of our own patented

process of ‘granulated photography’”13 (2). The note continues: “We need not call attention to

the faithfulness of the pictures which ‘granulating’ gives our readers” (ibid). These technological

advances, highly light-sensitive film and photo-mechanical reproduction, had removed any

subjective interference from studio portraitist or engraver. For many theorists of photography at

10 For a thorough overview of the various photomechanical mode of reproduction, see Louis Nadeau’s Encyclopedia

of Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical Processes, from which much of the following history and

descriptions come. 11 See Neil Harris’s “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect” for a discussion of the history of

the half-tone process and its importance to print media of the time. 12 The image was of Steinway Hall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. See Gail Buckland’s First Photographs

165. 13 This granulated photography was a form of leggotype, named after the co-founder of The Daily Graphic, William

Leggo, and was a short-lived precursor to the Ives process.

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the time, these were the final hurdles, now bested, that allowed not only the mass dissemination

of photographic images, but also their capture, free from any such subjective interference.

As William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of both photography and its theory,

explained, “it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself” (“New

Art” 73). He wrote in his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, that his book’s photographs, the first

such illustrated book in history, “are impressed by Nature’s hand” (i). As Peter Geimer notes,

modern photography became merely the most striking and popular in a long history of such “von

selbst entstandene[n] Bilder[n].” More specifically “wird die Selbsttätigkeit jetzt aber als

natürliches Phaenomen verstanden”14 (“Von selbst” 287). As these technologies further matured,

and the photographic image began to dominate mass media, Charles Sanders Peirce famously

classified the instant photograph, distinct from portraiture,15 as an indexical sign: “Photographs,

especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in

certain respects exactly like the objects they represent,” which is due to the fact “that they were

physically forced to correspond point by point to nature,” a form of “physical connection”16 (CP

II.159 [2.281]). This indexicality is, in a way, the result of a radical iconicity, where the iconic

resemblance is flawless and the map is the territory.17 The instant photograph, as a sign, “stand[s]

in direct physical continuity with the object that [it] signif[ies]” (“Self-Generated Images” 29).

This presumed physical continuity disallows any space, any interval between object and image

into which a human producer, her perception, intention, tampering, or indeed subjectivity, could

14 “self-generated images” ; “autonomy implicit in photography is now considered a purely natural phenomenon”

(“Self-Generated Images” 30). 15 Peirce writes in 1890: “In this sense, a word represents a thing to the conception in the mind of the hearer, a

portrait represents the person for whom it is intended to the conception of recognition” (CP I.192 [1.367]). 16 Peirce wrote this in 1903. 17 The Piercean icon “represent[s] its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being” (CP II.267

[2.373]). As Mein Herr states in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: “we now use the country itself, as its

own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well” (169). See also Borges’s “Of Exactitude in Science” which refers

to “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point” (131).

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fit. This optically true, physically contiguous reproduction of the photographic image, which is to

say the objective authenticity with which photography transmits the objects or scene before the

camera’s lens free of human interference, is now able to remain untainted, thanks to these final

technological advancements, throughout their mass-reproduction.

At the turn of the century, the consumers of mass-produced photographic images were,

thanks to the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung [BIZ, Berlin Illustrated Newspaper], by and large

German. The first viable and by far most popular illustrated newspaper,18 BIZ not only

augmented their journalism with photographic images, but fully integrated these images into

their written work as the founding exemplars of what would come to be the photo-essay and

photojournalism; journalistic objectivity now coupled with photographic authenticity. As Hans-

Jürgen Bucher summarized the introduction of the mass-produced photograph into, specifically

the German, journalistic mass media: “aus Illustrationen werden Dokumente und Nachrichten,

die Unmittelbarkeit und Authentizität ausdrucken sollen, der Fotograf wird zum Augenzeugen,

der auf Objektivität festgelegt werden kann”19 (“Mehr als Text mit Bild” 46). Despite the

marketed celebration of objective photography, the technology and the growing dominance of its

mass-reproductions were not without their critics. It is little wonder, then, that those who had

been the first to critically analyze the effects of the growing flood of mass-reproduced

photography on society would be those who had witnessed its first waves.

Along with Benjamin’s “Little History,” Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 “Die Photographie”

was among the first essays to question critically the effects of photography.20 Kracauer’s essay

18 For a history and commentary on the importance of BIZ, see Christian Feber’s Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.

Zeitbild, Chronik, Moritat für Jedermann 1892–1945. 19 “Illustrations become documents and news, which are to print immediacy and authenticity, the photographer

becomes an eye-witness who can be committed to objectivity.” 20 Originally published as an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung, “Die Photographie” was reproduced in his collection

of essays, Das Ornament der Masse, and translated as “Photography” in The Mass Ornament.

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sets the photographic image in radical opposition to memory-images, where each considers the

other a fragmentation, incomplete. For Kracauer, the photograph is little more than an aggregate

of pure information, an inventory of spatiotemporal calculations which informs not in the least

any meaningful history of what is catalogued. Hidden, “wie unter einer Schneedecke”21

(“Photographie” 26), by the pure “räumliche[] (oder zeitliche[]) Kontinuum”22 of photography

was precisely what the memory-image retains (25): that which is given though only “insofern es

etwas meint”23 (ibid, my emphasis). For Kracauer, this loss of significance takes on dire

consequences with the technological advancements of instantaneous photography, its photo-real

mass-reproduction, and its rise to cultural dominance in mass media. “Doch die Flut der Photos

fegt [die] Dämme [vom Gedächtnis] hinweg. […] Das räumliche Kontinuum aus der Perspektive

der Kamera überzieht die Raumerscheinung des erkannten Gegenstands, die Ähnlichkeit mit ihm

verwischt die Konturen seiner »Geschichte«”24 (34). For Kracauer, then photography and

particularly the mass-photography of illustrated newspapers restricts the access of the masses to

what is meaningful, to the history of a particular moment, overwhelmed by a ceaseless

bombardment of photographic spatio-temporal inventory. “Die »Bildidee« vertreibt die Idee”25

(ibid). Quoted enthusiastically in Benjamin’s “Little History,” Bertolt Brecht echoed Kracauer’s

sentiments, if in a specifically more political dimension. “Die Lage wird dadurch so kompliziert,

dass weniger denn je eine ‘Wiedergabe der Realität’ etwas über die Realität aussagt. Eine

21 “as if under a layer of snow” (“Photography” 51) 22 “spatial (or temporal) continuum (50) 23 “it has significance” (50, my emphasis). 24 “But the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. […] The spatial continuum of the camera's

perspective dominates the spatial appearance of the perceived object: the resemblance between the image and the

object eraces the contours of the object's ‘history’” (58). Kracauer also writes: “Die Photographie bietet ein

Raumkontinuum dar; der Historisimus möchte das Zeitkontinuum erfüllen. Die vollständige Spiegelung des

innerzeitlichen Verlaufs birgt nach ihm zugleich den Sinn der in der Zeit abgelaufenen Gehalte” (“Photographie”

24). [“Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According to

historicism, the complete mirroring of an intratemporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that

occurred within that time” (“Photography” 49f.).] 25 “The ‘image-idea’ drives away the idea” (ibid).

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Photographie der Kruppwerke oder der AEG ergibt beinahe nichts über diese Institute”26

(XXI.469, qtd. in GS II.383f.). Where Kracauer saw the expunction of “history,” Brecht noted,

like Benjamin, the erasure of human relations. These Germans, among the earliest theorists of

modern mass-reproduced and massively available photography, couched their arguments within

the context of ideology critique; there was something lost or hidden by the photographic image

like a palimpsest, whether that was Kracauer’s history [Geschichte] or Brecht’s and Benjamin’s

network of human relationships in which the a photographed object or situation is embedded.

This is a photography, “die jede Konservenbüchse ins All montieren, aber nicht einen der

menschlichen Zusammenhänge fassen, in denen sie auftritt”27 (GS II.383). For these critics,

photography functions like a false consciousness.

For these theorists, photography is far from innocent. “In den Illustrierten sieht das Publikum

die Welt, an deren Wahrnehmung es die Illustrierten hindern”28 (“Photographie” 34). The purely

objective technique of photography, and the photo-mechanical mass-reproduction of its images,

becomes then an apparatus of dehistoricization and depersonalization, a type of selective erasure

that leaves only that spatio-temporal inventory—”alle von der Kamera gewissenhaft

aufgezählten Details sitzen richtig im Raum, eine lückenlose Erscheinung”29 (21, my emphasis).

The framework of such critiques of photography remains, however, that of the seemingly

26 “The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything

about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions” (SW

II.526). 27 “that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in

which it exists” (SW II.526). 28 “In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from

perceiving” (“Photography” 58). In another example of his similarities with Kracauer, Brecht wrote similarly: “Das

riesige Bildmaterial, das tagtäglich von den Druckenpressen ausgespien wird, und das doch den Charakter der

Wahrheit zu haben scheint, dient in Wirklichkeit nur der Verdunkelung der Tatsachen” (XXI.515). [“The gigantic

mass of images that is spewed forth everyday by the printing presses and which certainly seems to have the

character of truth, serves in reality only to obscure the facts.”] 29 “all these details, diligently recorded by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance”

(“Photography” 47, my emphasis).

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fundamental Peircean indexicality of photography itself. That is, the ideological critique centers

on that indexical nature of photography, which strips or hollows out the photographed object or

situation of its own meaning or significance. As Mary Ann Doane noted: “Peirce theorizes the

index as potentially outside the domain of human subjectivity and meaning” (94, qtd. in “Von

Selbst” 286). Based upon, and indeed thanks to, this indexicality, modern instantaneous

photography and its mechanical mass-reproduction is able to function so well as a mode of

ideological communication, in that it replaces an historical situation with a flawless,

dehistoricized, depersonalized, or natural appearance. The Berlin-based Hungarian artist and

early theorist of photography, László Moholy-Nagy had applied this theorization to photography

in 1925: “Ein jeder wird genötigt sein, das Optisch-wahre, das aus sich selbst Deutbare,

Objektive zu sehen, bevor [sie] überhaupt zu einer möglichen subjektiven Stellungnahme

kommen kann”30 (Malerei 26). This complex relationship to indexicality was not unique to these

early German and Germany-based critics.

Though Peirce’s own writings surrounding the relationship between photography and

index continue to be debated,31 Peirce’s theory of index, in all of its various readings, has yet to

relinquish its dominate roll in discussions of an ontological definition of photography.32 For

instance, though André Bazin’s 1945 essay, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” did not

utilize Peirce’s terminology of the index, Bazin sets indexicality as the definitional attribute of

that ontology. “L’objectif seul peut nous donne de l’objet une image capable de « défouler » […]

30 “Everyone will be compelled to see what is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before [she]

can arrive at any possible subjective position” (Painting 28). We can see here similar rhetoric to Geimer’s

discussions of “Von selbst entstandene Bilder” [“‘Self-Generated’ Images”]. Moholy-Nagy was a colleague and

friend to many Berlin Dadaists. See, for instance, his book The New Vision 80. 31 See Photography Theory 130f. and the first chapter of Geimer’s Theorien der Fotografie zur Einführung. 32 As Andrew Hershberger writes: “The dominance of this connection [between Peircean indexicality and the

ontological definition of photography] can hardly be overstated” (100). Robin Kelsey, for instance, titled her review

of Photography Theory, “Indexomania.”

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ce besoin de substituer à l’objet mieux qu’un décalque approximatif : cet objet lui-même, mais

libéré des contigences temporelles. L’image […] procède par sa genèse de l’ontologie du modèle

: elle est le modèle”33 (16). Similarly, Roland Barthes is, almost aggressively, accused of being

Peircean in Margaret Olin’s reading of his 1964 essay “Rhetorique de l’image” [“Rhetoric of the

Image”] and in Geoffrey Batchen’s reading of Camera Lucida from 1980.34 While many critical

theorists of photography, whether those initial German thinkers or their more contemporary

counterparts, approached the technology from a standpoint of ideology critique, their focus on a

Peircean indexicality to the level of the rhetoric of the image. When Brecht writes, for example,

“Der Photographenapparat kann ebenso lügen, wie die Setzmaschine”35 (XXI.515), the critique

is leveled far more at the potential lie than the language utilized to tell it.

Many, however, saw the emancipatory potential of photography. Moholy-Nagy “das

Schaffen neuer Relationen”36 (Malerei 27), which would otherwise be glossed over, smoothed

out, or simply remain unnoticed by our intellectual, i.e. subjective experience. This remains,

however, predicated upon photography’s indexicality. “Das Geheimnis ihrer [‘fehlerhaften’

Fotoaufnahmen, die neue Relationen schaffen] Wirkung ist, daß der fotografische Apparat das

rein optische Bild reproduziert und so die optisch-wahren Verzeichnungen, Verzerrungen,

Verkürzungen usw. zeigt”37 (Malerei 26). This potential would go on to influence Benjamin’s

33 “Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object capable of ‘unfolding’ […] the need to

substitute for the object better than an approximate outline: the object itself, though liberated from temporal

contingencies. The image […] proceeds by its genesis of the ontology of the model: it is the model.” 34 Both of these examples can be found in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes Camera

Lucida, as “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” 75-90, and “Camera Lucida:

Another Little History of Photography,” 259-274, respectively. Olin writes that Barthes’s “kind of natural being-

there of objects” [“une sorte d’être-la naturel des objets” (“Rhetorique” 47)] is in fact a “replacement for the usual

term in such arguments, index or indexical, borrowed loosely from Charles Peirce” (76). Batchen is less equivocal:

“Peirce’s theory of the index… is key to Barthes’s ontological definition of photography” (265). 35 “The photographic apparatus can lie just as well as the typesetting machine can.” 36 “the creativity of new relations” 37 “The secret of their [‘faulty’ photographs, which create new relations] effect is that the photographic camera

reproduces the purely optical image and therefore shows the optically true distortions, deformations,

foreshortenings, etc.” (Painting 28).

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concept of the optical-unconscious. “Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche

zum Auge spricht […] Die Photographie mit ihren Hilfsmitteln: Zeitlupen, Vergrößerungen”38

reveals to the eye, aids the eye to perceive that which the eye itself cannot (GS II.371). For both

Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin, the optical-truth is unquestioned as accurate to the camera. This

accuracy is indeed what allows this new vision and these new connections.39 Whether in terms of

the potential seen by Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin (a new, potentially radical vision predicated to

some degree upon some form of indexicality) or by the deep pessimism of Kracauer and Brecht

(some form of indexicality obscures the history or social relations of the photographed object or

situation), a critique of the ways in which the photographic language functions in and of itself

remains underemphasized; a critique of the direct or physically contiguous, of the optically true

relationship between a photographed object or situation and the photograph itself. That is, a

critique of the Peircean radical iconicity as indexicality of the photographic image remains

conspicuously absent. Such a critique might function analogously to that of Althusser’s

elementary ideological effect: the transparency of language.

Where Lanham had summarized Havelock’s idea of linguistic, or rather alphabetical

transparency, “that a reader forgets about its [the alphabet’s] physical aspects and reads right

through it to the meaning beneath” (33), so does indexicality then allow someone, in a way, to

read or look right through the photograph. According to Kracauer, this was precisely the case.

“Sie [die aktuelle Photographie, z.B. von einer Filmdiva] verzeichnet jeweils eine Äußerlichkeit,

die zur Zeit ihrer Herrschaft ein so allgemein verständliches Ausdrucksmittel ist wie die Sprache.

D[ie] Zeitgenoss[in] glaubt auf der Photographie die Filmdiva selber zu erblicken; nicht ihre

38 “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye […] Photography, with its devices of

slow motion and enlargement” (SW II.510). 39 For discussions of New Vision [Neues Sehen] in Bauhaus, in which Moholy-Nagy was foundational, see his Von

Material zu Architektur and Franz Roh’s Foto-Auge.

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Ponny-Frisur nur oder die Pose ihres Kopfes”40 (“Photographie” 29). Similar, if medially

distinct, the viewer of the mass-produced, contemporaneous photograph reads through the

photograph to what she presumes, given the photograph’s radical iconicity as indexicality, to be

the meaning beneath, the actual object. That is, not only can the products of a photographic

apparatus lie like those of a type-setting machine, but they are necessarily lies in and of

themselves, as indexical naturalizations of historical situations. This was not, however, lost on

the Dadaists, who had wished, Tzara assures us, to “direct [their] attacks against the very

fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals”

(Motherwell 404). Their critical attacks expanded to include the language of the photographic

image, what Guy Debord later outlined as “un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par

des images”41 (Société 16, §4). That is, just as the ideology critique put forward by Dadaist

(anti)authors had based itself not only on the subversion of ideological lies but also on the

subversion of language as ideology, or perhaps more specifically on the ideological presumption

of linguistic transparency, so too can we investigate an analogous, media-specific praxis of

Dadaist (anti)photographers, or photomonteurs, those who in many ways began their ideology

critique less with an attempt at the radical rehabilitation of the photographic image through some

filmic, phantasmagoric, or surrealistic form of montage as many early theorists had suggested,42

but rather a far more radical subversion of the photographic image itself, or more precisely its

presumption to an operative photographic indexicality.

40 “In each case it [current-event photography, e.g. of a film star] registers an exteriority which, at the time of its

reign, is a means of expression as generally intelligible as language. The contemporaneous viewer believes that [she]

sees the film diva herself in the photograph, and not just her bangs or the pose of her head” (“Photography” 54). 41 “a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Society 7, §4). Debord’s concept of the spectacle,

though expounded by him in 1967, had indeed begun to take hold with those illustrated newspapers and magazines

at the turn of the century. See, for instance, Graeme Gilloch’s Siegfried Kracauer 224. 42 See, for example, Benjamin’s GS II.379f., SW II.519f.; Kracauer’s “Photographie” 39, “Photography” 62f.; or

Moholy-Nagy’s Malerei 26, Painting 28.

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Experiments and Index

In many ways, the technique of Dadaist photomontage is the combination and radicalization

of two artistic techniques that had immediately preceded it. The first was the papier collé of

Synthetic Cubism, particularly the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. As the name

indicates, this was “the integration of relatively large-scale paper shapes onto the surfaces of

Cubist drawings” (Art Since 112). Picasso’s 1912 Bouteille, journal et verre sur une table (fig.

4.2),43 for instance, glued [collé] a section of a newspaper to the work rather than create a

representation of a newspaper. The introduction of so-called foreign or everyday elements

created an artistic tension between those real-life elements and the remainder of the work, the

drawn likenesses of bottles, guitars, and violins; designs created by the Synthetic Cubist’s

hand.44 Where Cubist papier collé introduced so-called non-artistic elements into the work, the

second artistic technique to contribute to Dadaist photomontage was Futurist parole in libertá

[words in freedom]. Preceded by the nontraditional typographic layout of Symbolist poetry and

the calligrammes of Guillaume Appolinaire, Futurist words-in-freedom strew not only words, but

also onomatopoetic collections of letters across the page. Marinetti’s 1912-14 poem “Zang Tumb

Tumb” stands as perhaps the purest example (fig. 4.8), an account of the Battle of Adrianpole,

which Marinetti covered as a war reporter, now represented by strategically placed words and

onomatopoetic phonemes. With the combination and radicalization of these two techniques, the

43 The work is reproduced in Art Since 1900 114. 44 Further notable examples of Synthetic Cubism include Picasso’s 1912 Violon (fig. 4.3) and Guitare, feuille de

musique et verre (fig. 4.4); Braque’s 1914 Nature morte aux instruments de musique (fig. 4.5); and Juan Gris’s 1914

Le Petit Déjeuner (fig. 4.6). Picasso’s works are reprinted in Art Since 1900 113, 117. See Braque’s Les papiers

collés 167 and Juan Gris’s Catalogue Raisonné 168 for Braque’s and Gris’s works, respectively. While certain

works by Russian Constructivists, such as Kazimir Malevich’s 1914 Солдат первой дивизии [Soldier of the First

Division] (fig. 4.7), more accurately align with the aesthetics of Dadaist photomontage, these were only occasional

or one-off experimentations rather than a dedicated development of a technique.

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introduction of the non-artistic into the work and its highly non-traditional, though strategic

placement within the work, Dadaist photomontage was formulated.

Given their deep antipathy for art as such, however, the Dadaists most often associated with

this new technique of photomontage never spoke of the artistic lineage from which it sprang, but

rather the ideological apparatuses from which it would expropriate its raw material and

subsequently, the ideological apparatuses which it meant to subvert. In many ways, these

apparatuses are evidenced by the very genesis of the technique itself. Similar to the so-called

discovery of the word dada, the mythology surrounding the so-called invention of Dadaist

photomontage is somewhat confused, between two groups: George Grosz and John Heartfield on

the one hand, and Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann on the other.45 As with the word dada, our

discussion is far less focused on any conclusive resolution to the historical question of who

invented photomontage and when than it is on what the surrounding mythologies of that so-

called invention tell us. For the former group of Grosz and Heartfield, photomontage grew out of

care-packages sent between soldiers of World War I, their friends, and family, whether stationed

in the trenches at the front or convalescing in hospitals. Grosz and Heartfield quickly ironized

such packages with the pointedly impractical and sarcastic additions. One such example was a

rough assemblage of “Liqueurpreisliste [,…] Präservativüberstülpungsanleitung, desgl.

Kochrezepte, Schauerromanhefte [,…] Brotmarken, Getreidebörseberichte und

Modeplaudereien”46 (Grosz 63, qtd. in Bergius’s Montage und Metamechanik 22, hereafter

45 As with the word dada, our discussion is far less focused on any conclusive resolution to the historical question of

who invented photomontage and when than it is on what the surrounding mythologies of that so-called “invention”

tell us. For a more historiographic approach, see Dawn Ades’s Photomontage 19-21 or Richter’s DK 117-122. See

also Brigit Doherty’s in depth discussion of the competing stories of the technique’s invention in her dissertation

Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916-1920, esp. 1ff. 46 “price list of liqueurs [,…] pull-on-instruction leaflet for condoms, likewise cooking recipes, gothic dime novels

[,…] food stamps for bread, stock market reports for grain, and fashion gossip” (qtd. in Bergius’s “Dada

Triumphs!” 93, hereafter abbreviated as DT). For an involved history of the care-packages and postcards sent by

Grosz and Heartfield, see Biro 189ff. See also Douglas Kahn’s John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media 23. Grosz

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abbreviated MM). Grosz and, to a larger extent, Heartfield began “aus einer ursprünglich

politisch aufreizenden Spielerei eine bewußte Technik zu entwickeln”47 (Herzfelde 18).

Höch and Hausmann, on the other hand, had been inspired in the course of a 1918 vacation to

the Baltic Sea, where they saw, according to Hausmann, numerous and various instantiations of

some “lithographie en couleurs représentant sur un fond de caserne, l’image d’un grenadier. Pour

rendre se mémento plus personnel, on avait collé à la place de la tête un portrait photographique

du soldat”48 (Courrier 44), or according to Höch: “In der Mitte war der junge Kaiser Wilhelm II

im Kreise seiner Vor– und Nachfahren abgebildet, deutsche Eichen und Orden usw. [und] ein

junger Kanonier”49 (DK 119), upon which a young face or head was glued. As he faced these

Reservistenbilder [reservist-images] (fig. 4.9),50 small pieces of nationalist propaganda which

would represent a local soldier, thanks to his strategically glued head, marching off to war or

standing in solidarity with the Kaiser, Hausmann was struck: “Ce fut comme un éclair, on

pourrait – je le vis instantanément – faire des « tableaux » entièrement composé de photos

découées”51 (Courrier 44). This photographic entirety of the work came to function as one of the

decisive aspects to differentiate what would come to be Dadaist photomontage from Cubist

recounted later: “Im Jahre 1916 als Johnny Heartfield und ich in meinem Südender Atelier an einem Maimorgen

früh um fünf Uhr die Fotomontage erfunden…” (DK 120). [“In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented

photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o’clock on May morning…” (DA 117).] This, of

course, is reminiscent of Hans Arp’s satirical “Deklaration” that he had witnessed Tzara discover the word dada, at

an exceedingly precise time and place, while he had a bread-roll in his left nostril. See Arp’s “Deklaration” in Der

Sängerkrieg in Tirol, oder Dada au Grand Air. 47 “to develop from an originally politically provocative hobby a conscious technique.” Grosz himself noted the

importance of the technique: “dies alles stellt im Kleinen den vielfältigeren Lebensquerschnitt dar, als es je ein

einzelner Roman, sei’s auch noch so ein gutes Buch, jemals geben wird” (Grosz 63). [“on a small scale all this

shows us a more diverse cross-section of life than any single novel, no matter how good, would ever show” (qtd. in

DT 93).] 48 “colorful lithograph depicting the image of a soldier in front of a barracks. To make this military memento more

personal, in place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait.” 49 “In the center was the youthful Kaiser Wilhelm II surrounded by ancestors, descendants, German oaks, medals

and so on [and] a young grenadier” (DA 117). 50 For a fascinating discussion on the production of these Reservistenbilder by Klebedamen [Glue Ladies], see

Brigid Doherty’s dissertation, Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916-1920 10ff. Cf.

Zervigon 54. 51 “In a flash – I saw instantly – one could make a ‘tableau’ entirely from cut up photos.”

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papier collé and Futurist parole in libertá. This echoed Louis Aragon, one of the first to analyze

systematically collage and montage from an art-historical perspective with his 1923 essay, “Max

Ernst: Peinture des illusions,” later included in his 1930 book of essays, Les Collages.52 “De ces

premiers collages sont issues deux catégories d’œuvres bien distinctes, les unes où l’élément

collé vaut pour la forme, où plus exactement par la représentation de l’objet, les autres où il entre

pour sa matière”53 (Collages 44). That is, the latter type of collage remained however “des

oeuvres picturales où se débat un problème de couleur, où tout revient à un enrichissement de la

palette”54 (ibid). The external element introduced to the work was merely a compositional

material meant to highlight the artistic technique of the work, as a piece of newspaper augments

a work of Cubist papier collé, serves as an external catalyst for productive tension within an

otherwise painted or drawn artistic work functionally and aesthetically similar to a peculiar or

conspicuous color choice or brush stroke. As Peter Bürger would later summarize: “[I]m ganzen

bleiben die Realitätsfragmente weitgehend einer ästhetischen Bildkomposition unterworfen”55

(Theorie 99f.).

In opposition, however, Aragon continued: “Le collage moderne [dadaïste]… la [notre

attention] requiert pour ce qu’il a de concerté, d’absolument opposable à la peinture, au-delà de

52 This book served as something of a critical catalogue to the first documented exhibition of collage works, which

took place at the Galerie Goemens in Paris in early 1930. Artists included Cubists Picasso, Braque, and Gris;

Dadaists Arp, Ernst, Duchamp, and Man Ray; and Surrealists Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, and René

Magritte. 53 “From these first collages come two categories of very distinct works, one where the glued element is valued by

the form, or more exactly by the representation of the object, the others where it enters for its matter.” 54 “pictorial works which struggles with a problem of color, where everything reverts to an enrichment of the

palette.” 55 “[T]he reality fragments remain largely subordinate to the aesthetic organization” (Theory 74). This is

corroborated by Höch herself: “Die Klebebilder der Berliner Dadaisten wären demnach einem ganz anderen Prinzip

entsprungen als die der Pariser Kubisten, in deren Collagen das einem gemalten Stilleben eingefügte Stück

Zeitungspapier eine Zeitung darstellte…” (Roditi 62). [“The photomontages of the Berlin Dadaists would therefore

have sprung from a completely different principle than that of the Parisian Cubists, in whose collages a piece of

newspaper was inserted to represent a newspaper in a painted still-life.”]

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la peinture”56 (53f.). That is to say, what productive tension between an exterior element and a

painted design in Synthetic Cubism was now, in the Dadaist montage, a productive tension solely

between those exterior elements themselves. No longer concerned with the manner in which

individual elements represent, and therefore no longer concerned with how those manners

interact, e.g. between a drawn guitar and an excised wine label, the monteur of the Dadaist

montage is able to focus specifically on the interplay between precisely what is being

represented, e.g. between a mass-reproduced photograph of a tire and a mass-reproduced

photograph of a ballerina. Here already we can begin to see, at minimum, the relative shift away

from a Piercean indexicality of Dadaist photomontage. That is, unlike papier collé, which

highlights the tension between the indexical and non-indexical, Dadaist photomontage focused

on the iconicity of the indexical and the symbolic tension created between these excised

fragments, which is to say, how they functioned as language. As products of what came to be

modern photo-journalism and mass media at the intersection of the militant nationalist and

consumerist capitalist ideological apparatuses these industrially mass-reproduced photo-real

images functioned, similarly to what we have already seen, as both site and stake, both target and

weapon of Dadaist photomontage’s investigations and subversions.57

Though Dada had been keenly aware of the role of photo-real mass-reproduction of images

as a growing force within consumerist capitalism since its very inception as Dada, a word almost

certainly expropriated from a photo-illustrated advertisement for a hair strengthening conditioner

that ran in Zürich’s daily newspapers,58 it wasn’t until Berlin and its vast network of illustrated

56 “Modern collage … demands it [our attention] for what it has organized, absolutely opposable to painting, beyond

painting.” 57 See above, page 36. 58 As Raimund Meyer summarized: “Die Firma Bermann & Co. empfahl »Dada« als »haarstärkendes Kopfwasser«”

(25). Another product, featured in the advertisement was described as “Lilienmilchseife” [“Lily-milk soap”], to

which Ball made allusion in his manifesto. Still further, the trademark for the Bergmann & Co. corporation was two

crossed hobby horses, also mentioned in Ball’s manifesto. See fig. 4.10.

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mass media through the end of World War I and the first years of the Weimar Republic that

Dadaist praxis began to concern itself more radically with the photographic image. The very

materials themselves of the first Dadaist photomontages were in fact products of these capitalist

and nationalist apparatuses, whether in the case of Grosz and Heartfield who sent advertising and

marketing for commodities to military actors, or in the case of Höch and Hausmann inspired by

the commodified military mementos of the reservist-images, the very materials themselves were

in fact products of these apparatuses. As Höch mentions, in addition to the importance of the

“Hochentwickling der Fotografie während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Luftaufnahmen, Röntgen und

Nah-Aufnahmen, etc.)”59 (Höch et al 31f.), the mass-produced images themselves as products of

the Ives process were the very “Dinge aus der Maschinenwelt und der Industrie[, die wir] in die

Kunst einbeziehen [wollten]”60 (Roditi 63f.). That is, the excised mass-produced photo-real

images were already commodities, i.e. elements of mass-media newspapers and magazines,

commodities which were in no small part developed by the military. As Schwitters would do

with the letter, and Ball would do with the word, so the Berlin Dadaists began to experiment with

the radical excision of these mass-produced photographic images, the radical cut and de-

contextualization of montage, a violence against the very fundaments of the military and

capitalist apparatuses, violence to the agent of communication between individuals, indeed

violence against violence.

This violence is, of course, elemental to every collage, whether in the form of a small piece

of newspaper excised to represent a newspaper sitting on a table or a local soldier’s head excised

to represent their brave march to the front. Such examples, however, underscore the attempted

59 “high development of photography during the First World War (aerial photographs, x-rays, and close-up images” 60 “objects from the world of machines and industry[, which we wanted] to integrate into the world of art.” Patrizia

McBride, among others, notes that this desire to reference industry and machinery is precisely the purpose to utilize

the German words montieren, Montage, and Monteur [to assemble, assembly, and assembler or mechanic]. See

McBride’s “Montage/Collage” 205.

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suppression of this violence, or rather, they attempt to conceal or disguise it. Papier collé

focused on the mode of representation of the excised within the work, the aesthetic tension that it

created after its excision, rather than the excision itself, while the propagandistic photomontages

of reservist-images and other such military mementos attempted to camouflage or disguise the

necessary cut, placing a head where the head normatively would or should go. Indeed, the heads

printed on reservist-images often serve merely as outlines of where the excised photographed

head should be placed (see fig. 4.9). Dadaist praxis, to the contrary, thematized the cut. This

thematized violence, however, was not merely a general violence against the communicative

agent of nationalist and capitalist ideological apparatuses, but rather also a pointedly specific

violence against the presumption to indexicality given to mass-media’s reproduction of

photographic images. This is not merely the “various modes of ‘correcting’ nature” such as

“adding […] iconic details to the photograph’s indexical base” (Altman 43), but rather a radical

violence. That is to say, Dadaist photomontage is not merely an aesthetic destabilization of the

photograph’s indexicality, but rather of the presumption to boundless iconicity, indexicality

itself, of “what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its

indexicality)[, which was] only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium”

(Hainge 716).61 Dadaist photomontage, through the radicality of their excisions, juxtapositions,

and violence, destroyed that normativity and indexicality or rather showed that normativity as

normativity. Surprisingly, Rosalind Krauss, whose 1977 two-part essay “Notes on the Index”62

61 Martin Lefebvre makes a similar argument in relation to the waning of indexicality in the age of digital

photography and computer generated images. See his “The Art of Pointing: On Peirce, Indexicality, and

Photographic Images” in Photography Theory as well as his essay with Marc Furstenau, “Digital Editing and

Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and Beyond.” 62 Peter Geimer states, for example, that Krauss’s essays functioned as “[d]ie erste Reaktivierung der peirceschen

Semiotik innerhalb der Fototheorie” (Theorien der Fotografie 25). [“the first reactivation of the Peircean semiotic

within the theory of photography”]

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almost single-handedly revived the use of Peircean indexicality within photographic theory and

art history, connects the violence of the cut with a violence to the index.

In her essay, Krauss contrasts the works of Lucio Pozzi, with whose works she associates the

indexicality of the photograph, the “quality of transfer or trace [that] gives the photograph its

documentary states, its undeniable veracity”63 (2.59), with the works of Ellsworth Kelly, whose

works take, according to Krauss, “discontinuity” itself as its message (2.63). An abstract artists

best known for his Hard-Edge and Color Field painting, “Kelly’s work is[, unlike that of Pozzi,]

detached from its surroundings. […] Therefore whatever occurs within the perimeters of Kelly’s

painting must be accounted for with reference to some kind of internal logic of the work”64

(ibid). In opposition to Pozzi’s operations of the index, “Kelly’s work is about defining the

pictorial convention as a process of arbitrary rupture of the field (a canvas surface) into the

discontinuous units that are the necessary constituents of signs” (2.64, my emphasis). Though

she does not mention specifically which type of signs these are, she gives a telling example in

Kelly’s series of paintings entitled Spectrum (fig. 4.12). “[U]nlike the continuum of the real

world, painting is a field of articulations or divisions. It is only by […] creating discontinuous

units that it can produce a system of signs, and through those signs, meaning. An analogy we

could make here is to the color spectrum which language arbitrarily divides up into […] the

names of hues” (ibid).65 That is to say, this is the introduction of the symbolic, and for Dadaist

photomontage, the (re)introduction of the symbolic into the photographic medium.

63 Along with Krauss’s own quotation of Barthes’s “Rhetorique de l’image,” which Olin so thoroughly highlighted

as fundamental to contemporary conceptions of the photographic indexicality, this is but one of many quotations in

Krauss’s article that confirm her conviction of the indexical photograph. For example, “[T]his indexical quality [of a

sign connected to a referent along a purely physical axis] is precisely the one of photography” (2.63). 64 The Pozzi works to which Krauss refers are installation specific, mirroring directly the change in the paint of the

wall on which the painting was displayed. Two of these works are reproduced in Krauss’s essay, 2.62. See fig. 4.11. 65 Within this series of painting, many instances conform to yet another element of Kelly’s works that interested

Krauss, the extensive use of polyptychs. “In the kind of Kelly I have in mind, the demands of an internal logic are

met by the use of jointed panels, so that the seam between the two color fields marks an actual physical rift within

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This discontinuity, however, had always defined photography. As Krauss herself notes in her

quotation of Barthes: “[S]ans doute la photographie implique un certain aménagement de la

scène [tel que] cadrage”66 (“Rhetorique” 42). Dadaist photomontage radicalizes and relocates the

borders of this cropping from its normative position as the external most and singular frame of

the work, as well as the viewer’s normative perception of it, through the thematization of the

violence of the cut, excision, and decontextualization now brought to the interior of the work

itself. That is, not only is the previous frame radicalized through the introduction of a

conspicuous series of internal sub-frames, but also violated as frame, each element excised from,

and reminiscent of, the external world, now introduced into the work. This is not merely a

reintroduction of what Bazin called the “intervention créatrice de l’homme” or the “personalité

d[e la] photographe”67 (“Ontologie” 15), though it could be viewed that way, but rather functions

as a technique to show that this intervention had never left, that the normative perception of

photography as indexical had in fact repressed it, literally pushed it to the margins, to the edges.

This repression of the subjectivity of the photographer, the presumption “dass hier kein Mensch

im Spiel war”68 (“Von Selbst” 285), subsequently represses the roll of those Peircean concepts

dependent upon human subjectivity, the icon and the symbol. As James Elkins notes, “the use of

the index in isolation from the symbol and icon is a misuse of Peirce’s theory, since he was

adamant that every sign includes elements of all three” (Photography Theory 131). The violent

cut thematized by Dadaist photomontage, then, not only subverts the presumption to ontological

indexicality of the photograph, but also engenders the perception of the photograph as capable of

modes of subjective, i.e. iconic and symbolic, representation. That is, while each fragment of the

the fabric of the work as a whole” (2.63), all of which further highlights the theme of “discontinuity” within the

work. See fig. 4.13. 66 “Undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene [such as] cropping” (“Notes” 2.59) 67 “creative intervention of man” or the “personality of the photographer” 68 “that no person was involved” (“Self-generated Images” 27).

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Dadaist photomontage “is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical

relationship to its object” (“Notes” 1.75), they also, according to Aragon, “joue le rôle d’un

mot”69 (Les Collages 44, my emphasis), that is, play the role of a symbol.70 One reads a

photomontage, as one reads any other work of art.

69 “plays the role of a word” (my emphasis). In her 1981 essay “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,”

Krauss would write of Aragon’s quote: “he refers […] to the transparency of each signifying element[…], but also to

the experience of each element as a separate unit which, like a word, is conditioned by its placement within the

syntagmatic chain of the sentence, is controlled by the condition of syntax” (“Photographic Conditions” 105). Here

we see our analogy between photographic indexicality and linguistic transparency in operation. 70 Peirce utilized general language as an example of the symbolic in his system of signs. See Peirce’s CP II.168

[2.298].

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Photomontages

Chronologically, the first two Dadaist photomontages to read give us an initial idea as to one

of the major ways in which Dadaist photomontage thematized the violence of the montage-cut.

On 15 February 1919, the Herzfelde brothers, Wieland and Helmut (who at the time had yet to

anglicize his name to John Heartfield) published a small pamphlet, Jedermann sein eigener

Fussball [Everybody Their Own Soccerball] (fig. 4.14). Almost immediately banned for its

support of Bavarian revolutionaries in the face of newly elected Social Democratic Scheidemann

Cabinet, the tumultuously elected cabinet in the new Weimar Republic,71 and resulting in two

weeks of detention for Wieland Herzfelde,72 the cover of the pamphlet carries the oldest two

remaining Dadaist photomontages. The larger of the two, centered on the broadsheet, is George

Grosz’s Galerie deutscher Mannesschönheit, Preisfrage “Wer ist der Schönste??” [Gallery of

German Manly Beauty, Prize Question “Who is the Most Beautiful??”]. Though not exemplary

of the radically experimental nature that would come to characterize Dadaist photomontages,

Galerie gives some initial clues to Dadaist thematizations of the violent cut. Initially, the work

appears similar to those military mementos described by Höch and Hausmann, a series of

portraits of the leaders of the Scheidemann Cabinet. Unlike reservist-images and military

mementos, however, the self importance evident in these portraits was pilloried not only by the

title’s explicit sarcasm, but also their alignment along a middle-class woman’s handfan. In the

middle of the montage, below the arrayed fan and therefore conspicuously visible, which is to

say iconically thematized, as extracted, as cut (visible against the white background) rather than

71 Communists and the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands [Communist Party of Germany] famously boycotted

the election in the aftermath of the failed Sparticist Uprising in January of 1919, in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl

Liebknecht were murdered by the paramilitary Freikorps. 72 For a history of Jedermann and the legal troubles that it brought about, see Bergius’s DT 52.

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arranged (hidden against the black fan), is a half-length portrait of the uniformed General Erich

Ludendorff, World War I military leader; champion of the reviled Gesetz über den

vaterländischen Hilfsdienst [Auxillary Service Law], and zealous enemy of both the November

and later Sparticist revolutionaries targets of his infamous Dolchstoßlegende.73 On his shoulders

are smaller portraits of Gustav Noske (left) and Matthias Erzberger (right), the war and finance

ministers, respectively. The visible violence of Grosz’s cut, a violence that clashes with the

otherwise formally aesthetic layout of the woman’s handfan, is put into stark relation with the

radical violence Ludendorff himself perpetrated. This violence of excision and

recontextualization also extends beyond the work.

During the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe,74 Grosz’s Galerie was included in the upper

center of Otto Dix’s large 1920 oil painting Kriegskrüppel (45% Erwerbsfähig)75 (fig. 4.15). The

approximately three square meter painting features a parade of four World War One veterans,

each an amputee, from one limb to all four. Indeed, one of the very few functional limbs within

Dix’s work is a shop-sign which ironically points potential consumers to the local

Schuhmacherei [Shoe Maker] on the street down which the veterans hobble, limp, roll, and

skitter. As arranged for the Dada-Messe, this shop sign hand now articulates directly and

accusatorially to the series of German politicians in Grosz’s Galerie (fig. 4.16). Already with this

first photomontage, we are able to see one of the fundamental ways in which Dadaist praxis

thematized the violence of the montage cut, namely by placing that cut, by making that cut

73 Stab-in-the-back Myth. For a historical overview of this episode, and its repercussions, see Boris Barth’s

Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. See also, Paul von Hindenburg’s “Erklärung,” which he gave to

parliament on 18 November 1919. Ludendorff was a real asshole. 74 First International Dada Fair. The fair took place from 1 July - 25 August 1920 in Dr. Otto Burchard’s gallery in

Berlin and by all accounts was the largest and most successful Dadaist action/exhibition. As such, we will return to

it regularly throughout the remainder of the chapter. For a list of the 170-some works on display there, See Bergius’s

MM 293ff., DT 277ff. 75 War Cripples: 45% Fit for Service. For a discussion of the theme of dismemberment in the works of Otto Dix, see

Dietrich Schubert’s “Krüppeldarstellungen im Werk von Otto Dix nach 1920: Zynismus oder Sakrasmus?”

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visible on the body. Though here uniquely military, montage-violence done to the body did not

discriminate, but was rather the basis for Berlin Dadaist praxis as such. According to Richard

Huelsenbeck’s infamous “Dadaistisches Manifesto” delivered almost a year before the Dada-

Messe: “Die höchste Kunst wird diejenigen sein, die in ihren Bewußtseinsinhalten die

tausendfachen Probleme der Zeit präsentiert, der man anmerkt, daß sie sich von den Explosionen

der letzten Woche werfen ließ, die ihre Glieder immer wieder unter dem Stoß des letzten Tages

zusammensucht. Die besten und unerhörtesten Künstler[innen] werden diejenigen sein, die

stündlich die Fetzen ihres Leibes aus dem Wirrsal der Lebenskatarakte zusammenreißen”76

(Almanach 36). Huelsenbeck promotes then the artist who performs the violence of the

explosions of last week on or with her own body in order that her work is able to present that

violence.

In other words, through the performance of the violence of the montage-cut, the explosive

violence of the world is presented, is made visible. We can see this dynamic similarly play out

with the second photomontage to adorn the cover of Jedermann, which as a literalization of the

title of the pamphlet was given the same name. This photomontage, most often attributed to John

Heartfield, is composed of the limbs and head of his brother Wieland Herzfelde, the editor and

publisher of the pamphlet itself, though with a soccer ball in the place of the trunk of his body,

each element woefully disproportionate to the other; head twice too small, legs twice too large,

arms stiff and displaced. That is, the soccer ball has not simply replaced his chest and abdomen,

but the violence of the montage has transformed each and every element of him. Despite this

violence, Soccer-Ball-Herzfelde remains the proper bourgeois gentleman, refined with his

76 “The highest art will be that whose mental content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has

manifestly allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is forever trying to gather up its

limbs after the impact of yesterday. The best and most unprecedented artists will be those who continuously snatch

the tatters of their bodies out of the chaos of life’s cataracts” (Almanac 45). This was delivered in April 1918.

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walking cane and tipping his bowler cap in greeting to the readers of the pamphlet. This radical

juxtaposition, where the violence of the montage that seems to simultaneously create and

illustrate the de– and malformed human body is placed into high tension with everyday

bourgeois societal norms, becomes fundamental to this first form of Dadaist photomontage. That

is, not only is the violence of World War I thematized, represented, and recalled by the violence

of the montage-cut, Huelsenbeck’s explosions of the last week that had tattered veterans’ limbs,

but violence is transposed onto Herzfelde’s bourgeois Jedermann [Everybody], a metonym for

Weimar society itself, here commodified, transmogrified into a commodity,77 and specifically

into a commodity to be violently kicked, to be “buffeted by external forces” (Biro 32). The

violence of the montage-cut parallels Huelsenbeck’s manifesto: “Dadaist sein, heißt, sich von

Dingen werfen lassen”78 (Almanach 40); in order that, as Hugo Ball would later write in

reference to Dada Zürich’s own spasmodic dances, “[d]as Grauen dieser Zeit, der paralysierende

Hintergrund der Dinge […]sichtbar gemacht [ist]”79 (Flucht 97). Here, we can see the Dadaist

photomontages as response to Brecht’s and Kracauer’s veil of indexicality that conceals politics

and history. This visibility, however, is not merely the result of Soccer-Ball-Herzfelde,

continually kicked by ideological forces beyond his/its control, but rather Bodily-Dismembered-

Herzfelde, that first thematization of the violence of the montage-cut: upon the body.

The relationship between montage-violence and that of physical violence, which is to say

violence done to the human body, particularly the violence endured by veterans of World War I,

has existed since the first critical investigations of Dadaist montage. As we saw in his

77 When the photomontage is reprinted in Dada 3 as Der Dadaist Wieland Herzfelde, a small speech bubble is added

to the work which redoubles the role of the commodity to the work and adds a touch of ironic militaristic anti-

nationalism: “Kaufen Sie die Bücher des Malik-Verlags und vergessen Sie nicht: DADA SIEGT!!!” [“Buy books

from the Malik-Verlag and don’t forget: DADA TRIUMPHS!!!”] Reprinted in Niebisch 104. 78 “for being a Dadaist means allowing oneself to be hurled by things” (Almanac 49) 79 “[t]he horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible” (Flight 65).

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“Kunstwerk” essay, Walter Benjamin noted: “Aus einem lockenden Augenschein oder einem

überredenden Klanggebilde wurde das Kunstwerk bei den Dadaisten zu einem Geschoß. Es stieß

dem Betrachter zu. Es gewann eine taktische Qualität,” a forerunner of filmic montage, a

“Wechsel der Schauplätze und Einstellungen […], welche stoßweise auf den Beschauer

eindringen”80 (GS VII.379). These shots, jolts, and percussions affect, in a tactile, bodily manner,

their viewers. Brigid Doherty utilizes this theoretical framework along with Benjamin’s concept

of shock in her influential essay, “‘See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics’!’ or, the Trauma of Dada

Montage,”81 in which she argues that “the capacity to induce trauma inheres specifically in the

form of photomontage, where […] traumatic shock is made visible in a fragmented body” (84).

This trauma is to be taken on by the Dadaists, who, as great artists, gather up their limbs from the

explosions of last week “in a way that will allow [her]—perhaps compel [her]—to comprehend

the frenzy and the specific intellect of [her] age because [s]he can identify with them[, …] men

who had indeed been thrown by explosions” (89, my emphasis). For Doherty, then, montage

itself “is a vehicle for the monteur’s traumatophilia” (129), a “bodily identification with the

traumatic shocks it simulates” (132). Doherty sees Dadaist montage-violence on the body as a

means of identification, where Dadaists themselves, and presumably the spectators of their

works, identify with the victims of the explosions of last week and therefore the thousandfold

problems of the day. Matthew Biro saw in Dadaist photomontage a technique in which one could

critique the social and cultural institutions, which is to say ISAs, responsible for last week’s

explosions, while simultaneously coping with and even surviving them.

80 “From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a

bullet. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile quality” ; “successive changes of scenes and focus which have a

percussive effect on the spectator” (Work of Art 39, translation slightly modified). See above, page 24f. 81 Much of this work stems from her dissertation, Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916-

1920, particularly the second chapter, entitled “The Shock of Montage.” Unfortunately, Doherty’s book project on

Dadaist montage mentioned in a paratextual note to the essay never came to fruition.

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In his essay “The New Man as Cyborg,” Biro notes that the cyborgian aspect of Dadaist

photomontages,82 notably those of Raoul Hausmann, was not only critical but “also a figure upon

which a broad range of Weimar modernists could project their utopian hopes and fantasies” (71).

At the dawn of so many technological breakthroughs, Biro argues, “Hausmann’s cyborgs

expressed both pleasure and anxiety about human hybridity” (Dada Cyborg 151), where the

cyborg, thanks to its mechanical or technological augmentation, not entirely unlike Hausmann’s

utilizations of the mechanical and technological reproduced photo-real images to create those

cyborg-representations, “could live in environments for which it was not adapted” (2), even, or

perhaps especially if that environment was the able-bodied/abled privileged world upon the loss

of a limb or development of a traumatic disorder. That is, Biro’s Dadaist cyborg contains within

it both the technology responsible for last week’s explosions but also the ostensibly

emancipatory ability to gather up one’s limbs after those explosions. While the effect of such

violence upon the formation of the subject is suggested by, if not central to, both Doherty’s

“Neurasthenic” and Biro’s “Cyborg” studies of the trauma and violence of Dadaist

photomontage, Patrizia McBride has more recently focused on the violence particular to the

praxis of photomontage, namely the cut, and moreover the bodily cut.

While Doherty’s 1998 essay, “Figures of the Pseudorevolution,” had noted that “[s]urgery

was another favored Dadaist metaphor, with montage as violent vivisection” (75),83 McBride

suggests that this montage cut allows “a way of seeing that draws on and literalizes

contemporary discourses concerned with refashioning identity” (“Montage and Violence” 263).

Unlike the gunshot or explosion, purely destructive to whatever identity it comes across, the

82 Biro defines the cyborg, both in his essay and the book-length study that would follow, The Dada Cyborg: Visions

of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, “as a synthesis of organic and technological elements” (“New Man” 71). 83 Benjamin’s “Kunstwerk” essay plays with the idea of the cut of montage and surgery. See, for example, GS

I.495f. See also Susan Buck-Morss’s essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay

Reconsidered.”

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darkly comical euphemism of surgery encompasses both the violence of the montage-cut and the

Dadaist gathering-up that is meant to follow, the attempted or proposed fixing, refashioning, or

in our terms, the reconstitution of the subject, here literalized by the representation of bodies and

limbs excised, reassembled, augmented, destroyed or wholesale replaced, but seemingly

haphazardly slapped back together or agglomerated. For McBride, this is that discourse

“concerned with refashioning identity,” a “cultural framework [of] subjectivity[, …] formed

through individuals’ interaction with their environment and in the reciprocal gaze they exchange

with others” (Chatter 154).84 That is to say, the violence of the montage cut on, and

reconstitution of the body is the (re)formulation of the subject in socio-cultural interaction, which

is to say interpellation. As Devin Fore aptly summarizes in the front matter of McBride’s

Chatter: “every montage cut also entails a suture.” This intersection of the surgical violence of

the bodily montage-cut and reconstitution of the (bodily) subject leads us to the bourgeois

portrait, which “functions as a site for the formation of subjectivity,” for both the represented

subject and their viewer, “problematizing the very act of seeing with its attendant acts of

identification, misrecognition, projection, and imitation” (Ginsburg 3). To borrow Doherty’s title

for a moment then, not only are we all neurasthenics, but that shattered subjectivity is now,

through the violence of the montage-cut and subsequent gathering-up of Dadaist photomontage,

literalized, manifested, made visible on the physical body, which is to say, we are all surgical

subjects, all perpetually (re)constituted ideological subjects.

We can see this bodily materialization from Doherty’s title, which she took from a short 1917

poem written by George Grosz, which ends “Ich bin eine Maschine, an der der Manometer

84 McBride utilizes this framework in both her essay “Montage and Violence in Weimar Culture: Kurt Schwitters’

Reassembled Individuals,” as well as her 2016 book, The Chatter of the Visible, into which her essay would be

incorporated as the sixth chapter. She borrows from Helmut Lethen’s Verhaltenslehren der Kälte in both instances.

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entzwei ist—! / Und alle Walzen spielen im Kreis— / Siehe: wir sind allzumal

Neurastheniker!”85 (“Kaffeehaus” 155). Some three years later, Raoul Hausmann’s

photomontage Selbstporträt des Dadasophen86 (fig. 4.17) would literalize many of those same

characteristics mentioned by Grosz. Seated in an armchair, well clothed, the subject has been

radically altered by the photomontage process, the lungs exposed and connected via a series of

valves, tubes, and piping to the subject’s head, here entirely replaced by an enormous pressure

gauge. As Doherty notes of a previous line in Grosz’s poem, “Und wie Bandstreifen, Film / dreht

sich rot und gelb” (ibid), the locale in which Grosz’s poet sits “is transformed before the man’s

eyes, its furnishing seen through colored filters of twisting film” (“See: ‘We Are All

Neurasthenics’!” 95), which we see in Hausmann’s Selbstporträt as a projector attached to the

pressure-gauge head. Not only is this portrait somehow simultaneously a materialized

representation of Grosz’s poeticized war veteran,87 as well as an ostensible self-portrait of the

Dadasoph-Hausmann, if the title is to be believed, but also, as Doherty points out, a radical

augmentation of a portrait of Gustav Noske for the 2 March 1919 cover of BIZ (“Figures” 72;

75f.; fig. 4.18).88 That is, we don’t know precisely who or what this is. Though it has the form of

a traditional bourgeois portrait, it is at the very least no longer one, in so far as there is no stable

human subject.

This instability is central to what Theodor Adorno calls the “Funktion der Montage, die

ebenso, durch die sich hervorkehrende Disparatheit der Teile, Einheit desavouiert, wie, als

85 “I am a machine whose pressure gauge has gone to pieces! / And all the cylinders run in a circle— / See: we are

all neurasthenics!” Doherty quotes poem in its entirety, along with a translation, in “See: ‘We Are All

Neurasthenics’!” 93ff. 86 Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph. The photomontage is reproduced and discussed at length, if as an exemplar of

Hausmann’s positive feelings towards technological advancement, in Biro 118 87 Despite these similarities, Doherty surprisingly makes no connection between Grosz’s poem and Hausmann’s

photomontage in her essays. 88 Noske will, of course, play a large role going forward. For now, however, we wish to focus on the technique of

Dadaist photomontage portraiture, rather than the individual elements of a given work.

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Formprinzip, sie auch wieder bewirkt”89 (Ästhetische Theorie 231f.). That is, the fragmentary

elements, which together create something of the outline of this unified form, incessantly gesture

away from that form, which is to say, gesture towards potentially anything so long as it is not the

fulfilled form. In this way, photomontage responds almost perfectly to Kracauer’s criticism of

the film diva’s photo, or Brecht’s of the factory, in that it continually motions to that which is not

represented in the work, its history or politics. For Hausmann’s Selbstporträt, it is both a

bourgeois posed portrait and anything but one. This apparent disparity between the form of a

subject and the disparate fragments that simultaneously unify that form and refuse to reference it,

highlights the inherently allegorical nature of montage. Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde

suggested Walter Benjamin’s theory of Baroque allegory as a means to explore this fundamental

discrepancy in avant-gardist montage.90 In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of

German Tragic Drama], Benjamin writes: “Das Bild im Feld der allegorischen Intuition ist

Bruchstück. […] Der falsche Schein der Totalität geht aus”91 (GS I.352). He continues: “[E]ine

Bedeutung, einen Sinn auszustrahlen, ist er von nun an ganz unfähig; an Bedeutung kommt ihm

das zu, was d[ie] Allegoriker[in] ihm verleiht. […] In [ihr]er Hand wird das Ding zu etwas

89 “function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that,

as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity” (Aesthetic Theory 154). 90 Bürger does not investigate the Dadaist photomontages of Berlin, per se, but rather John Heartfield’s later

montages which showed themselves as montages more though their quasi-surrealistic themes than through the

visible cut of the montage. As Bürger notes of Heartfield’s work: “Im gewissen Sinne steht die Fotomontage dem

Film nahe – nicht nur deshalb, weil beide das Mittel der Fotografie benutzen, sondern auch deshalb, weil in beiden

Fällen das Faktum der Montage unkenntlich oder zumindest schwer erkennbar gemacht wird” (Theorie 104). [“In a

certain sense, photomontage is close to film not only because both use photography but also because in both cases,

the montage is obscured or at least made difficult to spot” (Theory 76).] However, as we will see, Bürger’s use of

Benjamin’s theory of allegory holds for our more technically Dadaist photomontages. 91 “In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment. […] The false appearance of totality is extinguished”

(Origin 176). Quoted in Bürger’s Theorie 94; Theory 69.

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anderem, [sie] redet dadurch von etwas anderem”92 (I.359). For Hausmann’s Selbstporträt, then,

the totality undone is that of the bourgeois subject itself.

This totality is undone not only in that Noske’s previous portrait has been itself transformed

beyond recognition into a fragmentary element, only his limbs visible to the observer, but in that

the traditional form of the bourgeois posed portrait is now radically dependent upon all manner

of so-called external, societal elements. With lungs exposed, no longer under the control of any

internal diaphragm, the form of the bourgeois subject is no longer able to speak for itself, but

rather only expresses or mirrors the pressure of its external environment through its gauge-head,

which according to the advertisement from which it was excised is fully “Militärtechnisch

geprüft u. vorzüglich begutachtet!”93 (Huttenlocher; fig. 4.19), an intersection of both the

consumerist capitalism and nationalist militarism ISAs.94 Attached to the gauge-head is yet

another apparatus of reproduction, the film projector, only able to repeat what has been filmed by

another. Here we see the self portrait of Dadasoph-Hausmann, who wished only to cite his

moment, formed from, and expressed through elements of his ideological surroundings. All of

this is to say, the bourgeois subject is unable to function as presumed, as a unified, self-

constituted subject, but rather merely mirrors its societal environment. Indeed, these instruments

which constitute this subject, are notably indexical in nature,95 responding almost directly to the

92 “[I]t [the allegorical object] is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such

significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. […] In [her] hands the object becomes something different;

through it [s]he speaks of something different” (Origin 184). Quoted in Bürger’s Theorie 94, Theory 69. 93 “Tested for military technology and excellently reviewed.” See the May/June 1916 issue of Motor 122. Motor

likely served many other Dadaist photomontages, as the magazine included many illustrated advertisements,

particularly for tires, wheels, and bearings, images often utilized in Dadaist photomontages. See MM 112-129; DT

154-164. 94 The advertisement continues: “Er [der ‘Pfeil’-Standmesser] steht infolge seiner technischen Vollendung

unerreicht da und ist daher unentbehrlich für Flugzeuge, Luftkreuzer, Automobile, Motorboote, Kriegsschiffe u. alle

sonstigen stationären u. fahrbahren Anlagen” (Huttenlocher). [“Because of its [the pressure-gauge] technical

perfection, it is unmatched for airplanes, aircrafts, automobiles, motorboats, warships and any other stationary and

mobile equipment.”] 95 As mentioned above, of course, there is no purely indexical sign. However, much like the weathervane mentioned

directly by Peirce, a pressure-gauge bears a notable physical relationship to what it signifies.

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external stimuli, and thereby reducing any presumed subjective agency of the seated

individual/Dadasoph, a simultaneous creation and annihilation of the self.96 For the Dadaist

photomontage portrait, then, the “zwei produktionsästhetische[n] Begriffe, von denen einer die

Materiealbehandlung (Herausbrechen von Elementen aus einem Kontext), der andere die

Werkkonstitution (Zusammenfügung der Fragmente und Sinnsetzung) betrifft”97 (Theorie 94),

are placed in something of a negative relationship, where the former is utilized to hollow-out the

latter, to de-center, de-stabilize, or de-construct the traditional, ideological view of a self-

constituted subject, now revealed as an agglomeration of external forces, viewpoints, and

pressures, particularly those of consumerist capitalism and nationalist militarism. As McBride

summarizes, “montage […] enables the Dadaists to construe allegorical compositions that

denounce the status quo and simultaneously stage their own unraveling to undermine the residual

representational structure in which they are embedded” (Chatter 16).98 That is, Dadaist montage

creates a formal composition while it simultaneously subverts both that creation and the elements

of its creation such as the bourgeois subject and the ephemera of the ISAs that create it.

In many ways, this praxis is utilized throughout Dadaist works, from Tzara’s suggestion that

a collection of randomly cut out words resembles the one who excised and chose them, to

multiple assemblages, and even a series of portraits composed from newspaper fragments.99 Here

96 See above, page 138. 97 “two production-aesthetic concepts, one of which relates to the treatment of the material (removing elements from

a context), the other to the constitution of the work (the joining of fragments and the positing of meaning)” (Theory

70) 98 This, then, gives a significantly less techno-optimistic, and more revolutionary view of Dadaist photomontage’s

representations of technology. 99 Unfortunately too numerous to detail here, other examples of this form of Dadaist photomontage include, the

eighth section of Tzara’s “Dada Manifeste sur l’Amour Faible et l’Amour Amer” [“Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love

and Bitter Love”] from OC I.382; SML 39, the assemblages Der wildgewordene Spiesser Heartfield [The Middle-

Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild] (fig. 4.20) and Mechanischer Kopf: Geist unserer Zeit [Mechanical Head:

Spirit of our Time] (fig. 4.21), by Grosz & Heartfield and Hausmann respectively, also follow this montage praxis.

Hausmann’s series of portraits include Porträt einer alten Frau [Portrait of an Old Woman] (fig. 4.22), Porträt

eines Dienstmannes [Portrait of a Porter] (fig. 4.23), and Gurk (fig. 4.24). In certain ways, this series is a precursor

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then, Dadaist photomontage is the formation of the (bourgeois) subject, in the form of a posed

portrait, while that formation is shown, if only allegorically, to be anything but its traditionally

presumed self-constitution, but rather a violent composition of violated societal and cultural

ephemera, in place of the ever-growing use of press-photography to represent supposedly unified

bourgeois and political portraits.100 That is, each subject, presumed by the masses to be self-

constituted thanks to press-photography, are shown as an agglomeration of external and often

violent forces, viewpoints, etc., which press-photography in the wake of the war was also all too

willing to disseminate. While visible in many Dadaist photomontage portraits,101 this complex is

made particularly explicit with Grosz’s Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft [A Victim/Sacrifice of

Society] (fig. 4.32).

Grosz’s Opfer, that is, both victim and sacrifice, makes this complex relationship explicit, not

only with its equivocal title, but also with the large question mark attached to the subject’s

unsure and questioning forehead, and straight-razor placed threateningly at his throat. Similar to

Hausmann’s Der Kunstreporter [The Art Critic] (fig. 4.33), whose eyes and mouth have been

excised and remain uncannily empty save their slight delineation with red pencil and newspaper

clippings, the eyes of Grosz’s Opfer have proliferated; his right seemingly unaffected, his left

now covered by an excised and inverted eye of another, and finally, a third eye, similar in

appearance and color to that which covered his left, oriented vertically placed atop his left ear.

Like the colored film-projector of Hausmann’s Selbstporträt, there is here not only a

multiplication, but also a transformative othering of the portrait-subject’s available senses of

of Heartfield’s 1930 Wer Bürgerblätter Liest [Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers] (fig. 4.25), which adorned the

front of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung [AIZ, Worker’s Illustrated Newspaper]. 100 See, for example the cover of Der Welt Spiegel [The World Mirror] (fig. 4.26), which was published the very day

after Grosz’s Galerie (fig. 4.14). 101 Examples include Hausmann’s Elasticum (fig. 4.27), ABCD (fig. 4.28), and Tatlin lebt zu Hause [Tatlin at

Home] (fig. 4.29), Grosz’s Herr Krause (fig. 4.30), and Georg Scholz’s Industriebauern [Industrial Farmers] (fig.

4.31).

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perception, specifically through the eyes of another rather than his own, or some techno-

mechanical contraption of a nose. Unable to see with his own eyes, hear with his own ears, or

smell with his own nose, he is also unable to speak through his own mouth, replaced by some

anonymous surrogate-mouth. The Opfer is then nothing but a questioned mind which perceives

with the organs of another, any of whose expressions are always already necessarily othered, all

of which is placed atop an unfinished, but properly buttoned, bourgeois portrait. This

incompleteness explains that these accoutrements are less a mask than the fundamental elements

of the subject’s constitution, a presumption of a finished, constituted subject.102 We can see,

however, thanks to his distinctive goatee, even if slightly covered by the other’s mouth, that

unfinished portrait as none other than Friedrich Ebert, the first democratically elected president

of the Weimar Republic.103 These two exemplary Dadaist photomontages, then, Heartfield’s

Selbstporträt and Grosz’s Opfer take Noske and Ebert, the Defense Minister and President of the

contentiously elected Scheidemann Cabinet, neither of whom are identified by the works

themselves, as the basis of their portraits. They are, since that first Soccer-Ball-Herzfelde

photomontage, the quasi-anonymous Jedermann, everybody and nobody who only gauge the

pressure of the external environment and connect through others, simultaneously the target,

location, and agent of ideology, identifiable by their frock coats, which “again in Germany in

1919[ was] the republic’s uniform [… and…] might have become the emblem of the republic”

102 Doherty, in her “Figures of the Pseudorevolution” suggests that the subject “wear[s] a mask of the present […]

made out of the features of mutilated veterans and model consumers, bits and pieces of painted faces in cheap color

reproduction and machine parts clipped from catalogues or newspapers” (78). 103 Doherty likens this painted portrait to the first mass-media portrait of Ebert upon gaining such political power

from the cover of 17 November 1918’s Der Welt-Spiegel [The World-Mirror] (fig. 4.34). In fact, this portrait was

utilized earlier by Grosz as the depiction of Ebert in his photomontage Galerie. Indeed, in yet another connection,

Grosz’s Opfer was, like Galerie, mounted on Otto Dix’s painting Kriegskrüppel, taking the place of the head of the

veteran to the far left of the painting. See again, fig. 4.16.

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according to Doherty (“Figures” 68). Ebert and Noske, everybody and nobody, all metonyms for

the Weimar Republic, its body politic.

While the first form of Dadaist photomontage that we investigated thematized its violence on

the body, an everybody hung on the shoulders of art critics, political figures, and even Dadaists

themselves, we can see this specified violence as metonymic of something more general: the

society and the culture against which Dadaist praxis appeared most focused. As such, the

violence of the Dadaist montage-cut perpetrated against the human body is a violence against the

society and culture in which those bodies dwell. As Michel de Certeau notes, “[l]e « n’importe

qui » ou le « tout le monde » est un lieu commun, un topos philosophique”104 (L’invention 14),

one which “lui [la théorie] procure un lieu sûr”105 (16). For Dadaist praxis, that was a theory of

violence. While this second form of Dadaist photomontage maintained that theory of violence,

its location and scope shifted from the metonymic everybody to society and culture themselves.

As Huelsenbeck forthrightly put it in 1920: “Was ist die deutsche Kultur? (Antwort: Dreck) die

Konsequenz gezogen worden ist, […] am Ende […] auch mit Gewalt gegen diese Kultur

vorzugehen. Und zwar in gemeinsamer großer Aktion”106 (En avant 35, my emphasis). This

target of Dadaist montage-violence is evident in the very titles of many of the works, such as

Heartfield & Grosz’s Leben und Treiben in Universal-City, 12 Uhr 5 mittags [Life and Activity at

Universal City, 12:05 Midday] (fig. 4.35); or Hausmann’s Dada im gewöhnlichen Leben (Dada

Cino) [Dada in Everyday Life (Dada Cinema)] (fig. 4.36).107 This second form of Dadaist

104 “[t]he ‘anyone’ or ‘everyone’ is a common place, a philosophical topos” (Practice 2) 105 “provides the theory with a secure place” (3) 106 “What is German culture? (Answer: Shit), the conclusion has been drawn, […] to proceed in the end with

violence against this culture. And in a great common action” (Motherwell 44, translation modified). 107 Less numerous than those focused on portraiture, this second form of Dadaist photomontage often utilize a

significant amount of text within their compositions, such as Grosz’s Germania ohne Hemd [Germania Shirtless]

(fig. 4.37), Hausmann’s Elasticum (fig. 4.27) or ABCD (fig. 4.28), and Johannes Baader’s Gutenberggedenkblatt-

/Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin [Commemorative Sheet for Gutenberg/Honorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin]

(fig 4.38). In much the same way that Hausmann’s Mechanischer Kopf or Heartfield and Grosz’s Spießer Heartfield

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photomontage, then, is no longer a representation of the buffeted subject, the violated

agglomeration of societal and cultural excrement, but rather something of a representation of that

buffeting as buffeting; put another way, no longer the reassembled body, but the explosions of

the last week. The violence of the Dadaist montage-cut here is less the explosion itself, but rather

the making visible, as Ball put it,108 of that very explosion, to show the explosion as explosion,

which polite society had attempted to hide.109 In a certain way, this is what Bürger means when

he describes avant-gardist montage as a technique, which “die Fragmentierung der Wirklichkeit

voraus[setzt]”110 (Theorie 98).

For Dadaists, the montage-violence made visible in the radical excisions and imbrications of

this societal photomontage was not merely representative of some presumptive worldview, but

rather performative; not merely a mimetic portrayal of the explosion, but a performative attempt

to reproduce and even reinforce its effects.111 In contradistinction to Surrealist photomontages,

which attempted to conceal the violence of their montage-cut and re-formulation, Hausmann

explains that “[d]ie Fotomontage in ihrer frühen Form eine Explosion von Blickpunkten und

functioned as three dimensional assemblage analogs to Dadaist photomontage portraits, so too does this second form

of Dadaist photomontage, focused more on society and culture, have a three-dimensional analog in Johannes

Baader’s large-scale assemblage Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Größe und Untergang durch

Lehrer Hagendorf oder, Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada [The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama:

Germany’s Greatness and Decline or The Fantastic Life of the Superdada] (fig. 4.39). For a thorough reading of this

work, see Michael White’s “Johannes Baader’s ‘Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: The Mysticism of the Mass Media.” See

also Maria Stavrinaki’s Dada Presentism 67, for a brief discussion on the importance of mannequins in Dadaist

assemblage. 108 Flucht 97; Flight 65. See above, page 171. 109 “Man sucht das Unmögliche möglich zu machen und den Verrat der Menschen, den Raubbau an der Liebe und

Seele der Völker, dies zivilizierte Gemetzel in einen Triumph der europäischen Intelligenz umzulügen” (Flucht

101). [“They are trying to make the impossible possible and to pass off the betrayal of man, the exploitation of the

body and soul of the people, and all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence” (Flight 67).] 110 “Montage presupposes the fragmentation of reality” (Theory 73) 111 Wieland Herzfelde noted that the Dadaist photomontage “aus dem Bedürfnis heraus arbeitet, die gegenwärtige

Welt, die sich offenbar in Auflösung, in einer Metamorphose befindet, zersetzend weiterzutreiben” (Bergius & Riha

Eds. 119) [“proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world, which already

finds itself in a state of disintegration, of metamorphosis.”]

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durcheinandergewirbleten Bildebenen [war]”112 (DK 119, my emphasis). Where Dadaist

photomontage portraiture had shown the consequences of the violent force of those explosions

on the metonymic everybody, the violence now is directed at us, the viewers of the work, it is

our viewpoint that has been targeted by the societal and cultural explosions of last week, we are

made into the everybody, or a Grosz succinctly put it, into the victim and sacrifice of society.

That is, the work interpellates us as societal victims, our own viewpoints multiplied, denied a

singular focus, radically proliferated, as if through Hausmann’s colored film or Grosz’s eyes of

others. These aspects are both uniquely apparent and concentrated in Heartfield’s Leben und

Treiben.

Leben und Treiben (fig. 4.35) served as the catalogue background to the Dada-Messe (fig.

4.40),113 and in many ways exemplifies the montage (anti)aesthetic propounded within the

exhibition. Serving as something of an underlying framework, a cacophonous, borderline

unrecognizable, drawing by Grosz,114 in which a series of capitalists, soldiers, and bourgeois

bystanders overlap and blend into each other until there remains no contained, distinguishable, or

delineated individual, Heartfield inundates the work with an overabundance of societal ephemera

from Universal City, the home of the Universal Studios film company within the, at the time,

unincorporated area of Los Angeles county.115 Film stock litters the corners of the work, and

English advertisements hawk everything from industrial fly-wheels to hair products, bleach, and

of course movies, or “photoplays.” This radical attention to commodities, of course, coincides

with the exhibition itself, whose title Dada-Messe connotes less an artistic exhibition than a

112 “Photomontage in its earliest form was an explosion of points of view and whirled image-levels” (DA 116,

translation slightly modified, my emphasis) 113 Hausmann’s Elasticum (fig. 4.27) utilized this catalogue cover, itself composed of a photomontage, as the

background on which he placed other photographic and typographic elements. 114 The work is occasionally credited to both Grosz and Heartfield for this very reason. 115 Both Universal City and Universal Studios were founded by Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant to America, to

whom the work was given.

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trade-fair and whose catalogue proclaims the event as an “Ausstellung und Verkauf dadaistischer

Erzeugnisse.”116 Indeed, the upper left corner of Leben und Treiben includes a fragment of an

advertisement or catalogue to a “Trade Show.” Above, however, we see that this is not a nominal

“DADa / Trade Show,” but rather an activity in the form of a verb, a “DADaING / Trade Show”

shouted from the nearby loudspeaker.117 In other words, neither this work, nor the trade-fair that

it means to introduce, is merely representative, but rather performative, or more precisely, both;

simultaneously showing and doing society. Weiland Herzfelde implied as much in his “Zur

Einführung in die Erste Internationale Dada-Messe,”118 where he explained his affinity for the

work.

For Herzfelde, the proper way for a viewer to approach Leben und Treiben (fig. 4.35): “Um

zu einem richtigen Gesamteindruck zu kommen, trete man am besten 40 Schritte durch die Wand

(Achtung, Stufe!) zurück”119 (Erste Internationale 3). Given the architectural layout of the Dada-

Messe in Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin gallery and Leben und Treiben’s location within it (see fig.

4.41),120 there was no such place within the building. That is, the work is best viewed from the

street, on the other side of a wall, which is to say, the best view of the work according to

Herzfelde is in fact not of the work at all, but rather of society. Herzfelde notes, however, that

there is a difference between the work and the view from the street. “Dann ergibt sich von selbst,

daß der Dadaist John Heartfield der Feind des Bildes ist. Er hat es auch für sich zerstört. Eine

116 “Exhibition and Sale of Dadaist Products” 117 Although the language of the elements within the photomontage is exclusively English, this additional “ING”

also recalls the German Ingenieur [engineer], which Dadaist often considered themselves, for instance taking the

title monteur [mechanic] when greating photomontages. See above, page 163n60. 118 “For the Introduction to the First International Dada-Fair.” Excerpts of this introduction are reproduced in

Bergius & Riha’s Dada Berlin: Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen 117-19. 119 “To get the correct impression, it is best to take 40 steps back through the wall (watch out for the stairs!).” 120 Number 152 in the catalogue, Leben und Treiben was placed in the second room on the wall with the three

windows, mere 5 meters from the opposite wall.

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sehr einfache nutzbringende Probe darauf kann man in jeder beliebigen Straße anstellen”121

(ibid). That is, once the viewer gets a correct impression of the work from this new viewpoint

outside, which is to say once the viewer places herself in a position to investigate the visual

ephemera around her on the street, Heartfield is revealed to be the enemy of that image; so much

so that he destroyed it himself at five past noon, the other side of the last minute [5 vor 12 Uhr],

the explosion detonated. Here we see, then, the violent montage-cut now directed at society. This

is the destructive and explosive performance of society itself, the DADaING of society to use the

work’s own rhetoric. The work is not merely complicated, but complicating; not only unstable,

but destabilizing. As Dorothée Brill summarized, “Dada transposes mimesis from the visual field

of depiction onto the more immediate sensorial experience. [… T]he recipient’s experience of

being overstrained by the abundance of disjunct impulses here is not an intellectual but a

sensorial one” (81). In closely reading these Dadaist photomontages, we can see their

interrelation, where portraiture places the violated (bodily) subject as its central theme, and this

second form of photomontage violates, is the societal violence which created and continually

(re)creates, that subject. The radical interrelationship of these forms is nowhere more visible in

the two great works of Hannah Höch: Dada Rundschau [Dada Panorama] (fig. 4.42) and Schnitt

mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands

[Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of

Germany] (fig 4.50).

121 “Then it is self-evident that the Dadaist John Heartfield is the enemy of the picture. He has destroyed it himself.

One can put this to a very simple and useful test on any random street.”

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Höch’s Magna Opera

While many Berlin Dadaists gained significant technical knowledge necessary for the

creation of Dadaist photomontage through their work with prominent newspapers and journals of

the time, Hannah Höch’s work as draughtswoman and designer from 1916 to 1926 at Ullstein-

Verlag,122 the publishing house of multiple illustrated newspapers and magazines such as Die

Dame, Uhu, and most importantly BIZ, gave her both that necessary knowledge as well as an

enormous resource of images from which to pull in the creation of her works. “Wie kein anderer

Dadaist sammelte Hannah Höch kleine fotografische Steckbriefe, die in der Illustrierten

umherschwirrten”123 (MM 91). Immediately after her northern vacation with Hausmann and their

reservist-image-inspiration, Höch began to put the depth and breadth of her ever-growing

collection to use, and exhibited many of the resultant photomontages at the Dada-Messe.124

Among those works was Dada Rundschau (fig. 4.42), which has come to be considered one of

her most accomplished works. Similar to other non-portraiture, large-scale Dadaist

photomontages, such as Leben und Treiben (fig. 4.35) or Dada Cino (4.36), the title of the work

implies a larger societal sweep as its theme. Rundschau, German for review, utilized by multiple

newspapers, can be literally translated as round show, as in an exhibition, or panorama; a type of

122 See Adriani’s “Biographische Dokumentation” 12; Ohff’s “Hannah Höch” 12; and Lavin’s Cut 51ff. 123 “Höch stands out among other Berlin Dadaists as an especially avid collector of small ‘wanted’ photographs

from magazines” (DT 137). Her ever-growing collection was often utilized by other Dadaists, notably her lover

Raoul Hausmann. 124 The exhibition of Höch’s works in the Dada-Messe is particularly complicated given Grosz and Heartfield’s

reluctance to include any of her works in the exhibition. After Hausmann’s threats to also remove his works, Grosz

and Heartfield capitulated, though mention of many of Höch’s works was excluded from the official catalogue. In

her “Lebensrückblick 1953,” Höch wrote of “diverse[n] andere[n] Arbeiten von mir auch[, die] nicht im Katalog

verzeichnet [wurden]” (196). [“diverse other works of mine also, which were not recorded in the catalogue.”] See

Bergius’s “‘Dada Rundschau’ — Eine Photomontage” 101.

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panoptical vision from which nothing is able to hide. Indeed, shifted and variegated vision

appears as one of the dominant themes of the work.

In the upper right-hand corner of the work, a disembodied and bespectacled pair of eyes

hover underneath the word Rundschau; eyes, “die thematisch und visuel zum dadaistischen

relativierenden Sehen in alle Richtungen aufforder[n]”125 (“Dada Rundschau” 106). To the far

right, a military scope peeks up from the bottom, just as soldiers had utilized it during the trench

warfare in World War I, and allowed them to see, through a series of mirrors out of the trench

while the soldier would remain within that trench’s relative safety, the soldier’s perspective

shifted up from the dregs. Directly to its left is a sniper, from whom the military scope was

meant to ensure shelter, here with his bird’s-eye vantage from atop the Brandenburg Gate, a

perspective redoubled for the viewer by the photographer who peers over the snipers’s shoulders,

as he looks down the barrels of their guns onto a group of protesters (fig. 4.43). The radical

alteration of vision and viewpoints, however, is not relegated simply to the bodies within the

work, but is also forced upon us as spectators of the work, in that the work functions as

something of a disorienting explosion of our own point(s) of view. Perhaps the most immediately

recognizable aspect of Rundschau is its series of strips of colored paper, black, blue, and

occasionally pink.

Similarly thematized in Leben und Treiben and Dada Cino, these strips evoke the filmic

montage and, here, its sense of the flicker between frames of celluloid. This is also, then, the

violence of the montage-cut materialized, where that violence is not merely thematized through

radical imbrication of the resultant fragments, but rather left separated and therefore made all the

more visible. Here, the space of separation, of what frames the individual elements, of the

125 “which thematically and visually summon Dadaist relativizing vision in all directions”

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destructive element of the montage-cut is thematized. This is what Krauss means when she says

that “[I]n dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is very strong. […E]ach

representation of reality is secured in isolation, held within a condition of exteriority, of syntax,

of spacing” (“Photographic Conditions” 106f.). Rundschau is not merely an agglomeration of

radically imbricated fragments placed atop a “white page” or “fluid matrix” (ibid), but rather

these strips are interpolated into the work, the traditional, singular, marginal frame now pointedly

and purposefully internalized and proliferated. Krauss’s description, in her “Notes on the Index,”

of Kelly’s spectral works (figs. 4.12; 4.13) and their “pictorial convention as a process of

arbitrary rupture of the field (a canvas surface) into the discontinuous units” (2.64), is mirrored

in her descriptions, four years later, of the spacing of Dadaist photomontages, which has

destroyed the photograph’s indexicality, “deprived of one of the most powerful of photography’s

many illusions[,…] robbed of a sense of presence[, … of its] vaunted capture of a moment in

time […] of its unity as that-which-was-present-at-one-time” (“Photographic Conditions” 107).

As she had with Kelly’s ruptured spectrums, and with recourse to Aragon’s suggestion that the

image-fragment within a photomontage “joue le rôle d’un mot”126 (Les Collages 44), Krauss

views “each element as a separate unit which, like a word is conditioned by its placement within

the syntagmatic chain of the sentence, is controlled by the condition of syntax” (“Photographic

Conditions” 105). This syntactic reading of the image fragments as well as their iconic

destruction represented in the strips of spacing-paper, whether considered temporally or

spatially, as the viewer’s eyes roam from one presumably iconically perfect sign to the next in a

re-creation of what Benjamin called the series of percussions of the filmic montage,127 introduces

a series of shocks, one at each lacuna.

126 “plays the role of a word” 127 See above, page 172; Benjamin’s GS VII.379.

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However, as an image-work in and of itself, Rundschau also functions as that shocking tactile

bullet, as Benjamin described Dadaist works. The beholder’s point of view, or rather, the work’s

interpellative power to form an ideological subject, is then radically destabilized, necessarily

simultaneous and chronological as both framed image and image of frames. These frames,

however, are less solid, less impermeable, or rather, less exterior, less lacuna then they may have

initially appeared. At the top of the work, for example, a large headed (or small bodied)

Woodrow Wilson appears to fly across the large lacuna that runs down the middle of the work,

further down which is again violated by a portrait of Weimar Finance Minister Erzberger.

Perhaps most notable, however is the small strip of paper to the center right. There, a bank of

fog, diffuse, amorphous, dispersive, without stable or defined borders or frames is appropriately

labeled “DaDA / 1919.” The cloud’s lone anchor, however, is a strip of black paper that

terminates at “1919” and “Rundschau” above in the upper right corner, indeed connects the two,

while it simultaneously pierces the middle of the second “D” of “DaDA” along the way, an

addition to the now connective thread. That is, the interpolated strips, which appear to separate,

are in fact precisely what connects the amorphous Dada to its own panoramic, panoptic, and

multiplied point(s) of view, as though the presented separations themselves enable, or indeed are

elemental to this Dadaist vision. In other words, Dada is able to read the separation, which is to

say, the radicalized cut. Here allegorically materialized in strips of colored paper, we see again

that Schwittersian reading of the materiality without matter of the cut, the ideological grammar

made visible, readable, criticizable.128 This is, then, a radicalization of reading as vision itself,

where these radically divergent viewpoints, able to examine all angles and sides, various and

128 See above, page 62f. Krauss too reverts to Derrida’s discussion of “presence” in Of Grammatology (18) in order

to come to similar conclusions: “Rather spacing is radicalized as the precondition for meaning as such, and the

outsideness of spacing is revealed as constituting the condition of the ‘inside’” (“Photographic Conditions” 106).

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disparate elements of the culture, highlight Rundschau radical lack of a coherent or stable

viewpoint. Despite this instability, there remains something of a leitmotif that runs through the

work: the intersection of nationalism and militarism.

If Dada Rundschau functions as something of a Dadaist newspaper in nuce, as both the

work’s title and the locale from which it finds many of its materials might suggest, and therefore

as a form of reading of the society in which it finds itself, the topics broached by that newspaper

show a society gripped by militarism and nationalism. As we’ve already noted, the theme of

vision with Rundschau is particularly militarized, such as the apparently blinkered vision of a

woman wearing a gas mask near the upper right, or the military scope, a necessary invention of

the recently ended war. The sniper, however, represents a new post-war form of domestic

militarism. Taken from the cover of the 19 January 1919 BIZ, this is merely one of many groups

of snipers, who on 12 January had fired upon the group of protestors below in the government’s

brutal suppression of those protestors, members of the Spartakus Bund [Spartacus League] (fig.

4.43).129 This devastating encounter, along with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl

Liebknecht on the night of 15 January, which crushed the Spartacist Uprising and effectively

ended any pretense to a German Revolution, was done on the orders of the two largest, and in

many ways main, figures of Rundschau: Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske, respective president

and defense minister and indeed personifications of the now ruthlessly victorious Weimar

Republic.

129 For Höch and many other Berlin Dadaists, this was particularly personal. For instance, Franz Jung and Raoul

Hausmann, Höch’s friend and lover respectively, helped to hide Spartacists from the government in the spring of

1918. On December 31st, 1918, Grosz, Heartfield, and Herzfelde joined the Communist Party of Germany

[Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD], which Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist League formed on the 30th

of December. See Simmons 46. Puchner takes a somewhat less nuanced view: “[There is] an almost seamless

continuity between dada and Spartacus” (Poetry 156). See also Doherty’s “Figures of the Pseudorevolution” note

38, as well as Bergius’s “Dada Rundschau” 105.

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These two main figures of Rundschau, in nothing but bathing suits, their exposed bellies on

full display, come from the infamous Badebild [Resort Image] printed on the front cover of the

24 August 1919 BIZ, only three days after Ebert’s swearing-in, with the caption “Ebert und

Noske in der Sommerfrische”130 (fig. 4.45). While this version of the photograph is certainly the

most infamous, it is “un certain aménagement de la scène [tel que] cadrage”131 (“Rhetorique”

42), as Barthes and Krauss would put it. The original photograph was in fact published two

weeks earlier on the cover of the conservative Deutsche Tageszeitung [German Daily

Newspaper] with the reproachful caption “Der Repräsentant des Neuen Deutschland”132 (fig.

4.46; 4.47). Stripped of their presumed impressive and important stature, the photo was utilized

by political foes of Ebert, Noske, and the new Weimar Republic for which they metonymically

stood, both left and right. Not only for Ebert and Noske, but for the German public as a whole,

this infamous image served as an introduction to the political force of the photographic image,

and more specifically, the ability to mass-produce and commodify such a political image, not

merely for the title page of a popular illustrated magazine,133 but also as a proto-photomontage

postcard (fig. 4.48), in which the swimsuit bedecked Ebert and Noske are surrounded by Kaiser

Wilhelm II and his highest military official, Paul von Hindenburg, both in full military regalia,

given the Fraktur title: “Einst und jetzt!” [“Then and Now”]. For conservative viewers, this

highlighted the radical discrepancy between the noble stature of the German Empire and the base

130 “Ebert and Noske in summer freshness.” The caption continues: “: Ausgenommen während eines Besuches des

Seebads Haffkrug bei Travemünde.” [“Taken during a visit of the beach resort Haffkrug near Travemünde.”] For a

significant study of the political and societal repercussions of the photo, see Albrecht’s dissertation “Die Macht einer

Verleumdungskampagne,” esp. 45-121. This same image was utilized by Höch in the earlier photomontage

Staatshäupter [Heads of State] (fig. 4.44). Grosz’s Germania ohne Hemd [Germania Shirtless] (fig. 4.37), named

after a headline at the top center of the montage, is likely an allusion to this same image. 131 “a certain displacement of the scene [such as] cropping” (“Notes” 2.59). See above, page 166. 132 “The Representation of New Germany” 133 While the image was ostensibly printed in both Deutsche Tageszeitung and BIZ, its relatively unedited printing in

the former, and far less popular, newspaper before the swearing-in ceremony of Ebert caused little immediate

consternation.

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vulgarity of Weimar. Indeed, the very first demand for legal prosecution that Ebert filed as

president of the newly formed republic was against the continued publication of this postcard,

against this commodified proto-photomontage. However, for a viewer like Höch and other

Dadaists, this “Then and Now” functioned less to differentiate than to suggest a form of

continuation.

As we see within Rundschau, the militarism, nationalism, and violence of the war appears

only to have slightly shifted, namely from its previously foreign to current domestic targets.

Though they appear unable to gain a privileged or authoritative point of view, Ebert and Noske’s

stand in the shifting silt of the Baltic, or in a Dada-cloud in the case of Rundschau Noske,

“[a]uch hier ist ihr Standort bodenlos”134 according to Bergius (“Dada Rundschau” 104), Höch

implies the militaristic violence has remained. Beneath the water-line, Höch allegorically placed

Ebert into two shiny military boots, rather than his feet submerged in the wet Baltic, with the

advertising slogan “Gegen feuchte Füße” [“Against wet feet”],135 to which Ebert seems to

respond “Für militärische Stiefel” [“For military boots”], and thereby fix himself and his regime

into that same old militarism and nationalism. The number of fragments within Rundschau, from

a row of beheaded but nonetheless standing military soldiers to numerous crowds holding

nationalist placards such as “Wir bleiben deutsch!” and “Einig und deutsch!,”136 appear to

signify as much. Perhaps most threatening, particularly with the reverberations of the Kiel

mutiny that effectively ended World War I, and with it the German Empire, as it simultaneously

sparked the German Revolution,137 is the menacing naval cannon, down which the viewer is now

134 “Here is their standpoint also groundless” 135 See Bergius’s “Dada Rundschau” 104. 136 “We remain German!” and “United and German!” These fragments are located in the bottom center and middle

left of Rundschau, respectively. 137 For a broad history of the Kiel mutiny and its lasting influence, see Dirk Dähnhardt’s Revolution in Kiel: Der

Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik. Noske, as a high-ranking member of the Social Democratic

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forced to peer, in a particularly gruesome mortal danger. In a perverse way, however, the end of

this cannon functions as something of a highly threatening, mechanical, military anus.

Centered near the bottom of the montage, which as a whole is assembled on the folio verso of

Höch’s variegated portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II (fig. 4.49), the contents of Rundschau itself

become then the evacuated excrement, the “deutsche Kultur[…]: Dreck” as Huelsenbeck put

it,138 the chaotic, scatological remnants of a disintegrated empire and monarchy. Violently

scrawled across the left of the portrait, and the presumptive title of the work, is Friedensfürst, the

prince of peace, as Kaiser Wilhelm II was often called after Reinhold Kirchhöfer’s 1915 political

pamphlet “Wilhelm II. Als Friedensfürst in der Weltpolitik.”139 Such a title, by the time of

Rundschau’s creation in 1920 that had seen World War I, the German Revolution, their failures,

and the continual difficulties of the new Weimar Republic, is darkly tragicomical. Dada

Rundschau here functions in its more literal translation that suggests a quick peek around the

back, a kind of round look, from all vantages. Not merely the same-as-it-ever-was “Einst und

jetzt” of a relative continuum from Wilhelmine Germany to the Weimar Republic, but rather

Rundschau makes literal a type of “Zwei Seiten derselben Medaille” [“two sides of the same

coin”]. In order to aid in the recognition of these two sides and their interrelations, Höch deploys

a searching spotlight supported atop the cannon that connects these sides, whose light reveals the

excretory and laxative relationship between these two sides: “Schatzkammer des deutschen

Gemütes entleert,”140 the “Dreck” of Weimar culture, as Huelsenbeck put it, exposed as nothing

Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD], was also instrumental to the end of the mutiny.

See Wolfram Wette’s Gustav Noske und die Revolution in Kiel 1918. 138 “German culture[…]: Shit” See above, page 181. In many ways, Höch here also created what Tzara would

consider a true Dadaist work: “nous voulons nous voulons nous voulons pisser en couleurs divers” ; “nous voulons

dorénavant chier en couleurs divers” (OC I.562f.; 357). [“we want we want we want to piss diverse colors” ; “from

now on we want to shit in different colors”] See above, page 109f.; 122. 139 “Wilhelm the Second as Prince of Peace in World Politics” 140 “Treasury of the German state of mind evacuated.”

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more than the expulsive echo of what had come before it; soft fat bellies packed into hard

military boots just out of sight, but grounded in militarism and nationalism all the same. This is,

of course, no nostalgic look back towards a more refined German state of mind, but rather a

recognition that Weimar was Wilhelm undressed, that what had appeared as such grand nobility

was nothing more than military medals and uniforms, a pleasant fiction told amongst themselves

as they marched to war. This fiction unraveled, or rather this interpellation disrupted, by Höch’s

or Dada’s panoramic and panoptical investigation is, however, not meant merely for them. The

searchlight invites others: “Lesen und an Männer und Frauen weitergeben!”141 Rundschau, as an

exhortation to (re)view or to read, as Dada has done, begs the question in a certain way as to how

Dada writes. Hanne Bergius gives a useful suggestion: “Die ‘Dada Rundschau’ ist als ‘Vorspiel’

für die großangelegte Montage ‘Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer

Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands’ zu betrachten”142 (“Rundschau” 106).

Höch’s Schnitt (fig. 4.50) is consistently considered her magnum opus.143 The enormous

piece, almost seven times larger than Rundschau,144 is also exceedingly intricate with

photographic images of over fifty individuals, almost twenty pieces of industrial technology,

seven animals, numerous images of architecture and crowds, an array of military imagery,

among a host of other ephemera. Schnitt was recognized almost immediately for its importance.

Despite the difficulties that Höch encountered in her attempt to display her works at the Dada-

Messe, Schnitt was prominently placed at eye-level in the corner of the first room, directly

141 “Read and pass on to men and women!” 142 “‘Dada Panorama’ is to be considered a prelude to the large-scale montage ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife through

the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.’” 143 As such, it has also inspired by far and away the most critical readings of any of Höch’s works, and indeed,

potentially of any Dadaist work at all. See, for example, MM 99-110 & 130-156; DT 142-152 & 164-179; Biro’s

Dada Cyborg 65-103; Lavin 19-34; Niebisch 98-102; and of course, Dech’s Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser. 144 Schnitt measures at approximately 114 by 90 centimeters, while Rundschau is 43.7 by 34.6 centimeters. While

dimensions of course varied between works and artists, Rundschau serves as an average for the majority of works,

particularly those of the first, portraiture form of Dadaist photomontages.

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opposite of the main entryway to the Messe (fig. 4.41; 4.51), and was therefore among the very

first works to be seen by a visitor to the exhibition. This distinguished placement amongst

Dadaist works has continued long after the Dada-Messe closed their doors; the work held as an

exemplar of Dadaist photomontage, Berlin Dada, and even Dadaism as such. Peter Boswell, for

example, considered Schnitt to “stand[] as a visual summa of Berlin Dada’s exuberant

condemnation of contemporaneous German society and wholehearted immersion in the

revolutionary chaos of post-Wilhelmine Germany” (7). With little ambiguity, the title of the

work indicates that this wholehearted immersion was one of a violence; a violent surgery.145

This surgical violence was not with the surgical scalpel of a bourgeois doctor, however, but a

common, everyday, household commodity.146 That is, this violence is no longer the purely

destructive bullet or explosion, but the DADA knife that cuts, perhaps slightly dulled after its

regular use in the kitchen,147 now wielded against the very culture that had created it. This was

the culture of Weimar, no longer one of pre-war emperors or kings, but certainly not one of

dedicated revolutionaries either, indeed rather enemies of the revolution, as Ebert and

particularly Noske’s ordered violent repression of the Spartacus Uprising had shown. While

Doherty reads Höch’s Rundschau as the violent surgical vivisection of “Weimar’s

pseudorevolutionary beer-belly” (“Figures” 74), it is Schnitt that appears, at the very least in its

title, to make this metaphor explicit. That is, no longer burdened by the weight of military

refinery and further still, freed of its Weimar-Republic uniform of the frock coat as it waded into

145 See above, page 173f. See also, Doherty’s “Figures” 75. 146 Variations of the title from the creation of the work through its exhibition have shed doubt across particular

words, none more notably than Küchenmesser, or occasionally Kuchenmesser sans umlauts, the difference between

a kitchen and a cake knife. For our purposes, the implicit violence of the weapon is what is at stake, namely in that it

cuts. As Dech notes in her in-depth discussion of the title: “Klar ist daß, es sich bei dem im Titel zitierten Instrument

um ein Messer handelt” (49). [“It is clear that the cited instrument in the title concerns a knife.”] See Dech 48-53. 147 The word “DADA” is absent from most citations of the title, but was specifically added for the Dada-Messe, for

us its most important exhibition. See Dech 48f.

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the waters of the Baltic, the exposed beer-belly itself had become “(in dada and elsewhere in left-

wing caricature) a metonym for Weimar’s new political ruling class, and for the Weimar body

politic more generally” (Berlin Dada xli). The metaphor of the title and therefore the title’s

relation to the work remains somewhat ambiguous. Schnitt functions as both the noun, cut, as in

a wound or haircut which result from an action, and the simple past of the verb, to cut, if here

without a grammatical subject, such as a medical examiner who dissected, who cut a corpse. The

former connection, of Schnitt as the after-effects of the cut, the remnants left on the examining

table after the action completed, has been far more prominent in critical readings of the work.

McBride likens Schnitt to “a barbed cross section of life in Weimar Germany” (18), while Biro

suggests it “presents a turbulent image of Germany’s postwar revolutionary moment of 1918 and

1919” (Dada Cyborg 71); Niebisch suggests it “offers a panoptic view on the Weimar society”

(99), while Maud Lavin says it “offers an entire social panorama of the Weimar Republic” (19).

These descriptions, however, are far more relevant to Rundschau, indeed in that such readings

utilize the very vocabulary of that work’s title. While Schnitt on the other hand, with its deluge

of cultural touchstones excised from BIZ and other illustrated magazines and newspapers of the

time, does indeed provide an overview of Weimar society, it appears to do much more.

As Bergius summarizes, for the contemporaneous spectator, Schnitt is “weniger fremd als

befremdend. Gerade indem sie [die Montage] sich auf [ihre] Kenntnisse berief, forderte sie [sie]

heraus”148 (MM 71, my emphasis). That is to say, Schnitt’s representation of Weimar society

functions as something of a necessary resource or basis from which it is then able to do

something. A panorama of Weimar society is then, as we saw Bergius mention above, a Vorspiel

of Schnitt, not merely as a prelude but as preliminary, as the necessary basis for its activity of

148 “alienating rather than alien. It challenges [her] because it appeals to what [s]he knows” (DT 121, emphasis

added).

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alienating. In this way, we can read the title of Schnitt less as what came before the work, less as

prelude to a work that shows the now inert aftermath of some disembowelment of Weimar, than

as the proper nomen actionis of the work, the action itself of the violently incisive intervention

into that culture, the very act of a type of Weimar seppuku. This is the act of the kitchen knife

DADA, which is to say, what DADA does. As we saw with Leben und Treiben’s “DADaING”

of Universal City on the cover of the Dada-Messe, where Schnitt was first exhibited, so we can

see Schnitt as a “DADAing” of Weimar. In this way, Schnitt simultaneously represents and

performs Dadaist praxis; it functions as something of a self-explanatory Dadaist work. As such,

Schnitt has often been read as a visual manifesto. Lavin, for example, writes: “Though seemingly

as chaotic as the Dada-Messe itself, Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a remarkably concise

and elegant work that functions as a Dadaist manifesto on the politics of Weimar society”

(19).149 Schnitt’s clarity, in fact, is in many ways tied to its behavior as manifesto.

Hanne Bergius sees the multiple instances of text within Schnitt as informational: “Das Auge

[der Betrachterin] wird mit Hilfe dieser Sprachsignale durch die Fülle der partikelhaften

Fototeile und Fotokleinstteile geleitet, weil jene sich klar von dem Fotogewebe abheben und […]

sinnverstärkend […] wirken können”150 (MM 71). Unlike the often chaotic introduction of text in

works such as ABCD (fig. 4.28), Leben und Treiben (fig. 4.35), Germania ohne Hemd (fig. 4.37),

or Gutenberggedenkblatt/Ehrenportrait von Charlie Chaplin (fig 4.38), almost all of which

utilized text excised from journalism, marketing, or advertisement, Schnitt’s text comes almost

exclusively from Dadaist texts and journals, the word dada itself appearing ten times throughout

149 Puchner also noted the relationship between the Dadaist manifesto and photomontage: “dada’s two most

important forms of expression, manifesto and photomontage, did not stay neatly apart but began to leak into one

another, producing dada’s most important form of manifesto art. The best example here is one of the most well-

known photomontages, Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (Poetry 161). 150 “These linguistic signals guide the eye [of the beholder] through the maze of tiny photo segments and particles

because they are clearly offset from the web of photos and […] function as clarifiers and amplifiers of meaning”

(DT 121).

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the work, and more specifically these textual signposts come from Dadaist manifestos.151

Reminiscent of Aragon’s linguistic description of photomontage, Dawn Ades writes of Schnitt:

“In Cut with the Cake-Knife, disparate elements, photographs and scraps of text are thickly

scattered over the surface, but most still remain legible, like words on a page” (30ff.). These

fragments and slogans from Dadaist manifestos, combined with the “concise and elegant” layout

of symbolic photographic images from Weimar mass media most often excised from BIZ in an

allegorical array, give us then a larger work, a written Dadaist manifesto for us to read.

While the initial confrontation with Schnitt can be uniquely overwhelming and destabilizing,

particularly given the work’s scale, the sheer number of photographic and textual fragments, and

the intricacy with which those fragments appear to be placed, there appears to be multiple ways

in which the viewer can structure the work, multiple subject positions the viewer can take. For

example, Biro finds a “diagonal axis that partially runs along the bottom of the kaiser’s right

arm,” from the “baby’s backside” on the right to the “portrait of Albert Einstein” on the left

(Dada Cyborg 73f.), all of which cordons off, more or less, the upper right quadrant of the work.

More severe than Biro’s structure, Bergius too determines something of a diagonal, which goes

almost vertically down the middle of the work from the large cog wheel in the upper middle to

the oversized ball bearings in the bottom middle: “eine steile Diagonale, die, nur scheinbar von

der weißen Fläche inmitten der Montage unterbrochen, eine Verbindung in der Mittelpunkt-figur

der Tänzerin findet, die ihren Käthe-Kollwitz-Kopf als Spielball in die Höhe wirft”152 (MM 71).

For Lavin, it is around this whirling dancer, “Niddy” Impekoven with her Kollwitz head, that

“[t]he centrifugal composition rotates” (22). As something of a combination of these elements,

151 See Puchner’s Poetry 161. 152 “a steep diagonal line that, though seemingly interrupted by a white space at the center of the montage [with] a

woman dancer who tosses her Käthe Kollwitz head like a ball into the air” (DT 120).

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we can then create our own relative quadrant system to the work; with the pirouetting dancer and

her othered head at the center, able to panoptically see each quadrant in turn (fig. 4.52). While

the dancer’s whirl may not have an initial direction, we choose to begin as we would with any of

the manifesto-texts which dot the work as a written text: in the upper left of the page.153

Within this upper quadrant (fig. 4.53), the large portrait of Einstein, the most imposing and

clearest element within the work as a whole, dominates, taken from the front cover of BIZ on 14

December 1919.154 Dadaists had found in Einstein, or rather vice versa, something of a kindred

spirit. In response to Heartfield and Grosz’s 1917 journal, Neue Jugend, Einstein had written a

warm letter of encouragement: “Ihr Unternehmen ist mir von großem Interesse, wie all die

Bemühungen, die der internationalen Verständigung dienen können. […] Möge Ihr Werk die

Schwierigkeiten der Geburt glücklich überwinden und recht fruchtbringend wirken!”155 (qtd. in

MM 101). In addition to this early politico-cultural rapprochement and Einstein’s ascendant

popularity throughout Germany and the German mass-media after the experimental verification

of his Special and General Theories of Relativity,156 Einstein’s complete revolution of the

concepts of movement and force had violently overthrown the stability of the designated and

definitive viewpoint or frame of reference necessary for classical Newtonian mechanics. That is

to say, Einstein’s theories removed any presumption to authority in the singular, stable subject

153 Bergius too begins, so to speak, with Einstein’s portrait, which “besticht, beherrscht aber nicht wie bei den

Porträt-Montagen das Bild” (MM 71) [“is striking but it does not dominate the picture as in the montage portraits”

(DT 120). 154 The caption reads: “Eine neue Grösse der Weltgeschichte: Albert Einstein, dessen Forschungen eine völlige

Umwälzung unserer Naturbetrachtungen bedeuten und den Erkenntnissen eines Kopernikus, Kepler und Newton

gleichwertig sind” (Dech 156). [“A new great man in world history: Albert Einstein, whose research constitutes a

complete revolution of our thinking about nature and is equivalent to the findings of Copernicus, Kepler, and

Newton” (qtd. in DT 142).] 155 “Your enterprise is of great interest to me, like any effort that may serve the purpose of international

understanding. […] May your work happily overcome the difficulties of birth and take fruitful effect” (qtd. in DT

143). 156 See Lewis Elton’s “Einstein, General Relativity, and German Press, 1919-1920.” Sir Arthur Addington

confirmed major elements of Einstein’s General Theory during a solar eclipse on 29 May 1919. Later that year, 6

November, Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society had announced the results.

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position, but rather recognized that vastly dissimilar experiences could be valid, that no single

viewpoint was more true than another. As Bergius summarized, Einstein’s theories resulted in

“die Negation von absoluten Größen, [… und] festen Bezugspunkten”157 (MM 101). This, for

Dadaists, bordered on scientific affirmation and endorsement of their own views. As Hausmann

would later write: “Dada war die Relativität der Relativität”158 (Anfang 7). Einstein’s presumed

association with Dada and their views is noted by the surrounding elements of text: “Legen Sie

Ihr Geld in dada an!” and “dada” float above is head,159 “dada siegt!” is funneled into his left ear,

and he rests upon the adage “He, he, Sie junger Mann / Dada ist keine Kunstrichtung.”160

In addition to this textual association and even implicit alignment with Dada, Höch further

represents Einstein’s novel and radically panoptical relativistic viewpoint with a tipped number

eight, now in the position of the mathematical symbol for infinity, placed over his right eye.

Beyond Einstein’s infinite vision, this upper quadrant similarly reflects the pan-optic and

relativistic vision as the sole locale of contrasted color, the blue field over Einstein’s right

shoulder and an unknown woman with a feather-boa-like headdress161 (fig. 4.54). Moreover,

elements of dynamic motion and force orbit Einstein, such as hot-air balloons, horses, feet, figure

skaters, gears, pulleys, and a cassette of rotational ball bearings, on which Einstein is supported,

along with a large static girder, seemingly able to appreciate both. Indeed, the train that rolls atop

his head evokes Einstein’s regular use of the ambulatory train and stationary platform as two

157 “the negation of absolutes, [… and] stable reference points” (DT 144). 158 “Dada was the relativity of relativity.” 159 “Invest in Dada!” along with the “dada” above Einstein’s head, as well as the smaller “da / -dü / dada!” beneath

him, all came from the first edition of Der Dada, published in June 1919. 160 “dada triumphs!” and “Hey, hey, you young man / Dada is not an art movement” both come from the second

edition of Der Dada, published in December 1919. 161 For a brief discussion of color, or rather its relative lack outside of this quadrant, in Schnitt, see Dech 58.

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relative frames of reference in his thought experiments meant to clarify his theories.162 These

allusions to dynamic force and movement are, here in the photomontage, given room to roam,

with large swaths of spacing, Krauss’s “fluid matrix” (“Photographic Conditions” 107), which

“both combines and separates them [the silhouettes of the photographed forms]” (106). However,

this expanse, with its energetic and dynamic movement and force, appears to be transferred to

the right through a large cog-wheel or gear, directly into the back of the other prominent

personality within Schnitt: Kaiser Wilhelm II (fig. 4.55).163

By far and away the single largest fragment within Schnitt, the half-length portrait of Kaiser

Wilhelm II is, as he had been in Friedensfürst (fig. 4.49), once again outfitted in his military

finery, his chest covered in sashes and the aiguillettes which stream from the epaulette on his

right shoulder, a scepter jutting from his right hip. In case such opulent dress had not clarified his

regality, a comical top hat, thrice too small, rests upon his head. Despite his seeming importance,

Wilhelm II remains almost entirely obscured, static and stagnant, pinned underneath an

avalanche of other fragments. Immediately differentiated from Einstein’s expansive dynamism,

open space for any fragments to move is in short supply, even filled in as black rather than

Krauss’s white page or fluid matrix. Similar to the space described by Biro’s diagonal, this

quadrant is titled, as if to protrude from Wilhelm’s forehead: “Die / anti / dada / istische /

Bewegung.”164 Indeed, this quadrant could be seen as both anti-dada and anti-Bewegung

162 An embankment and a uniformly moving train play a large role throughout Einstein’s 1916 Über die spezielle

und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie: (Gemeinverständlich), translated as Relativity: The Special and General

Theory. 163 This transfer, in a certain way, occurred in the real world. In 1913, Einstein was appointed director of the Kaiser

Wilhelm Institute of Theoretical Physics (now the Max Plank Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin). See Neffe’s

Einstein: eine Biographie 182, or its translation by Shelley Frisch Einstein: A Biography 165. 164 “The / anti / dada / ist / Movement.” The elements “dada / istische / Bewegung” all come from the second edition

of Der Dada published in December 1919. Save a lowercase “k,” perhaps for “Kaiser” that is positioned directly to

the left of Wilhelm’s face, and the pairing “nf” that straddles the border between this and Einstein’s quadrants, this

title is the sole text in this quadrant.

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[movement]. Any potential indication of movement is undercut by the various fragment’s

recontextualization within the quadrant.165 For example, a tire rests immobile as a kind of

military medal, worn over Wilhelm’s right nipple; a dancer, now with the head of Paul von

Hindenburg, who along with Ludendorff acted as Germany’s de facto military dictators during

the war, balanced on the tire, stabilized by the shoulder of Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin, the Supreme

Commander of Austro-Hungarian infantry who himself stands at-ease atop the heads of Noske

and a German admiral, in order to tickle Wilhelm’s chin; any number of military airplanes sit

idle, their propellers stationary; a woman stands with her hand on her hip, motionless. In many

ways, we see here Höch’s Rundschau, in nuce.

As we saw in Rundschau, vision here has been similarly altered, with Wilhelm’s right eye

covered by an agitated infant, perhaps a vision of the young Republic, though balanced

precariously on the foot of one of two wrestlers engaged in allegorical conflict, merely an

accoutrement of a mustache, even disguise from behind which Wilhelm intensely observes. Just

as the feet of Rundschau’s Ebert had been dried off from the Baltic and placed into the support

and stability of military boots, we see here an abundance of nationalist and military imagery,

from war planes and machine guns to soldiers, generals, and diplomats. Rather than Wilhelm

hidden on the folio verso of the work, gastro-intestinally connected, Wilhelm here stands not

only in the background, but as the background, as the anti– Krauss’s white page, as rather the

static matrix support structure. To continue with Krauss’s Derridean terminology, Background-

Wilhelm himself becomes “the precondition for meaning as such, and the outsidedness of

spacing is revealed as already constituting the condition of the inside” (106). Wilhelm then

becomes the allegorical framework, just as he had served as something of a structural framework

165 In this, as in other quadrants of Schnitt, I am deeply indebted to the work of Julia Dech and Hanne Bergius,

particularly MM, for their attention to detail in determining each of the particular fragments that make up the work.

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as the folio verso of Rundschau, literally that against which everything in the Weimar of 1920

should be measured, from the militarism and nationalism to the quickly deteriorating economic

prospects of the Weimar Republic, represented here to Wilhelm’s left by a line of Berliners

standing patiently, awaiting assistance from a Berlin Arbeitsnachweis [employment agency]. For

Höch, in other words, Wilhelm remained the underpinning narrative ideological structure which

continued to frame the decidedly anti-dadaist Weimar. However, this narrative too influences the

text.

This static anti-dadaist Kaiser-Weimar hybrid is funneled down into the screaming, almost

laughing, head of Höch’s lover, Raoul Hausmann (fig. 4.56).166 The components of the funnel

itself, however, are unique. As Dech notes, the funnel which connects Hausmann’s maniacal

head with the Weimar ideological narrative above is “ein zwölfzylindriger Schiffsmotor”167 (69).

Hausmann, the top of his head screwed into this ship-engine/funnel, is placed into suit, slightly

too small, of a “deep-sea diver, […] a suit that can go to twice the depth of previous suits”168

(Dada Cyborg 67), able to wade out into the deepest and most pressured environments. Perhaps

more importantly than its technological advancements, the diver’s suit allows Hausmann to

inhabit a position without nationality or nationalism, but rather feel perfectly at home in any

international waters to which the maritime engine might transport him. Placed on the front of the

engine casing is a portrait of Karl Marx, like an emblem or ornament. In this way, the funnel also

functions as a something of a screen, one which appears to allow Hausmann to analyze the

inherent militant nationalism that Höch and Dada see within Weimar ideology from the

allegorical international-waters, and with a keen Marxist eye toward the state and the position of

166 This photograph was also utilized by Hausmann himself, perhaps most notably in his own photomontage ABCD

(fig. 4.28). See Dech’s plate XXXII. 167 “a 12-cylinder ship-engine” 168 This is according to the caption on the cover of the 18 January 1920 cover of BIZ, from which the image was

taken.

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the worker within it. Indeed, for Dada’s more strident Marxists, among whom Hausmann would

certainly be counted, these two concepts are linked in Weltrevolution [World Revolution], which

Höch had originally placed next to Marx’s well-known portrait for its exhibition at the

international Dada-Messe169 (fig. 4.57). That is, the revolution was to be international, to unite

the peoples of all countries, all lands. As Marx and Engels infamously wrote to conclude the

communist manifesto: “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”170 (MEW IV.493, my

emphasis).

The analyzed fragments of Wilhelmine-Weimar, funneled down through the Marxian motor,

however, do not rest with Hausmann, presumptive co-creator of photomontage along with Höch,

but are rather joyously shouted to his fellow “DADA / i / S / t / en” across “Die große / WELT /

dada,”171 as this quadrant is labelled. Within the quadrant are Berlin Dadaists Baader, atop two

uniformed springboard divers in the upper left of the quadrant, as well as overseeing the

proceedings with his pipe and othered left-eye from the lower left; Grosz and Herzfelde twirling

round and round on a ballerina’s body; Heartfield bathed as a baby by the dancer Impekoven;172

Huelsenbeck’s balanced head atop his tie and crinoline; Mehring smiling underneath a passing

train; and finally Hausmann again and Höch herself taking the international train as Einstein

imagined.173 The doubling of Hausmann and Baader, and to a certain extent Höch herself as

169 Through the designator “international” was somewhat overly optimistic as a descriptor of the exhibition (fully

90% of the works on display were from German born artists), it positively situates the exhibition in opposition to

nationalist tendencies. 170 “WORKING PEOPLES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” (MECW 519, translation slightly changed and

emphasis added). 171 “DADA / i / S / t / s” ; “The vast / WORLD / dada.” The latter of these was used by Höch to replace the previous

Weltrevolution [World Revolution]. 172 Impekoven, remember, is the twirling body that centers the work as a whole. 173 In this long list of Dadaists which inhabit this quadrant, I have again found Dech’s work imperative. See Dech

94f. Here, it is again worth noting the international aspect of this quadrant, whether in the form of the Balkan train

from Berlin to Constantinople or the European map in the lower right corner which indicates the countries with

woman’s suffrage. For a feminist reading of Schnitt and other works by Höch, see Lavin’s Cut with the Kitchen

Knife. Bergius and Federle find Höch’s work far more complex in regards to sexual politics, both in the context of

Weimar and Dada. See their “Dada Rundschau” and “Küchenmesser DADA” respectively.

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monteur and montierte, (anti)artist and (anti)art, implies the relativistic ability to inhabit two

locations, two viewpoints at once, which is to say, to destabilize and critique stable and singular

ideological subject positions. This “vast WORLD dada,” free from any country’s borders as

Hausmann’s international waters attest, a radicalization of Einstein’s “international[r]

Verständigung,”174 across which Hausmann screams his screened analyses, undoes the

claustrophobia of Wilhelmine-Weimar and returns to the open spacing of the white page like that

of Einstein’s dada-friendly dynamic quadrant. Here, each Dadaist has space for their own

personal “boumboum,” as Tzara might have put it,175 free of potential imposition of interference

from either other Dadaists, previous monarchs, or nationalist and militarist concerns. Here we

can see, then, the action of the kitchen knife DADA’s Schnitt itself, the Dadaist praxis of writing

to Rundschau’s reading, the “DADaING” that this manifesto-art presents and performs.176

In its investigations of Weimar society and culture, which had conglomerated formerly

independent, relative, and dynamic elements, represented by Einstein’s quadrant, into something

of an ideological narrative of militant nationalism, the DADA knife begins with the violence of

the cut, of destructive analytic excision. This is a cut through the Weimarer

Bierbauchkulturepoche, which is to say, through the mode of that culture’s ideological

communication; “the creative activity begins with the destruction of images” (Niebisch 95),

namely the press photograph. As we’ve seen, this is a subversion of that image’s presumption to

indexicality as complete, borderless iconicity, its presumption to a direct and unhindered

connection to the real world, how it really was, the disruptive (re)introduction of Krauss’s white

174 “international understanding” 175 See OC I.363. 176 As Federele aptly summarizes this double movement: “When Höch cuts through the surface of the everyday

world of die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche, she applies this dialectical optics [of Walter Benjamin’s

“profane illumination”] which enables her both to see differently and to present that difference graphically” (128,

my emphasis).

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page, of internalized frame(s) into Weimar’s ideological discourse. That is to say, this praxis is

less an attack on the particular ideology dominant at this or that moment, less on the thing, which

for Höch constituted nationalist militarism, but rather a violence focused on the media and

modes in which those ideologies and, with the ever more dominant photographic image,

ideology itself would come to communicate. This then is Tzara’s conception of the “direct

attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between

individuals” (Motherwell 404), now transferred to an attack against the photographic press-

image à la Debord’s spectacle as “un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des

images”177 (Société 16, §4, my emphasis). The violence of the montage-cut, and that violence

made visible and allegorized in the transition from the claustrophobic Wilhelmine-Weimar

narrative to the great expansive world of relativistic and dynamic dada, “calls into question the

very basis of how it is that the visual media form an everyday reality that appears natural and

promises understandability” (Federele 122, my emphasis). That is to say, Schnitt, the cut with

the kitchen knife DADA disturbs this purported understandability, which is to say the

photograph’s presumption to perfect iconicity, and therefore its indexicality. This alienates and

destabilizes the ideological viewer-subject to such an extent that she calls into question the very

production that natural understandability proffered by the society of the (ever growing) spectacle

itself, the exact visual mode in which she had for so long interacted with her society.

Norman Bryson succinctly summarizes this interplay of the visual with the social found in

Jacques Lacan’s concept of the gaze:178 “Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs,

a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena[, …] that is,

177 “social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Society 7, §4). 178 Specifically, Bryson here summarizes elements of “Du regard comme objet petit a” which constitutes sections 6-

9 of the eleventh book of Le Séminaire, entitled Les quatre concepts fondementaux de la psychanalyse 65-109.

These seminars are translated into English as “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoanalysis 65-119.

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when I begin to articulate my retinal experience with the codes of recognition that come to me

from my social milieu(s), I am inserted into systems of visual discourse” (92).179 For Lacan, a

system not dissimilar to the grammar and syntax of language applies to the visual. We can see a

similarity in Pierce’s insistence on the symbolic aspect of, and inherent to every sign, even those

presumed ontologically indexical, self-generated, natural. Bryson continues his summary of the

Lacanian visual screen: “Into my visual field something cuts, cuts across, namely the network of

signifiers” (ibid). This network of signifiers is, of course a societal and cultural construct, those

systems of visual discourse “that saw the world before I did[,…] orchestrated with a cultural

production of seeing that exists independently of my life and outside it” (ibid). This cultural and

therefore ideological production of seeing was further honed with the advent and growing

spectacle of mechanically mass-reproduced photo-real images in that it invisibly introduced a

framework of determinations made by publishers and advertisers, layout editors and even

photographers themselves, all of whom implicitly and automatically reinforced the network of

signifiers, the dominant system of visual discourse in which they lived and worked. The viewer

of the press photograph who is consistently assured of the image’s ontology as purely indexical,

as untampered and free of subjectivity, however, does not see this invisible apparatus that comes

to determine both what they see and how they see it, all of which they increasingly appear to take

for lived experience itself.180 That is, this screen of signification remains hidden in plain view.

As Lacan writes: “un petit écran […] tranche sur ce qui est éclairé sans être vu”181 (Séminaire

179 This mirrors, to a certain extent, the conception from which Moholy-Nagy believed photography could

emancipate us. See above, page 155f.; Malerei 26f.; Painting 28f. 180 See above, page 157. Debord also writes: “Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une

représentation” (Société 16, §1). [“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (Society 7,

§1).] 181 “a small screen […] cuts into that which is illuminated without being seen” (Four 108, my emphasis)

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XI.99, my emphasis). Within the visual culture of early Weimar, this invisibility of the screen is

precisely what the praxis of Dadaist photomontage undoes.

Höch’s Schnitt allegorically presents and practices in the transition from the hidden Wilhelm,

syntactically and structurally supportive of a static and claustrophobic Weimar, to the quadrant

of dispersed and dynamic Dadaists. In this way, the Marxist screen of the 12-cylinder ship-

engine functions as a type of contradiction-screen, one which both announces itself as screen,

Marx positioned as a crest on the screen-apparatus, and allows for the analysis, the illumination,

the making-visible of other screens. That is, it is not merely enough to rearrange excised

fragments, as the reservist-images had done and many surrealist photomontages would come to

do in their attempt to hide the cut.182 Indeed, Höch allegorizes Wilhelmine-Weimar as an

extension of precisely that procedure, a shift in the system of visual discourse, rather than its

exposure, its analysis, its destruction. As we also saw in Rundschau’s interpolated strips, Höch

expands the cut that other Dadaists had left at the whim of radical imbrication or absurd

juxtaposition; she radicalized the violence of the montage-cut in order that that cut be explicitly

shown, be spatially visible, be expanded into the shocking lacuna of Krauss’s white page, for as

Baudelaire had prefigured: “Point de lacune, donc, point de surprise”183 (“Peintre” 505).

To the left of this Dadaist expanse, however, we see the shouted analyses of Hausmann and

the dynamic movements of the Dadaists seemingly obstructed by a series of unsympathetic

portraits, their vision severely othered (fig. 4.58). From top to bottom, the first portrait is of Graf

Mirbach,184 a German ambassador to Russia, assassinated as part of a coordinated effort within

182 As mentioned above, page 160, reservist-images (fig. 4.9) gave specific outlines or boundaries as to where, for

example, a soldier’s head should be placed. Krauss notes that “the surrealist photographers rarely used

photomontage. Their interest was in the seamless unity of the print, with no intrusion of the white page” (107f.). She

uses this “to illuminate the distinction between surrealist photography and its dada predecessor” (106). 183 “No lacuna, then, no surprise.” This could, alternatively, be read positively: “Place of the lacuna, then, place of

the surprise.” 184 Dech mistakenly attributes this portrait to Walther Rathenau; Dech 94. See MM 144 & 147; DT 171.

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the Left Socialist Revolutionary Uprising in Russia to re-enter war with Germany and unseat

Russian Bolsheviks from power, with othered eyes comprised, on the right, of one of the heads

of the spring-board divers which has been displaced by Baader in the Dadaist quadrant, and on

the left of Karl Neufeld,185 a German adventurer who secretly worked to persuade Egyptian

Muslims to fight in World War One against the British. Two portraits sit below Rathenau: Kurt

Hiller, the reviled philosopher of meliorism often pilloried by Berlin Dadaists,186 here in profile,

his only visible eye now both othered and inverted; behind Hiller is Adolf Gröber, a politician

who worked tirelessly against the revolution as a parliamentarian with the Deutsche

Zentrumspartei [German Center Party]. Despite this apparent blockade of, at best

pseudorevolutionaries as Doherty would call them, the head and trunk of Raimund Tost, a leader

of sailors during the revolution,187 is placed atop the body of a public speaker who stands atop an

ambulance amidst a crowd, originally under the title “Revolutionstage in Berlin,”188 (fig. 4.59) as

he shouts “Tretet dada bei!”189 The second-person plural imperative does not command you to

“Join dada!” but familiarly you all, each and every in the crowd, one which expands throughout

the quadrant to include attentive audiences of school-children, the old men listening in the

National Assembly, hangers on to the local train, and simple passers-by. Unlike Rundschau’s

general directive “Lesen und […] weitergeben,” to read and pass on, here the people of the

crowd, the masses and even politicians of Weimar, are commanded to join, to become Dadaists,

which is to say, to write and paint as Dadaists, to do Dada. “[S]o brauchen wir nur die Schere

185 Dech here suggests Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913

though embroiled into the politics of the war by the Hindu-German Conspiracy; Dech 94. See for example Jules

Stewart’s The Kaiser’s Mission to Kabul, and The Hindu Conspiracy Cases. See, however, MM 144 & 147; DT 171. 186 See above, page 126n137. 187 See Lavin 22. 188 “Revolutionary Days in Berlin” See Dech XXVI/15. 189 This is taken from the cover of the second edition of Der Dada, published in December 1919.

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nehmen”190 (Bergius & Riha Eds. 118), as Herzfelde stated in the introduction to the Dada-

Messe catalogue where Schnitt was first exhibited. This radical excision, however, isn’t only

based on the montage-cut, but Herzfelde continues: “handelt es sich um Dinge geringeren

Umfangs, so brauchen wir auch gar nicht Darstellungen, sondern nehmen die Gegenstände

selbst”191 (ibid). Across the Atlantic and before Herzfelde had written these words, Marcel

Duchamp was in the process of radicalizing this very tenet of Berlin Dada; with the readymade.

190 “Now we need merely take scissors” (qtd. in Chatter 16). 191 “when something on a smaller scale is involved, we do not need representations at all but take instead the objects

themselves” (ibid).

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Chapter Five

“So That Its Useful Significance Disappeared”: Subversions of the Commodity by Commodities

“La question des devantures:. / Subir l’interrogatoire des devantures:. /

L’exigence de la devanture:. / […] / Quand on subit l’interrogatoire

des devantures, on prononce aussi sa propre Condamnation.”1

– Marcel Duchamp

“Les vitrines scandent ainsi le procès social de la valeur : elles sont pour tous

un test d’adaptation continuel, un test de projection dirigée et d’intégration”2

– Jean Baudrillard

“[Die Ware] spricht eine historische Sprache, die behauptet,

universell und transhistorisch zu sein.”3

-Werner Hamacher

If the word dada had not been utilized in its current mode, to designate, however loosely, an

aggregation of (anti)artists, until its inclusion in Hugo Ball’s journal on 18 April 1916, any

designation as Dadaist of Duchamp and many of his readymades becomes particularly fraught.

Of course, Duchamp’s connection to Francis Picabia, a frequenter of the Arensburg Circle that

would retroactively come to be called New York Dada, and something of a travelling apostle of

Dada,4 would have likely introduced Duchamp to their (anti)artistic program, if not necessarily

its most recent nomenclature. Indeed, Duchamp later mentions that he first heard of the word

dada through the work of Picabia’s friend and occasional collaborator, Tristan Tzara and

1 DDSN 111. [“The question of shop windows / To undergo the interrogation of shop windows / The exigency of

shop windows / […] / When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one pronounces one’s own

sentence / […] / From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, concludes

with the cessation of choice” (qtd. in Mileaf 44, translation modified).] 2 Société de consommation 265. [“Shop-windows thus beat out the rhythm of the social process of value: they are a

continual adaptability test for everyone, a test of managed projection and integration” (Consumer Society 167).] 3 “Lingua” 77. [“[The commodity] speaks a historical language which claims to be universal and transhistorical”

(“Lingua” [en] 174).] 4 Picabia travelled regularly to multiple artistic centers, most obviously the various chapters of Dada and proto-

Dada. Duchamp would later remark: “C’est trés complique, l’histoire de Picabia, au point de vue voyages…”

(Entretiens 100). [“Picabia’s story is very complicated from the point of view of his travels” (55).]

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specifically his manifesto “‘La première aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine’ […] qu’il

nous l’a envoyé, à moi ou à Picabia, assez tôt en 1917 je crois, ou fin 1916”5 (Entretiens 99).

Somewhat begrudgingly, Duchamp concedes that, despite his ignorance of what precisely was

occurring in Zürich, his work and those of his fellow artists in New York was “parallèle, si vous

voulez, mais sans influence directe. Ce n’était pas Dada mais c’était dans le même ésprit”6 (101).

European Dadaists, however, came to count Duchamp among their ranks, perhaps most notably

Hans Richter, who explained in his DADA– Kunst und Antikunst the exemplary position that

Duchamp’s works, particularly his readymades and his magnum opus La mariée mise à nu par

ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even], often shortened to

simply The Large Glass (fig. 5.1), held as specifically Dadaist works.7 In addition to Richter’s

and other Dadaist’s later assignation of the Arensberg Circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia,

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy, Marius de Zayas, Man Ray, among others,

as New York Dada, multiple art historians have also insisted on the connection.8 Indeed,

Duchamp would later associate himself directly to Dada with his single issue journal produced

with Man Ray titled simply New York Dada (fig. 5.2).9 Perhaps the connection most often

asserted between New York and European chapters of Dada was their apparently virulent stance

as anti-art.

While Duchamp would not entirely distance himself from such a label, he would neither

accept it without caveat. Duchamp, for example, described the type of “aggressivité” that

5 “The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Fire Extinguisher [… which] he sent […] to us, to me or to Picabia, rather

early, in 1917, I think, or at the end of 1916” (Dialogues 55). See above, page 101; 110. 6 “parallel, if you wish, but not directly influenced. It wasn’t Dada, but it was in the same spirit” (Dialogues 56). 7 See Richter’s DK 91-104; DA 87-100. 8 For both its summary of such insistences, as well as the subtlety of the argumentation for various connections, see

Marjorie Perloff’s “Dada without Duchamp; Duchamp without Dada: Avant-Garde Tradition and the Individual

Talent.” 9 The cover of the work included a reproduction of Duchamp’s Belle Haleine: Eau de Violette [Beautiful Breath:

Veil Water] (fig. 5.3), a perfume bottle marketed as mouth wash. See CW 686-689.

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Picabia’s journal 391, among the first New York works to utilize the word dada, as “Anti-art. Il

s’agissait surtout de remettre en question le comportement de l’artiste tel que l’envisageaient les

gens. L’absurdité de la technique, des choses traditionelles…”10 (Entretiens 100). In many ways,

this was far more indicative of Dadaists who had remained in Europe and were therefore

afforded a rich (sub)textual explanation for their aggressivity, such as the summary presented on

an advertisement for the Dadaist journal Der blutige Ernst, which “die tödlichen Ideologien und

Einrichtungen [bekämpft], die den Krieg verursachten…”11 (Gegen den Ausbeuter, fig. 1.3).

Duchamp’s relationship to the war, however, was decidedly different than those who had

emigrated within Europe. Duchamp’s conscription to serve the war effort had been initially

deferred, as he had already completed his compulsory one-year service, and in January 1915 was

finally exempted thanks to a rheumatic heart murmur.12 With difficulties in Paris and the

encroachment of hostilities, Duchamp fled Paris for neutral New York in June, one month after

Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball fled Berlin for neutral Switzerland.13 From far across the

Atlantic, however, Duchamp appeared particularly disinterested in the war and the militant

nationalism that surrounded it,14 all of which was therefore unconvincing as an explanation for

the perception of Duchamp as aggressively anti-art. Indeed, Duchamp appeared to reject, in a

certain way, this aggressivity: “I am against the word ‘anti’ because it’s a bit like an atheist, as

10 “aggressivity” ; “Antiart. It was principally a matter of questioning the artist’s behavior, as people envisaged it.

The absurdity of technique, of traditional things…” (Dialogues 56). 11 “combats the deadly ideologies and institutions that caused the war.” Looking back, Tzara would write: “Dada

took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety, for it regarded this system as inextricably bound up

with human stupidity, the stupidity which culminated in the destruction of man by man…” (Motherwell 403). 12 See Calvin Tompkin’s Duchamp: A Biography 136f. 13 Marcel Janco had arrived in Zürich the year before, likely in autumn of 1914. Walter Serner had also abandoned

Germany for Switzerland in February 1915, who had invited Hemmings and Ball to work on the pacifist newspaper

Der Mistral [The Mistral]. By autumn 1915, almost all major Zürich pre-Dadaists were in neutral Switzerland. See

Witkovsky’s chronology in Dickerson’s Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris 419ff. 14 In a letter to his lifelong friend Walter Pech, Duchamp writes almost blithely: “Ils m’ont trouvé trop malade pour

être soldat. Je ne suis pas fâché de cette décision : vous le savez bien / Je continue donc à travailler régulièrement…”

(Affect/marcel 29). [“They said I was too sick to be a soldier. I am not too unhappy about this decision, as you’ll

well imagine. So I carry on working regularly…” (Affect/marcel 30).]

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opposed to a believer. And an atheist is just as much a religious man as the believer is, and an

anti-artist is just as much of an artist as the other artist. Anartist would have been better. […]

Anartist meaning no artist at all” (“Art, Anti-Art: Marcel Duchamp Speaks”). We can, at best,

read this statement by Duchamp as something of a highly ironic meta– or paratext in reference to

his own history and works. Certainly by 1959, when Duchamp made this statement and as he

intimates, he had long since been interpellated as artist and anti-artist, or at the very minimum, as

the producer of (anti)artistic works. The questions begged by such a statement, then, revolve

around the role of the self-proclaimed anartist within art. We can then recontextualize the

question: if the European (an)artists of Dada aggressively dismantled language and art for its role

as a seemingly willing accomplice to war, for what other odious collaboration might the New

York anartist Duchamp have denudated art and language? As European Dadaists often alluded to

the underlying target of their aggresivity, so too did Duchamp often invoke, in both his

paratextual notes and completed works, the collaboration he often meant to investigate.

Duchamp rhetorically asked himself in 1913: “Peut-on faire des œuvres qui ne soient pas

‘d’art’?” (Duchamp du signe 111, hereafter abbreviated DDSN). While this is translated easily

enough as “Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” (Essential Writings 74),

However, the French word here, œuvres [works], already and necessarily has the context of a

specifically artistic production. There is no such thing as an œuvre of lumber, for example. This

quasi-ironic wordplay, however, already presages the theme of collaboration that would

regularly appear in Duchamp’s paratextual notes. Later, Duchamp would clarify his conception

of this “of art” that he proposed to be exorcised: “Le mot art, d’ailleurs, étymologiquement, veut

dire ‘faire’, tout simplement. ‘Faire avec’, si vous voulez, et presque ‘faire avec les mains’.

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Donc, l’art, c’est tout ce qui est fait avec la main, et généralement par un individu”15

(Charbonnier 12). Here, we can begin to imagine a subtext to the perception of Duchamp as anti–

or anartistic. That is, art, or rather a work of art, is an object, created or made by hand, the

product of manual labor by an individual artist of particular skill and genius. Duchamp’s

rhetorical desire, then, to make works which are not works of art becomes a critical attempt at

distinction from, or contention with, not merely a more classical idea of aesthetics and art. That

is, a work that is not a work of art, then, is a work devoid of unique artisanship, devoid of

individual handwork. Thierry de Duve calls this Duchamp’s abandonment of painting,16 the

“passage from the specific to the generic, from painting to art in general” (“Echoes” 73). In

addition to a confrontation with classical aesthetics and the work of art, so too does this highlight

production, here a labor that is no longer manual, no longer by-hand and individual, but rather

invokes another form of production and consequently another product—that of the

technologically mass produced, industrially Fordist commodity.17 Nowhere did Duchamp more

thoroughly investigate this connection between the work (of art) and the modern commodity

more than his most infamous creation, the readymade.

15 “The word art, incidentally, etymologically, means ‘to make,’ quite simply. ‘To make with,’ if you like, and

almost ‘make by hand.’ Therefore, art is everything that is made with the hand, and in general by an individual.” 16 This point is made in many of de Duve’s works, but nowhere more strenuously and thoroughly than his

Nominalisme pictoral, translated as Pictorial Nominalism. 17 This mirrors, in a certain way, the shift from art drawn or painted by hand towards elements of technological

reproduction such as marketing labels and mass produced photographs, which initially characterized Cubist papier

collés and later more radically Dadaist photomontage. See above, page 158ff.

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Choice at the Shop Window

Duchamp himself noted: “The curious thing about the Readymade is that I’ve never been

able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me” (Tompkins 159). As many

have noted, this lack of any ontological definition is further complicated by the multiple

descriptors that Duchamp would utilize to differentiate between various types; “added,”

“assisted,” “unhappy,” “semi–,” etc.18 Thierry de Duve removes the idea of an object-oriented

ontology and rather focuses rather on the praxes necessary for the formation of the readymade,

the first and most readily recognized and regularly discussed of which centers on choice.19 The

importance of choice to the fabrication of the readymade was first mentioned by André Breton in

1935, one of the first to write a critical analysis of Duchamp’s readymades, which he

summarized as “objets manufacturés promus à la dignité d’objets d’art par le choix de l’artiste”20

(“Phare” 46). Duchamp repeated this three years later in Breton and Max Eluard’s Dictionnaire

abrégé du surréalisme: “READYMADE – Objet usuel promu à la dignité d’objet d’art par le

simple choix de l’artiste”21 (23). Beatrice Wood’s defense of Duchamp’s most infamous

readymade, Fountain (fig. 5.4), for The Blind Man (fig. 5.5) places what Breton and Duchamp

would later refer to as manufactured and usual in relation to choice: “Whether Mr. Mutt

[Duchamp’s pseudonym for the work] with his own hands made the fountain or not has no

importance. He CHOSE it” (qtd. in Ades & Brotchie 135). That is, the made-by-handedness of

18 See de Duve’s essay “Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism,” especially 67f. One can see these

various adjectives put to use in the list of “designated” readymades given in André Gervais’s La raie alitée d’effets

81-83. For an extended discussion of these adjectives, see chapter four of CW. 19 See de Duve’s “Echoes” 72f. Here I use the word “formation” as simply a place-holder during our investigation

into these fundamental praxes that will help us to better understand the work of the anartist in relation to the

readymade. 20 “manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of objects of art through the choice of the artist.” Cf. Reed 224f. 21 “Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism” ; “READYMADE – an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of

art by the mere choice of an artist.”

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the object, which is to say the object’s supposed artistic or aesthetic quality pursuant to

Duchamp’s definition, remains inconsequential in light of the choice of the object. That is not to

say, however, that aesthetics did not play a role in that choice.

Duchamp would later describe the praxis of readymade choice: “Il faut parvenir à quelque

chose d’une indifférence telle que vous n’ayez pas d’émotion esthétique. Le choix des ready-

mades est toujours basé sur l’indifference visuelle en même temps que sur l’absence totale de

bon ou de mauvais goût”22 (Entretiens 84). The basis for the choice of the readymade, therefore,

the approach of the fabricator to her readymade is entirely aesthetic-based, though here based on

a radical indifference, as an anartist possessed with something of “une anesthésie complète”23

(DDSN 182). That is, the anartist is meant to approach the object with something of a radical and

radically exhaustive aesthetic catalogue in mind, one which is not merely based upon her own

conceptions of good or bad taste, but rather one which encompasses all of aesthetics, all of good

and bad taste, a catalogue which is not only complete but must be simultaneously avoided.

Though such a catalogue’s completeness and its avoidability can only be seen as purely

theoretical and wholly unrealizable, if not oxymoronic and self-contradictory, aesthetics serves

as the ironically sole paradigm within which the readymade is formed, if in a purportedly

negative way. This unique combination—a supposedly complete catalogue of aesthetic theory

with an allegedly efficient exclusion of any object that belongs to such a catalogue—leaves

precious few objects available to the choice of the anartist. It must never have circulated, or

thought to have been able to circulate within the world of art, not of art nor, therefore, made by

hand, but rather is meant to be a usual and manufactured object, a commodity. While aesthetics

22 “You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of

readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste”

(Dialogues 48). 23 “a complete anaesthetic”

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functions as the ultimate frame within which the anartist forms the readymade, our investigation

of an ultimate target of Duchamp’s latent anti-art aggressivity, that with which art co-conspires,

leads us here to focus on the commodity character of his works, and in many ways, the

burgeoning commodity aesthetics which those works themselves consider at the dawn of Fordist

consumerist capitalism.

This conflation of the world of art and aesthetics with the world of capitalism and

commodities appears not only in Duchamp’s interviews, apologetics, and notes, but is also

regularly referenced by the readymades themselves. Duchamp’s infamous readymade, Fountain

(fig. 5.4), was pseudonymously signed “R. Mutt / 1917” (fig. 5.6), often considered an allusion

to J.L. Mott Iron Works, both the commodity’s Philadelphia manufacturer and supplier, which

ran a Manhattan plumbing supply store from which Duchamp purchased it. The allusion to

manufacture and distribution is all the more evident in 1916’s Peigne [Comb], which is stamped

like a business card by the manufacturer: “CHAS F. BINGLER / 166 6TH AVE. N.Y.” (fig. 5.7).

Beyond the object itself, we can also see in the anartists approach to the object this intersection

of commodity and aesthetics. In Breton and Éluard’s 1938 dictionary, Duchamp writes: “Ready-

made réciproque : se servir d’un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser”24 (23), the motion of the

formation of the readymade reversed. While this is oft quoted as evidence of Duchamp’s anti-art

aggressivity,25 the destruction of a purely aesthetic work of art by a hot iron, it shows the

approach of the reciprocal anartist; the absolute anaesthetic indifference to a work of high art in

service of the formation of a commodity. Duchamp would enact this vacillation between art and

commodity, and thereby highlight their ever-growing intersection, with his 1919 readymade,

L.H.O.O.Q. (fig. 5.8). Leonardo da Vinci’s La Jaconde, thanks to its theft and subsequent return

24 “Reciprocal ready-made: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.” 25 See, for example, Martial Poirson’s essay “« Se servir d’un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser! ».”

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to the Louvre,26 had become world renowned and subsequently commodified in the form of a

postcard, sold by vendors along the banks of the Seine as a type of keepsake. Duchamp chose

this now-commodified art, a work of high-aesthetics desiccated by its commodification,27

repurposed as a readymade with the sharp addition (rectification) of a mustache and goatee, and

the inclusion of its title;28 from art to commodity to readymade. In 1955, Duchamp repeated this

movement in his L’envers de la Peinture (fig. 5.10),29 a dish-cloth with La Jaconde reproduced

on it, or rather L.H.O.O.Q.; art to commodity to readymade back to commodity? to art? to

readymade again? Duchamp’s conspicuous play at this confused intersection continued with his

1965 readymade rasée L.H.O.O.Q. (fig. 5.11);30 a commodified work of art, a postcard of La

Jaconde, chosen as readymade and rectified with facial hair and title L.H.O.O.Q., which reverted

to a commodity in its publication on the front cover of Picabia’s 391,31 now chosen again, sans

rectifying facial hair, as yet another readymade.32

26 Stolen on 21 August 1911, La Jaconde was not returned to the Louvre until 4 January 1914. Duchamp’s good

friend Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and held for five days as the suspected thief, two years before the true

thief was caught. 27 In an interview with the Toronto journal Evidence, under the title “Dada,” Duchamp discussed L.H.O.O.Q. as a

response to this very type of degradation. “I had the idea that a painting cannot, must not be looked at too much. It

becomes desecrated by the very act of being seen too much” (36). In this interview, Duchamp was also clear that

L.H.O.O.Q. was a Dadaist work, and in many ways intimated specifically that he was a Dadaist. See Arturo

Schwarz’s Complete Works 670, hereafter abbreviated CW. 28 The title L.H.O.O.Q. is a homophone, when spoken in French, of “Elle a chaud au cul” [“She is horny”]. Much

like Stieglitz’s photo of Fountain reproduced in The Blind Man (fig. 5.4; 5.5), L.H.O.O.Q. had become something of

a commodity in itself thanks to Picabia’s quasi-reproduction of it on the cover of the twelfth edition of his journal

391, March 1920 (fig. 5.9). Indeed, thanks to their photographic reproduction in journals, Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q.

were Duchamp’s only readymades known outside of the Arensberg Circle and their associates. 29 The French word envers here produces a double meaning, both The Wrong Side of Painting and The Reverse of

Painting. 30 Unadorned with facial hair, a playing card which represented La Jaconde was attached to a dinner invitation

associated with an exhibition of his work, inscribed with rasée / L.H.O.O.Q. [L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved] and signed by

Duchamp. See CW 849f. 31 Famously, this version of L.H.O.O.Q. was created by Picabia himself, as he had not received Duchamp’s original

in the post by the time it was needed to print that edition of 391. Rather than not include the image, Picabia created

his own version, forgetting La Jaconde’s goatee and drastically dramatizing the mustache. 32 The connection between Duchamp’s suggestion of the reciprocal readymade as a Rembrandt ironing board and

L.H.O.O.Q. was playfully memorialized by Daniel Spoerri’s 1964 work, Utiliser un Rembrandt comme planche à

repasser [Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board] (fig. 5.12), which placed an ironing board featuring a large

representation of La Jaconde, with iron and cloth, across an old chair.

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With such a series of oscillations between art and consumerist capitalism, aesthetics and

commodity, we can begin to see both the extent and the complexity of the intersection that

Duchamp and his readymades appear to inhabit and investigate. That is, the readymade is

anything but unidirectional from commodity towards art or vice versa, but rather reverses, folds

back upon itself, complicates itself. Previous critical readings of the readymades themselves,

however, have mainly focused on one relationship and one direction; that of the choice of

commodities for introduction into the world of art, and specifically in order to critique that world

and the highly traditional aesthetics on which it is based. While this is critical to the commodity

aesthetics that Duchamp’s readymades confront, it remains only one element, one direction of

the larger network of commodity aesthetics. With this in mind, we hope here to expand the

critical reading of the readymade to include other elements and directionalities, namely the

critique of the commodity form and commodity aesthetics that is inherently enabled by the

commodity’s introduction into that world of art. With the promotion and presentation of former

commodities as (an)aesthetic works, as œuvres not of art, Duchamp complicates and analyzes

this broader intersection of commodity aesthetics that contemporaneous Fordism had begun to

require and develop. Duchamp appeared to have knowingly inhabited this intersection as he took

his final pseudonym, Marchand du sel.33 This phonetic anagram of Marcel Duchamp designated

him not only a trader or merchant of salt [sel], that common or exceedingly usual commodity,

but also of, homophonically, a type of official signature, stamp, or sigil [scel].34 That is, where

the merchandise meets its signature, its simultaneously official and ornamental seal, the

intersection of commodity and aesthetics, is precisely where we find Duchamp and his

readymades merchandise.

33 Robert Desnos created the pseudonym, which Duchamp would take. See Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” 15. 34 See CW 218f.

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Some decade before Duchamp adopted the moniker of merchant, however, the stage had

been set for his investigation of the commodity and its multivalent aesthetic interactions. Indeed,

his investigations began before his first readymade; with its prototype, Broyeuse de chocolat no.

1 [Chocolate Grinder No. 1] (fig. 5.13). Duchamp completed Broyeuse 1 in March of 1913, after

he had initially seen the apparatus during a New Year’s trip with friends to Rouen.35 In a note on

Broyeuse 1, Duchamp reminds himself to add the final compliment to this work, and eventually

its second incarnation Broyeuse de Chocolat no. 2 [Chocolate Grinder no. 2] (fig. 5.14) a year

later:36 “formule commerciale, marque de fabrique, devise commerciale / inscrite comme une

réclamé sur un petit papier glacé et / coloré (faire exécuter dans une imprimerie) – ce papier collé

/ à l’article: ‘Broyeuse de Chocolat’”37 (DDSN 148). This title-advertisement hybrid was added

to both works as stipulated (fig. 5.16). Here is one of the first explicit intersections of Duchamp’s

work and consumerist capitalism. While this coincided with Duchamp’s initial introduction of

whole commodities into his work, as readymade with Bicycle Wheel (fig. 5.17), not merely

temporally or in relation to consumerist capitalism, but also thematically, as a so-called bachelor

machine, which auto-erotically rotates without going anywhere,38 Broyeuse 1 and 2, and their

title-advertisement, appear particularly concerned with the commodity’s aesthetic interaction and

exchange with the potential consumer. Duchamp would write of the work’s inspiration: “Je vis

un jour dans une vitrine une véritable broyeuse de chocolat en action et ce spectacle me fascina

tellement que je pris cette machine comme point de départ”39 (DDSN 173). Here we see not only

35 For a biographical account of Duchamp’s trip, see Tompkins 122ff. 36 Broyeuse 2 was completed in February of 1914. These works served as initial studies of the form that would

represent the bachelor apparatus in the lower panel of The Large Glass (fig. 5.15). 37 “commercial formula, trade mark, commercial slogan inscribed like an advertisement on a bit of glossy and

colored paper (have it made by a printer) – this paper stuck on the article ‘Chocolate Grinder’” (Notes 210). 38 For discussions of Bicycle Wheel, in addition to its physical and formal similarities to Broyeuse 1 and 2, see CW

188f.; 442; and Ulf Linde’s “La Roue de Bicyclette.” 39 “One day, in a shop window, I saw a veritable chocolate grinder in action and this spectacle so fascinated me that

I took this machine as a point of departure.”

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Duchamp’s fascination with the specific commodity of the chocolate grinder, but also the

spectacle of the shop window in which it’s displayed, like the capitalist analogue to the frame

around a tableau or a pedestal in a museum, the moment and location of the commodity’s

theatrical, aesthetic appearance, which along with the remainder of the storefront functioned as

the very locus of consumerist capitalism. This spectacle, this exhibition, show, tableau,

performance, the aesthetics of the shop window and the storefront functions as the aesthetics of

the commodities therein, functions then as the aestheticized interaction between commodities

and consumers, as the appeal that draws consumers to commodities. Duchamp’s fascination with

this spectacular interaction continued well beyond the confectioner’s shop window in Rouen.

While Duchamp’s investigation of the shop-window is perhaps most apparent in Duchamp’s

Large Glass40 (fig. 5.1), the Broyeuses that in many ways inspired it (figs. 5.13; 5.14; 5.15), or

the first readymade completed at the same time, Bicycle Wheel (fig. 5.17), there is another

readymade of particular interest. In Duchamp’s collection of notes À l’infinif,41 the final such

collection published before his death, Duchamp included a note, dated January 1916, which

envisioned a “Vitrine avec des verres roulants,” and “vitrine-buffet”42 (DDSN 111; 112). The

note ends with a quick imperative reminder to himself: “trouver inscription pour Woolworth

Bldg. / comme readymade–”43 (112). New York City’s Woolworth Building (fig. 5.18) would

certainly have been Duchamp’s largest readymade; the 57 floor, 792 foot piece of Neo-Gothic

architecture ostentatiously stood as the tallest building in the world from its completion in 1914

40 Indeed, thanks to Duchamp’s initial discussion of the shop-window occurred simultaneously with his study of the

bachelor-machine Broyeuse which he used as the “point of departure” for The Large Glass, the vast majority of

critical readings of Duchamp’s investigation into the shop-window have elaborated on this connection. Of particular

note is Robert Lebel’s Marcel Duchamp 31; 68. Joselit continues this line of inquiry from the point of view of erotic

frustration. See Joselit 137ff. See also Mileaf 43f. 41 This is also commonly known as La boîte blanche [White Box]. See DDSN 110-139. 42 “Show-case with sliding glass panes” ; “glass-front dresser” 43 “find inscription for Woolworth Bldg. / as readymade–”

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until 1930.44 It might also serve as the readymade most directly associated with consumerist

capitalism. As the building loomed over the Manhattan terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge, at

precisely the point where millions of potential consumers from Brooklyn would cross daily for

their jobs in Manhattan, the Woolworth Building and its multiple street or eye-level storefronts

and large window displays functioned as something of an advertisement in its over-sized self.45

Indeed, the building quickly began to symbolize American commerce as such, christened and

wildly popularized by a local priest as “The Cathedral of Commerce.”46 Rather than a simple

commodity removed from behind a shop window, Duchamp here chose the very epicenter of

American modernity and consumerist capitalism; the headquarters and crown jewel of the

corporation that “had already earned a reputation for enticing window design,” going so far as to

employ “the latest technologies in plate glass manufacturing, along with mirrors and the new

incandescent illumination to heighten the viewers’ experience of the shop windows’ allure”

(Fenske 27).47 That is, Duchamp wrote to himself to choose as readymade the headquarters of

consumerist capitalism, of the revolutionized storefront and its highly aestheticized interaction of

appeal with the passer-by as potential consumer, the very culmination of shop windows and

storefronts themselves; nor was that his only note on the subject.

Sandwiched between the œuvres– and Woolworth-notes in À l’infinitif, and dated 1913, just

after Duchamp’s trip to Rouen, Duchamp questioned the particularly fraught interaction between

storefront and passer-by. “La question des devantures:. / Subir l’interrogatoire des devantures:. /

L’exigence de la devanture:. / […] / Quand on subit l’interrogatoire de devantures, on prononce

44 The Bank of Manhattan Trust Building at 40 Wall Street took over the title at the beginning of May 1930, only to

be overtaken at the end of May by the Chrysler Building. 45 See Fenske 25f. 46 The first use of the phrase “cathedral of commerce” was by Alan Francis, an English visitor, interviewed in the 27

April 1913 edition of the New York Times. See Fenske 216; 265ff. 47 For a longer discussion of the lengths to which Woolworth went to perfect his hop window, see Fenske 25ff.;

220ff.

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aussi sa propre Condamnation. […] De la demande des devantures, de l’inévitable réponse aux

devantures, se conclut l’arrêt du choix”48 (DDSN 111). Though Duchamp utilizes multiple

double genitive constructions, where the question is potentially posed of the storefront or by the

storefront, its utilization is less ambiguous than it is rather bi-directional,49 a question and

response from both storefront and passer-by, a “aller et retour”50 (ibid), which is to say,

something of a symbiotic, co-temporal conversation or dialogue between the two. As with any

dialogue or cross-examination, that interaction between the aesthetic spectacle of the storefront

and the passer-by is anything but innocent or innocuous. Not only does the dialogue conclude

with the cessation of choice, but we can begin to imagine how it began there. That is, any

interrogation perpetrated by the storefront functions as an aesthetic appeal, designed by

Woolworth employees or their counterparts to turn the passers-by towards it, which is to say, to

transform the passer-by individual into a potential-consumer ideological subject. As Wolfgang

Haug notes in his seminal Kritik der Warenästhetik,51 an investigation of the “Subjekt-Objekt-

Beziehungen” of commodity aesthetics, with storefront and shop window as its locus, “eröffnet

einen Zugang zur subjektiven Seite in der politischen Ökonomie des Kapitalismus, soweit das

Subjektive zugleich Resultat und Voraussetzung ihres Funktionierens darstellt”52 (22). This is

precisely the relationship that Duchamp means to investigate: the cessation of choice in the

48 “The question of shop windows / To undergo the interrogation of shop windows / The exigency of shop windows

/ […] / When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one pronounces one’s own sentence / […] / From

the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, concludes with the cessation of

choice” (qtd. in Mileaf 44, translation modified). Here, Mileaf translates devanture as shop windows, though

storefront, of which the shop window is the overwhelmingly dominant feature, might be more appropriate. Of

particular import for us here is the deep connection between the devanture and the vitrine, neither able to exist

without the other. 49 Though the beginning of the note utilizes the double genitive, the final line quoted here appears to clarify the

directionality in the utilization of “aux devantures” [“to the storefront”], which strongly implies that the storefront

began the conversation as interrogator. 50 “round trip” 51 Critique of Commodity Aesthetics 52 “subject object relations” ; “reveals the subjective element in the political economy of capitalism in so far as

subjectivity is at once a result and a prerequisite of its functioning” (Commodity Aesthetics 7).

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aesthetic, symbiotic, simultaneous, round trip dialogue between subject and object, the

aestheticized commodity, through the vitrine, that is, the effect of the shop window and

storefront on the formation of the subject. In other words, we are able here to begin to think of

Duchamp’s investigation into the spectacle of the shop window as a unique reformulation, a

more clearly defined concept of Althusser’s interpellative subject formation in the time of

consumerist capitalism.

Published the same year as Althusser’s Sur le reproduction and with a similar eye to Lacan’s

vocabulary of the mirror-stage, Jean Baudrillard theorized the role of the shop window in the

formation of the subject, though with a crucial difference: “Il n’y a plus de miroir ou de glace

dans l’ordre moderne, où l’homme soit affronté à son image pour le meilleur ou le pire, il n’y a

plus que de la vitrine”53 (Société de consommation 309). Jacques Derrida, in his later work,

Spectres de Marx, similarly considered the commodity form: “Il y a miroir, et la forme

marchandise est aussi ce miroir, mais comme tout à coup il ne joue plus son rôle, comme il ne

renvoie pas l’image attendue, ceux qui se cherchent ne s’y retrouvent plus”54 (247). While

Baudrillard and Derrida complicate the formation of the subject in late capitalism, there of

course exists a reflection when a potential consumer stands before the shop window, if flawed or

incomplete, which reforms our use of Lacan’s mirror-stage. Unlike Lacan’s infant, who sees

herself as a wholly constituted Gestalt, seeing herself in her environment, the passer-by who is

53 “There is no longer any mirror or looking-glass in the modern order in which the human being would be

confronted with his image for better or for worse; there is only the shop-window” (Consumer Society 193). It is

important to note that Baudrillard does not argue here that mirrors no longer exist, but rather that the mirror’s

innocent, alienated reflection of the other no longer exists, as there is, in the modern order, no selfsame. “C’est un

peu comme dans le cas de l’enfant qui embrasse son image dans la glace avant d’aller se coucher […] il « joue »

avec elle, entre le même et l’autre” (Société de consommation 310). [“The situation is rather like that of the child

kissing his image in the mirror before going to bed […] he ‘plays’ with it, somewhere between sameness and

otherness” (Consumer Society 193).] 54 “There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role,

since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find

themselves in it” (Specters 195).

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drawn to, and subsequently stands before the shop window sees only her partial reflection in the

plate glass, which hovers, superimposed ghostlike upon the highly aesthetic and theatrical scene

of commodities. It is an incomplete formation of the subject, in that the presumptive subject

presented appears to be for the moment, fragmentary. Extrapolated from Lacan’s mirror-stage,

we can think of this partial reflection of the subject in the shop window is fulfilled in its

superimposition atop a series of commodities, where the reflection seen by the consumer-subject

is made whole only in so far as the commodity compensates for, fulfills the missing elements of

the fragmentary reflection. In terms of the mirror-stage, then, the subject is integrated into

consumerist capitalism. This integration is what offers the passer-by “some form of social and

discursive existence” (Excitable Speech 26).55 It appears then, that this is what the shop window,

more than the commodities it displays, truly offers to passers-by, even if simultaneously and

conspicuously offered as though it were the commodity’s appeal. As Baudrillard continues: “il

[le consommateur] « joue » sa personalisation d’un terme à l’autre, d’un signe à l’autre[, …] se

définit par un « jeu » de modèles et par son choix, c’est-à-dire par son implication combinatoire

dans ce jeu”56 (Société de consommation 310). The promise of the shop window to the passer-by

is, however, that the purchase and possession of these theatrically displayed signs, terms,

models,57 commodities will transform the passer-by’s incomplete, ghostly reflection amongst

commodities into an ever-closer approximation to an actual mirror, an accurate reflection of

55 See Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, where she discusses Althusser’s example of the policeman in the courtyard

as an economic interaction: “The passerby turns precisely to acquire a certain identity, one purchased, as it were,

with the price of guilt” (25). She adds the example of hate speech: “Thus we sometimes cling to the terms that pain

us because, at a minimum, they offer us some form of social and discursive existence” (26). That is to say, in a

certain respect, we crave the completeness of subjecthood. 56 “he [the consumer] ‘plays out’ his personalization between one term and another, one sign and another[, …]

defines himself by his choice within a ‘game’ played between different models or, in other words, by his

combinatorial involvement in that game” (Consumer Society 193). 57 Baudrillard, in his radical association of the commodity with the sign, describes that which is behind the shop

window as “objets/signes multipliés […] l’ordre des signifiants du statut social” (Société de consommation 309f.).

[“multiple signs/objects […] the order of signifiers of social status” (Consumer Society 193).]

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themselves and their environment, which is to say, a repetition of Lacan’s mirror stage and the

shop window’s promised formation of the subject. This promise, however, is necessarily always

hollow.

In order to keep up the game of consumption, the reproduction of capital as Althusser called

it, the shop window as a unique interaction and representation of commodity aesthetics can never

become a reliable mirror, never faithfully reflect the passer-by as a fully formed subject, for this

incompleteness of the subject is precisely where the shop window places the image of the

commodity, which according to the shop window would then complete that subject. As Haug

notes: “Es drängen sich nämlich unabsehbare Reihen von Bildern heran, die wie Spiegel sein

wollen, einfühlsam, auf den Grund blickend, Geheimnisse an die Oberfläche holend und dort

ausbreitend. In diesen Bildern werden den Menschen fortwährend unbefriedigte Seiten ihres

Wesens aufgeschlagen”58 (Kritik 82). The partial-reflection of the shop window, with

commodities fulfilling its darkened voids, seems then to show how a completely formed subject

may look, if these potential consumer-subjects would only purchase and possess this or that

commodity, but: “Die Erscheinung verspricht mehr, weit mehr, als sie je halten kann”59 (80). It is

a disappointment that ultimately leaves the subject incomplete and leads to the next desire, the

next purchase. Though the image of the fulfilled consumer-subject given by the shop window is

never realized, “versieht er [der Schein] sie [die Menschen] mit einer Sprache zur Ausdeutung

ihrer selbst und der Welt”60 (82), or as Baudrillard wrote the year before Haug: “la

58 “An innumerable series of images are forced upon the individual, like mirrors, seemingly empathetic and totally

credible, which bring their secrets to the surface and display them there. In these images, people are continually

shown the unfulfilled aspects of their existence” (Critique 52). 59 “Appearance always promises more, much more, than it can ever deliver” (Critique 50). As Duchamp ends his

note: “La peine consiste à couper la glace et à s’en mordre les pouces dès que la possession est consommée” (DDS

111). [“The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated” (qtd. in

Mileaf 44).] 60 “It [the illusion] provides them [the people] with a language to interpret their existence and the world” (Critique

52)

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communication qui s’établit au niveau de la vitrine[, … c’est] une communication généralisée de

tous les individus entre eux à travers […] la lecture et la reconnaissance, dans les mêmes objets,

du même système de signes”61 (Société de consommation 265). The vitrine functions as

something of an educational sub-apparatus to consumerist capitalism, teaches the consumer to

speak commodity-language. It is then buildings such as Woolworth, which function as

universities. “Les Grands Magasins constituent une sorte de sommet de ce procès urbain”62

(ibid). Ironically then, neither Duchamp nor his critical readers, considered Woolworth Building

to have been a completed readymade, for Duchamp was never able to complete the second

constitutive elements of its formation, that of its inscription.63

61 “the communication which is established at the level of the shop window is […] a generalized communication

between all individuals […] via the reading and recognition in the same objects of the same system of signs”

(Consumer Society 167). 62 “The big stores are a kind of pinnacle of this urban process” (ibid) 63 See David Reed’s “Developing Language of the Readymade” 223.

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Readymade Inscriptions

Despite the relative focus by critics on the role of choice in the formation of the readymade,

particularly given Beatrice Wood’s initial, capitalized defense of Fountain (fig. 5.5), “He

CHOSE it,” and therefore the relative underdevelopment of the inscription’s role in the

formation of the readymade, Duchamp himself was clear of the correlation. Indeed, inscription

was co-originary with his first choice of readymade, Bottle Rack (fig. 5.19): “L’idée d’une

inscription est entrée dans l’exécution à ce moment-là”64 (Entretiens 83). Recently, however,

critical studies have come to see inscription as not only corollary but constitutive of the

formation of the readymade.65 Much like the readymades they helped to constitute, however, no

ontological definition of inscription exists and seemingly any attempt to create one is quickly

complicated by their radically unsystematic utilizations; occasionally missing, simultaneously

title, or simply deemed unnecessary. Indeed, this heterogeneity of the inscription prompted

David Reed to designate multiple phases of readymades based on their relationship to their

inscriptions. The first phase, which Reed describes as the “halting steps in Paris” (220), largely

have no inscription, such as Bicycle Wheel (fig. 5.17), which was chosen before Duchamp had

conceptualized either readymade or inscription, and Bottle Rack, whose inscription was lost

along with the original object.66 The third, final, “and largely abortive phase” (223), eschewed

64 “The idea of an inscription was part of the execution at that moment” (Dialogues 47, translation modified).

Though Bicycle Wheel was Duchamp’s first readymade, that designation was retrospective. See CW 588. While

Bottle Rack was given an inscription at the time of its choice, it was lost along with the original piece itself. As

David Reed notes, Duchamp attempted once again, in vain, to create an inscription for Bottle Rack: “When

[Duchamp] initiated a second version [of Bottle Rack] in 1921 he could not remember his original words. He

inscribed it ‘Antique’ but that rather flaccid idea did not satisfy him and it did not reappear on subsequent

recreations” (219). 65 Perhaps the first to stress the importance of the inscription is Reed’s “The Developing Language of the

Readymades.” More recently, de Duve has listed inscription as one of the necessary conditions of readymade

fabrication. See de Duve’s “Echoes” 73. 66 See Reed 219.

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the inscription all together. We will focus rather on what Reed considers the second phase, an

“extended exploration of words and their syntax; ways of withdrawing meaning; ways of

attaching meaning” (221), the often radically abstract textual results of which were literally

inscribed, written upon the readymades themselves.

The textual abstraction of inscription was first practiced not with inscription or any

readymade, but rather with the textual experiment The (fig. 5.20) from October of 1915, a text in

which the word “the” was replaced by a small star (★ ). This, however, was not the only form of

deletion with which Duchamp imbued the text. “The meaning in these sentences was a thing I

had to avoid. [… T]he minute I did think of a verb to add to the subject, I would very often see a

meaning and immediately […] would cross out the verb and change it […] until the text finally

read without an echo of the physical world” (CW 638). These deletions, the literal removal and

replacement of words, is tied to a radical abstraction or complication of sense. One month later,

Duchamp appears to have attempted to utilize this same experimental approach to abstraction in

the creation of the inscription, “In Advance of the Broken Arm / from Marcel Duchamp 1915”

along the lower rim of a snow shovel, which subsequently functioned as the title of the

readymade, In Advance of the Broken Arm (fig. 5.21).67 This was, perhaps due to Duchamp’s still

infantile English, far from actual abstraction. He explained later: “Évidemment, j’espérais que

cela n’avais pas de sens mais, au fond, tout finit par en avoir un”68 (Entretiens 96f.). Duchamp

here seems to have taken something of a different tone in regards to sense; whether a wink and

nod to his ironic statement against sense or simply a resignation that as quickly as the words are

written, sense can be created. However, his sense of disappointment appears here specifically

67 Given the short amount of time between The and In Advance of a Broken Arm, the two are regularly linked in

critical readings, if not for their linguistic similarities as two pieces of English text. 68 “Obviously I was hoping it was without sense but, deep down, everything ends up having some [sense]”

(Dialogues 54).

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localized: “Évidemment l’association est facile [quand on a l’objet sous les yeux] : on peut se

casser le bras en pelletant la neige”69 (ibid). Duchamp recognizes that the inscription’s location,

on a snow shovel, creates the sense he attempts to avoid. Moreover, he recognizes, here some

fifty years after the work’s initial production, that spectators and critics continually and

instinctively create sense,70 one which here reverberates specifically with the object on which it

is inscribed, an almost narrative history of the object. Duchamp avoided this in his next work.

Two months after In Advance of the Broken Arm (fig. 5.21) and a month following his

Woolworth note, Duchamp created another dedicated text similar to The (fig. 5.20), free from

pedagogical or replacement stars and in his native French: Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février

1916 / à 1h. 3/4 après midi (fig. 5.22).71 Typed over four postcards held in place by tape, the text

of Rendez-vous followed the approach of The,72 and its supposed attempt to avoid sense. As with

the seeming relationship between The and In Advance of the Broken Arm, Duchamp appears to

have utilized lessons from the creation of the text Rendez-vous in service of the inscription for

his next readymade Peigne [Comb] (fig. 5.23). Here already, however, we are able to see a

radical distinction from In Advance. Rather than In Advance’s inscription-as-title, as no specific

title was given, Peigne is given the explicit, precise, pedestrian, even borderline tautological title,

on which the spectator can hang her expectations; I read “comb” and see a comb. This simplicity,

however, is placed in radical contradistinction to the inscription, indeed further heightens the

inscription’s abstraction, written along the spine of the comb in white, capital letters: “3 OU 4

69 “An obvious association is easy [when you have the object in front of your eyes]: you can break your arm

shoveling snow” (Dialogues 54). 70 Duchamp considered the reception of the spectator to be of considerable importance. See, for instance Entretiens

130; Dialogues 70. See also his brief text “The Creative Act.” 71 The full text in French can be found in DDSN 233. For a detailed reading, along with its English translation, see

CW 189-195; 208. 72 Duchamp’s description of this approach to Arturo Schwarz, quoted above in relation to The, was given in a

discussion of both of these works. See CW 638 and 642.

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GOUTTES DE HAUTEUR N’ONT RIEN A FAIRE AVEC LA SAUVAGERIE,”73 and along

the end of the comb, “FEB. 17 1916 11 A.M.” (fig. 5.24).74 While various critics have invariably

created/made sense of the inscription,75 none attach that meaning specifically to this comb, this

object, this readymade. That is, any sense read into or from the inscription remains relatively

separated, independent from the object on which it is written, the inscription creates no narrative

for the object, it adds nothing to the object’s history, which is to say something of a pure

ornament. Though Duchamp ostensibly chooses the object based on (an)aesthetics and writes the

inscription based on (an)sense, Duchamp’s creation of the work itself appears to be based on

their (non)intersection. For Haug, commodity aesthetics is the location of this intersection:

“einerseits auf »Schönheit«, d.h. auf eine sinnliche Erscheinung, die auf die Sinne ansprechend

wirkt; andrerseits auf solche Schönheit, wie sie im Dienste der Tauschwertrealisierung

entwickelt und den Waren aufgeprägt worden ist”76 (Kritik 23). Seemingly ignoring the aesthetic

inscription, Duchamp later spoke of the object Peigne: “this little iron comb has kept the

characteristics of a true Readymade: no beauty, no ugliness, nothing particularly aesthetic about

it… it was not even stolen in all these 48 years!” (d’Harnoncourt 279). While the anaesthetic

73 “3 or 4 drops of [from?] height have nothing to do with the savagery” 74 This places the moment of inscription just under eleven days after Rendez-vous was written. This was the sole

time in which a readymade was inscribed as was Rendez-vous, and which Duchamp had suggested to himself when

he sought “Préciser les « Readymades »,” published in La boîte verte [Green Box]: “En projetant pour un moment

proche à venir (tel jour, telle date telle minute), « d’inscrire un readymade ». […] Inscrire naturellement cette date,

heure, minute sur le readymade, comme renseignements” (DDSN 68). [“by planning for a moment to come (on such

a day, such a date, such a minute), ‘to inscribe a readymade’ […] Naturally inscribe that date, hour, minute, on the

readymade as information” (Essential Writings 32).] 75 Indeed, Arturo Schwarz places Peigne’s inscription rather in the context of The Large Glass (fig. 5.1), therefore

“less enigmatic: the ‘3 or 4 drops of haughtiness’ are the Bride’s who rejects, with some restraint, the Bachelor’s

approaches, but again her ‘haughtiness [hauteur] has nothing to do with shyness [sauvagerie]’” (CW 195). Amelia

Jones and John Moffitt highlight the sexual, and more pointedly seminal, connotations of the “3 or 4 drops” that

begin the inscription. See, for example, Amelia Jones’s Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp

139f. or John Moffitt’s Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp 231. Juan Ramirez connects

the inscription, thanks to the comb’s status as another form of bachelor machine, to masturbation. See Ramirez 39f. 76 “on the one hand to ‘beauty,’ i.e. a sensuous appearance which appeals to the senses; and, on the other hand, to a

beauty developed in the service of the realization of exchange value and has been imprinted on the commodity”

(Critique 8, translation slightly modified)

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object-commodity refuses to serve the realization of exchange value,77 the ansensical inscription

functions as precisely Haug’s conception of beauty. That is, Duchamp appears to radically

separate beauty in the form of inscription from the object-commodity’s utilization towards the

realization of exchange value.

In an explanation of Bottle Rack’s ultimately lost inscription (fig. 5.19), Duchamp considered

it “une sorte de drapeau ou une couleur qui n’était pas sortie d’un tube[, … qui] devait être

d’essence poétique et souvent sans sens normal”78 (Charbonnier 62). Duchamp embeds the

inscription in the vocabulary of aesthetics, of color and poetry, but an aesthetics without sense, or

more importantly, without its fall into the service of the object-commodity’s exchange value. We

can see this, then, as less a commodity anaesthetics than a radically unfunctional commodity

aesthetics, a radical complication of the commodity through aestheticization. Thierry de Duve

reads this inscription as a performative speech act, as the location “where the statement ‘This is

art’ is recorded and institutionalized” (“Echoes” 69), the “passage from the specific to the

general, from painting to art in general” (73). For de Duve, the inscribed readymade exemplifies

“a work of art reduced to the statement ‘This is art’” (68). The object is no longer merely

promoted or elevated to a work of art, as Breton and Duchamp initially suggested, but rather the

readymade is simultaneously signaled or enunciated as art and is that signal or enunciation itself,

Duchamp “having submitted art in general to the linguistic turn” (64). This submission of art to

the linguistic turn, however, also functions as a submission of the commodity to art, here

specifically an (an)aesthetic no longer in service of, but rather pointedly positioned against the

form of the mass-produced commodity. That is, the inscribed readymade is less an abolition or

77 As Haug notes, “So sind nicht nur die Absatzzahl, sondern auch die Diebstahlquoten als ihre [Warenästhetiks]

Erfolgsmeldungen zu verstehen” (Kritik 63). [“Thus not only the sales figures but also the theft rates are to be seen

as an achievement of commodity aesthetics” (Critique 39).] 78 “a sort of flag or color that didn’t come from a tube[, … that] must have been essentially poetic and often without

a normal sense”

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dissolution of the commodity form and its aesthetics in the aftermath of the Fordist revolution

than it is their radical complication and subversion by means of and through the world of art

itself.

While Duchamp favored Peigne (fig. 5.23) to In Advance (fig. 5.21) as an inscribed

readymade, his next readymade, With Hidden Noise (fig. 5.25), combined and radicalized many

of the aspects of the previous two and, therefore, gives a unique perspective on the relation

between the readymade and the commodity. Created two months after Peigne,79 Hidden Noise is

composed of a hollow spool of twine held in place between two brass plates by four long bolts.

Before its final assembly, however, Walter Arensberg placed a small object into the cavity of the

spool which, when hit against the inside of the brass plates, creates the titular hidden noise.

Inscribed on the two brass plates (figs. 5.26; 5.27) is the text: “.IR. CAR.É LONGSEA → /

F.NE, .HEA., .O.SQUE → / TE.U S.ARP BAR.AIN →” and “P.G .ECIDES DÉBARRASSE. /

LE. D.SERT. F.URNIS.ENT / AS HOW.V.R COR.ESPONDS.”80 A combination of the English

of The (fig. 5.20) and the French of Rendez-vous (fig. 5.22), this inscription radicalizes the stars

of the former, replaced individual letters with a period which stood in place of one of the two

other letters in that period’s column, what he called “an exercise in comparative orthography […

where] French and English are mixed and make no ‘sense’” (CW 644).81 This exercise then

invites the reader to recreate the text, to fill in the gaps and solve the riddle, to search for sense,

here noticeably placed in scare quotes. Duchamp further contextualizes and locates where

precisely this search takes place, namely the storefront: “letters were occasionally missing like in

79 With Hidden Noise, somewhat similar to Peigne, was inscribed with the supposed moment of its creation, Pâques

[Easter] 1916, which fell on 24 April that year. 80 See DDSN 234. 81 For example, the first period from the first word of the first line, “.IR.,” stands for either the F from “F.NE” or the

T from “TE.U” directly beneath (fig. 5.26). The reconstructed text then reads “Fire. Carré Longsea → Peg decides

débarrassée / Fine, cheap, lorsque → Les deserts fournissent / Tenu sharp bargain → As however corresponds”

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a neon sign when one letter is not lit and makes the word unintelligible” (d’Harnoncourt 280).

Duchamp continues the allusion to capitalism: “Arensburg put something inside the ball of

twine, and never told me what it was, and I didn’t want to know. […] I will never know if it is a

diamond or a coin” (qtd. in CW 644). Though Duchamp recognizes his position of willful

ignorance, he highlights the work’s possibilities, not as a work of art but rather as a professed,

noisy potential as and for exchange value.82 The work functions as a bizarre form of promise,

one which refuses to explicate what precisely is being promised.

Evidenced by its title, With Hidden Noise is a work of concealments. Not only does the

eponymous noise result from a hidden object’s knock against the inside of the brass plates, but

the noise itself is hidden from all but those few who have freely handled the original work or the

museum directors and collectors able to handle the extant replicas in the present; the title itself a

promise. This hindered access also effectively conceals the inscription from view, unable to turn

the work over to view the inscription on the other side,83 while the inscription conceals elements

of itself, letters missing. Even the ball of twine, in which the noisy object is held, is partially

concealed by the over-sized brass plates. The work, then, is something of a withdrawal or

revocation of sense, or rather, of sensual understanding. Nonetheless, it promises, that there is a

noise to hear, an object to sensually understand, while it simultaneously restricts or subverts the

realization of that understanding. In other words, it subverts commodity aesthetics, subverts

82 Adam Smith described, for example, the sparkling diamond as a commodity which “has scarcely any value in use;

but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it” (I.45). In many ways, the

decorative diamond functions similarly to Marx’s precious metals gold and silver, whose “Seltenheit wegen den rein

auf dem Tausch gegründeten Wert mehr darstellen” (MEW XLII.99). [“very scarcity makes them more

representative of value founded purely upon exchange” (MECW XXVIII.103).] Marx also wrote, almost a century

after Smith: “Das Geld [ist] die gemeinsame Form, worein sich alle Waren als Tauschwerte verwandeln, die

allgemeine Ware” (MEW XLII.98). [“Money [is] the common form into which all commodities transform

themselves as exchange values, the general commodity” (MECW XXVIII.102).] 83 Certain museums, notably the Philadelphia Art Museum and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet have set their versions

of With Hidden Noise on mirrors, which offers some access, if confusingly reflected, to viewers.

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“de[n] ästhetische[n] Schein, das Gebrauchswertversprechen”84 (Kritik 30), a promise made for

an impossible sale of an unknown object with unknown use-value, a hook without the bait; “Vom

Tauschwertstandpunkt aus ist der Gebrauchswert nur der Köder”85 (27). As Duchamp himself

appears to have done, if only ironically as the work’s first reader, the work invites the spectator

then to create their own bait, their own aesthetic illusion or fantasy of potential value hidden by

the work, whether in the form of a shiny diamond, a humble coin, or something in between, that

could transform this collection of inexpensive objects into something of value, transform this

gesture of promise into a realizable promise. However, this promise is perhaps nowhere more

clearly articulated than, of all places, With Hidden Noise’s inscription.

In addition to Duchamp’s allusion to consumer capitalism in his description of the

inscription as a broken neon sign, the vocabulary utilized by Duchamp within the

inscription itself also point to a commodity aesthetics. Once the inscription is

reconstruction according to Duchamp’s instructions, with the neon storefront legibly

restored, the final two lines of the inscription read: “Fine, cheap, lorsque [while] → Les

deserts fournissent [The deserts provide] / Tenu [kept] sharp bargain → As however

corresponds” (figs. 5.26; 5.27). Here, we get something of a narrative of exchange

value: the creation a “sharp bargain.” Literally inscribed upon With Hidden Noise, the

inscription then functions as a form of commodity aesthetics, makes the object more sensibly

understandable, though with a distinct goal as commodity speech; the speech of one

commodity with another, betrayed to consumers in terms of a third commodity, money.

84 “the aesthetic illusion – the commodity’s promise of use-value –” (Critique 17). This turn of phrase is utilized

regularly through Haug’s work. 85 “[F]rom the point of view of exchange-value, use-value is only the bait” (15). Quoting Marx, Haug continues:

“Jedes Produkt privater Warenproduktion »ist ein Köder, womit man das Wesen des andern«, wie es für den

Tauschwertstandpunkt allein zählt, »sein Geld, an sich locken will«” (Kritik 30). [“every product of private

commodity production ‘is a bait with which to entice the essence of the other, his money,’ which is all that counts

from the position of exchange-value” (Critique 17).]

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That is to say, this can be seen as a discussion of a commodity’s exchange value, for as

Derrida reads the concept from Marx’s famous opening section of Das Kapital:86 “Parler,

emprunter la parole et être valeur d’échange, c’est ici la même chose”87 (Spectres

250f.). This is not merely a discussion of exchange value, a simple price tag, but rather

a promise. As Werner Hamacher notes, any commodity speech-as-exchange value is

necessarily a self-valuation: “Indem die Waren miteinander sprechen, versprechen sie

sich ihre Austauschbarkeit […] Ihre Sätze, so arithmetisch und reduziert sie klingen

mögen, sind also keine Konstatierungen, ohne zugleich Fingierungen, Projektionen,

Ankündigungen oder Forderungen zu sein”88 (“Lingua” 73). With Hidden Noise’s

inscription makes these announcements and claims, promises the sharp bargain of

something “fine” hidden within these outward “cheap” materials. Duchamp, the first to

encounter the completed work, considered the possibility of just such a scenario; an

imagined diamond hidden within, unverifiably promised by the titular hidden noise.

Of course, regardless of the noisy object’s promised value within, the inscription

functions as a description of the object itself, now a work of “fine” art for the museum’s

collection, fashioned from a collection “cheap” materials of twine and bolts, the product of the

Marchand du s(c)el, of his stamp-signature.89 With Duchamp’s readymades, we can see

86 “[Den] Warenwert[…] sagt die Leinwand selbst, sobald sie in Umgang mit anderer Ware, dem Rock, tritt. Nur

verrät sie ihre Gedanken in der ihr allein geläufigen Sprache, der Warensprache” (MEW XXIII.66). [“the value of

commodities […] is told us by the linen, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat.

Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities” (MECW

XXXV.62).] 87 “To speak, to adopt or borrow speech, and to be exchange-value is here the same thing” (Specters 197f.). 88 “In speaking with one another, commodities promise one another their exchangeability […] Their propositions,

however arithmetical and reduced they might sound, are thus not constative without being at the same time

simulations, projections, announcements or claims” (“Lingua” [en] 170f.). 89 Duchamp would play with this intersection a year later with his infamous readymade Fountain (fig. 5.4), the

signature “R. Mutt / 1917” a move toward Richard, French slang for money bags, from R. Mutt, a homonym of the

German Armut [poverty]. The “R.” stands for Richard, as evidenced by Wood’s piece in The Blind Man (fig. 5.5).

Otto Hahn quoted Duchamp regarding the meaning: “And I [Duchamp] added Richard. That’s not a bad name for a

‘pissotière.’ / Get it? The opposite of poverty” (10). See also Jack Burnham’s “The True Readymade” 27.

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already an analysis of the commodity character of works of art, but also the ways in

which works of art are able to analyze the mass produced commodity and the ways in

which it is presented. That is, not only did Duchamp introduce the commodity into the

world of art, and therefore crossed the world of commodities and aesthetics fifty-some

years before its theorization in the early 1970s, but through that introduction was able to

more closely investigate the ever more aesthetic ways in which that commodity would

be presented, its rapidly altered aesthetics in the wake of Fordism, where the massive

production of commodities required an equally massive increase in consumption and

therefore commodity aesthetics.90 As Beatrice Wood noted in her defense of Fountain

(fig. 5.4), which functions for many readymades, Duchamp “took an ordinary article of

life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of

view—created a new thought for that object” (Ades & Brotchie 135).91 Not only was this

new thought, then, a reorganization of the world of art, but of the world of commodity

aesthetics from which it came. That is, the disappearance of the object’s useful

significance ironically allowed Duchamp to lay bare the commodity aesthetics that had

depended upon that use value, to analyze the performance of the “ästhetische Schein,

das Gebrauchswertversprechen”92 (Kritik 30, my emphasis), unblinded by the potential

fulfillment of that promise or those use values, like a heliologist who can view the sun’s

corona only during eclipse. This then functions as Duchamp’s subversion of commodity

aesthetics and storefronts that had intrigued him in the years since his first interaction

90 For a discussion on the effects of Fordist production on commodity aesthetics, see Haug’s Kritik 36ff., Critique

22ff. 91 In many ways, we can view the readymades as a collection, and Duchamp the collector. Walter Benjamin then

states: “Man mag davon ausgehen, daß der wahre Sammler den Gegenstand aus seinem Funktionszusammenhängen

heraushebt” (GS V.274, [H 2,7]). [“One may start from the fact that the true collector detaches the object from its

functional relations” (Arcades 207, [H 2,7]).] 92 “aesthetic illusion—the promise of use-value” (Critique 17).

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with the chocolate grinder in Rouen in 1913, and therefore his subversion of the

formation of the consumer-subject within Fordist capitalism in front of a shop window

and storefront, the promise of a complete subjecthood.

To be able to analyze commodity aesthetics in general, and storefronts and shop

windows in particular, in this way is the subversion of Duchamp’s readymades, not

merely in that it critically views commodities and their aesthetics, but also in the creation

of a critical dialogue that begins to understand the ways in which those aesthetics have

begun to infect our own language and our own subject formation. Haug has noted, for

example: “So entlehnen die Waren ihre ästhetische Sprache beim Liebeswerben der

Menschen. Dann kehrt das Verhältnis sich um, und die Menschen entlehnen ihren

ästhetischen Ausdruck bei den Waren”93 (Kritik 33). Duchamp, however, does it

critically. Baudrillard, a year before Haug, focused more specifically on this dynamic at

the shop window as something of an educational apparatus for the subject-consumer:

“le lieu de cette « opération-consensus », de cette communication et de cet échange

des valeurs par où toute une société s’homogénéise”94 (Société de consommation 264),

a place that creates “une communication généralisée de tous les individus entre eux

[…] à travers la lecture […] du même systeme de signes”95 (265). In their critical

separation of the commodity from its aesthetics, or rather of the use value from the

promise of the use value’s fulfillment, Duchamp’s readymades are able to analyze those

commodity aesthetics that had, in the aftermath of the Fordist revolution, come to

93 “Thus commodities borrow their aesthetic language from human courtship; but then the relationship is reversed

and people borrow their aesthetic expression from the world of commodity” (Critique 19). 94 “the site […] of that `consensus operation,’ that communication and exchange of values through which an entire

society is homogenized” (Consumer Society 167). 95 “a generalized communication between all individuals […] via the reading […] of the same system of signs”

(ibid).

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dominate, hegemonize, generalize communication. In many ways, this puts the

readymades, and perhaps its most commodity-critical instantiation, With Hidden Noise

(fig. 5.25), in deep agreement with contemporaneous European Dadaists. Inscribed on

24 April 1916, With Hidden Noise was completed a little over a week after a small group of

fellow emigrants who had fled the war to a neutral land had chosen the word dada from a local

advertisement,96 and only a few months before the de facto leader of this group, Hugo Ball,

would give his “Eröffnungs– Manifest,” where he alluded to the various bits of commodity

aesthetics that inhabited that advertisement,97 and decry “[d]iese vermaledeite Sprache, an der

Schmutz klebt wie von Maklerhänden, die die Münzen abgegriffen haben”98 (Zinn 13). The

critical subversion of commodity aesthetics by Duchamp’s readymades functions as the response

to this curse. The curse of commodification, of exchange value and manic equation and

evaluation, of a stockbroker’s sharp bargains, is the curse of a language that attempts to make

consumer-subjects of us all, a curse against which Dadaist praxis, and here specifically Duchamp

as Dadaist, fought.

96 See above, page 162. 97 See above, page 79ff. 98 “this accursed language, to which filth clings as from stockbroker’s hands, hands worn smooth by coins” (Flight

221, translation slightly modified). Ball gave his manifesto on 21 July. At the other bookend of Dadaist praxis, the

mock-trial of Maurice Barrès in 1921, Tzara admitted that “Mes paroles ne sont pas à moi. […] Mes déductions ne

sont que le résultat d’une pensée fugitive plus ou moins accommodée aux désirs, aux commodités de la

conversation” (Bonnet 44) [“My words are not mine. […] My deductions are nothing but the result of fugitive

thoughts more or less attuned to desires, to commodities of conversation” (qtd. in Hentea 167, translation slightly

modified).

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Conclusion

Looking back at their experience of Dada, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara

contributed addenda to the publication of Motherwell’s extremely influential 1951 Dada

anthology, Dada: Painters and Poets,1 “at last in a position to pass fair judgment on Dadaism

itself” (398). Tzara wrote:

“Dada opposed everything that was literature, but in order to demolish its foundations we

employed the most insidious weapons, the very elements of the literature and art we were

attacking. […] Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety, for it

regarded this system as inextricably bound up with human stupidity, the stupidity which

culminated in the destruction of man by man[…] This led us to direct our attacks against the

very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals,

logic as the cement” (403f.).

Though Tzara’s text focuses particularly on the language of literature and poetry, Tzara here

links it to the so-called proper operation of society, the communication between individuals,

which is to say functional interpellation. We can see here “the mark of so subversive a spirit”

(ibid), on which Dadaist praxis stood: the appropriation of a particular mode of communication

in order to subvert that very same mode. Our dissertation, then, initially sharpens the theoretical

implications of this communication between individuals as interpellation and ideological subject

formation, which is then to be subverted with and within the various media of that interpellation

1 See Motherwell 398-402 and 402-406, respectively.

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From our desired development of Peter Bürger’s concept of avant-gardist ideology-critique

as the complete abolition of the institution of art that functioned ideologically within bourgeois

society into a more strategic disruption of the everyday operation and reproduction of that

ideological formation, we combined Althusser’s concept of interpellation and its continual

formation of ideological subjects with a literary– and media-focused Dadaist praxis that appeared

to performatively subvert or disturb that interpellation. Throughout the various media of Dadaist

works, this combination came to further refine, clarify, expand, and develop our conceptions of

ideological subject formation and the Dadaist praxis that subversively performed it. Our first

readings, of Kurt Schwitters’s “Das i-Gedicht” and the word dada itself within the context of

interpellation, focused on the ideological effects of a sign’s supposed transparency and the ways

in which these signs utilized materiality with and without matter to subvert those effects. We

then extended the act of naming implicit from our first readings to the act of founding, a

necessarily ideological formation of some We, Them, Us, and even I, explicit in manifestos.

Dadaist manifestos undermine that act through the radical theatricality of their manifestos, their

theatrical performance, which is to say their ironic imitation of that act of interpellation. Our

third set of readings focused on Dadaist photomontage as a critical negation of the ostensible

obviousness of indexicality of the technologically mass-reproduced photographic image and its

exploitation by interpellation and ideological apparatuses through the destruction and

reappropriation of the mass-media photographic image itself. Finally, we explored the

commodity-form as media itself and its use within ideological commodity aesthetics within

consumerist capitalism such as shop windows and storefronts, as well as the ways in which

Marcel Duchamp’s readymades perturbed the everyday formation of ideological subject-

consumers within capitalism. Such results, however, do not merely touch on this or that element

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of the tripartite intersection that began our investigation, but rather combine to give a greater

picture of the complex between mediality, interpellation, and Dadaist praxis, that our study has

illuminated. This is not to suggest, however, that our study here has been exhaustive.

Given the sheer number of Dadaist works and the practical restrictions on the production of

this dissertation, certain works were unfortunately underrepresented in our discussion of Dadaist

praxis. Given the disruption of a sign’s transparency by Dadaist praxis, for example, how might

we be able to view other experimental uses of phonemes and graphemes in works such as

Dadaist sound– and simultaneous-poetry or radical typography. While we investigated proto-

linguistic elements in isolation, how might they form within or otherwise create something of a

proto-grammar, if at all? Our situation of Dadaist manifestos within the media-paradigm of the

theatrical performance of foundation could be complicated with further exploration of that

paradigm’s continual intersection within the mass-media emulative Dadaist journals and little

reviews in both their materiality as well as their commodification. While we briefly discussed 3-

dimensional Dadaist assemblage, the question of interpellation and montage practices would be

further developed by an investigation into the use of non-representational media, i.e. the less-

iconic in Peircean vocabulary, such as ticket stubs in Kurt Schwitters’s Merz collages. Our

exploration of the commodity-form in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades raises questions about

other interactions between Dadaist praxis, the commodity, and its aesthetics, such as Francis

Picabia’s object portraits and machine drawings (e.g. figs. 1.1; 1.2). Moreover, how might our

description of a media-specific Dadaist praxis of subversively performed interpellation function

in explorations of media that our study was unable to encompass, such as the textiles or

marionettes of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the sculptural abstractions of Hans Arp, or Max Ernst’s

painted collages? The studies within this dissertation, however, open intriguing and provocative

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possibilities for further investigations into not only the media specificities of Dadaist praxis, but

also into the various modes of discourse theorized throughout the 20th century that may similarly

attempt to disrupt or disturb, perturb or pollute the complex of ideologies and their ordinary

everyday operation.

Along with many of the theorists that have aided our conception of ideology criticism within

Dadaist praxis, from Althusser to Žižek, other theoretical vocabularies for the performative

subversion of other particular ideological complexes and positions may further refine Dadaist

praxis as a subversion of interpellation and ideological subject formation. Within the realm of

post-colonial political discourse, for instance, Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Subaltern Studies and

her concept of strategic essentialism functions as a critical utilization of the tools of colonial

hegemony towards a specific political objective counter to that hegemony.2 Similar concepts

within post-colonialism, such as the complex of concepts hybridity, négritude, and creolization

throughout the works of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Éduard Glissant, or Homi K. Bhabha,3

utilize various forms of subversive performativity. Such concepts may prove useful to critical

investigations of Dadaist theatricality’s complex confrontation with primitivism and orientalism

throughout the collapse of the German colonial empire, whether as subversive critic, unaware

accessory, or some combination of the two. Recent interest in the central, if previously relegated

role of female Dadaists to its praxis, as well as the sexual politics that infuse the works of Marcel

Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and others, could also benefit from critical vocabularies within queer

and feminist theory of political subversions of sex, sexuality, and gender, such as Judith Butler’s

radical performativity, or José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification.4 Indeed, even a cursory

2 See In Other Worlds 205. 3 See, for example, Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, Glissant’s Le

Discours Antillais, and Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. 4 Two key works are Butler’s Gender Trouble and José Esteban Muñoz’s appropriately titled Disidentification.

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investigation into the concept of Luce Irigaray’s conception of mimesis, outlined throughout her

books Speculum de l’autre femme and Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un,5 offers a unique intersection

with Dadaist praxis.

While many of Irigaray’s texts expand on the concept, perhaps her “Le pouvoir du discours”6

most succinctly captures her concept of mimesis as a critique of both systems and systematicity,

that which Tzara calls it a “histoire qui parle et se définit”7 (OC I.360) and Irigaray a “prétension

à la production d’une vérité et d’un sens par trop univoques”8 (Ce sexe 75). Such a system, that

of masculine discourse and phallogocentrism in Irigaray’s essay, has profound effects on the

individuals subjected to it. For Irigaray, “le féminin se trouve déterminé: comme manque, défaut,

ou comme mime et reproduction inversée du sujet”9 (76), within this univocal system of

masculine discourse, interpellated into an ideological subject position of lack. Similar to Tzara’s

refusal to sharpen his wings with upper– and lowercase a.b.c.s, Irigaray refuses a direct

confrontation the system, which would always already take place on the terms of that system, but

rather seeks to sabotage it and its operation from within, “d’enrayer la machinerie théorique elle-

même”10 (75), until “le droit de définir toute valeur […] ne lui [le masculin] reviendrait plus”11

(77). Much like Dadaist praxis, Irigaray conceives of an insurgent and subversive mimesis,

where one becomes aware of the subversive power that the subjugating system had necessarily,

if inadvertently, given to everyone that it subjugates: its language. Irigaray notes that, as

femininity mirrors masculine desire, woman is always already mirroring, that is to say repeating

5 Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which is not One. 6 “The Power of Discourse.” These were both published in their original French in Ce sexe and are translated into

English in This Sex. Of course, there are multiple other texts of Irigaray’s which follow similar lines of argument. 7 “a talking and self defining story” (SML 4). 8 “pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal” (This Sex 78). 9 “the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject” (ibid) 10 “jamming the theoretical machinery itself” (ibid) 11 “the right to define every value […] would no longer belong to it” (80).

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the discourse, the language of the masculine. For this reason, each woman has unwittingly

mimed the masculine discourse at least since the moment of her sexualization and is therefore

particularly suited to investigate “le fonctionnement de la « grammaire », de chaque figure du

discours […] et aussi de ce qu’elle n’articule pas dans l’énoncé : ses silences”12 (73). Irigaray

seeks then to weaponize this mimesis in order to subvert that very system of discourse, “pour

faire « apparaître », par un effet de répétition ludique, ce qui devait rester occulté”13 (74). Within

the span of merely a few pages, we are able to see the potential in an exploration of Dadaist

praxis with Irigarayan mimesis.

Indeed, the concept of mimesis appears, at least initially, to summarize much of what we’ve

encountered throughout our explorations of Dadaist works, whether the reading of materiality

without matter of a sign and the ideological grammar it hides, only to be subversively (re)cited

ad absurdum; the recognition of theatrical auto-authorization as foundational to the manifesto

and its mockingly ironic exaggeration at the expense of any performative authority; the

explosions of last week tragicomically reenacted upon, and with mass-media photographs to

show the invisible grammar of spectacle; and finally, an investigation of and by the storefront,

dislocated and repeated beyond consumerist capitalism in order to hear and comprehend the

operation of its otherwise silent language. Or, as Hugo Ball foresaw the ideological critique of

Dadaist praxis, and seemingly Irigarayan mimesis some 60 years before Irigaray: “Das Grauen

dieser Zeit, der paralysierende Hintergrund der Dinge ist sichtbar gemacht”14 (Flucht 97).

12 “the operation of the ‘grammar’ of each figure of discourse, […] and also, of course, what it does not articulate at

the level of utterance: its silences” (75). 13 “to make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible” (76). 14 “The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible” (Flight 65).

247

Figure 1.1

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Figure 1.2

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Figure 1.3

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Figure 2.1

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Figure 2.2

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Figure 2.3

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Figure 2.4

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Figure 2.5

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Figure 2.6

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Figure 2.7

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Figure 2.8

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Figure 2.9

Sütterlin

259

Figure 2.10

Kurrent

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Figure 2.11

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Figure 4.1

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Figure 4.2

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Figure 4.3

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Figure 4.4

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Figure 4.5

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Figure 4.6

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Figure 4.7

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Figure 4.29

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Figure 4.30

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Figure 4.31

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Figure 4.32

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Figure 4.33

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Figure 4.34

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Figure 4.39

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Figure 4.59

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Figure 5.1

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Figure 5.2

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Figure 5.11

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Figure 5.12

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Figure 5.13

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Figure 5.14

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Figure 5.15

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Figure 5.16

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Figure 5.18

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Figure 5.19

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Figure 5.20

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Figure 5.21

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Figure 5.25

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Figure 5.26

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Figure 5.27

347

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364

J. BRANDON PELCHER

Doctoral Candidate

Johns Hopkins University

German & Romance Languages & Literatures

3400 North Charles Street

Baltimore, MD 21218

phone: +1 (720) 545 6619

email: [email protected]

EDUCATION

Fall 2011 – present

Ph.D. candidate, German Language & Literature, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Dissertation Title: Performing Ideology: Dadaist Praxis and Interpellation

Advisors: Drs. Andrea Krauss & Elisabeth Strowick

ABSTRACT: My dissertation develops and utilizes Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation

as a theoretical framework, where literary, aesthetic, and mass media works serve to create

ideological subjects. I argue that Dadaist praxis subversively performs interpellation, through

disruptive uses of the sign, manifesto, photomontage, and commodity, in order to confuse or

complicate the formation of a stabile ideological subject in the various, ideologically fraught

contexts of Dada’s historical moment.

Fall 2008 – Spring 2011

M.A., Comparative Literature, University of Colorado Boulder

Thesis Title: Forgetting Eckbert: Reading Tieck with Adorno, Benjamin, and Proust

Advisor: Drs. Patrick Greaney & Davide Stimilli

Fall 1999 – Spring 2004

B.A., Mathematics, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Graduate Exchanges

Summer 2014 – Summer 2015

Graduate Exchange, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Free University of Berlin, Germany

Summer 2013

Graduate Exchange, PhD-Net, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Summer 2012

Graduate Exchange, Dahlem Humanities Center, Free University of Berlin, Germany

Fall 2009 – Summer 2010

Graduate Exchange, University of Regensburg, Germany

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Continuing Education

Fall 2007 – Summer 2008

Continuing Education, Comparative Literature, University of Colorado Boulder

Spring – Summer 2007

Intensive French Studies & Complete Immersion, Institut Français des Alpes, Annecy, France

PUBLICATIONS

Translations

Sue Zemka, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society, Cambridge University

Press, 2012. (Translations of passages from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

and Contre Sainte-Beuve)

Book Reviews

Review of David Ellison, A Readers’ Guide to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Modern

Language Notes 127.4 (September 2012), 957-959.

Review of Lorna Marten, The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in

Literary Modernism, Modern Language Notes 127.4 (September 2012), 959-963.

Articles in Submission

Being and the Madeleine: Forgetting in Heidegger, with Proust.

(Submitted for Initial Peer Review)

Ideology with an /i/: Reading with Kurt Schwitters.

(Submitted for Initial Peer Review)

Articles in Progress

On the Ironic Theater of Dadaist Manifestos.

HONORS, GRANTS, AWARDS

Max Kade Foundation Travel Grant, Johns Hopkins University, Summers 2012–17

William H. McClain Dissertation Fund, Johns Hopkins University, Summer 2016-17

Cornelia Hohenberg Kaye Memorial Research Grant, Johns Hopkins University, Summer 2017

Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, Johns Hopkins University, Fall 2015

Center for Advanced Media Studies Fellowship, Johns Hopkins University, AY 2013–14

Johns Hopkins University Photograph Club, Outstanding Night Photography, Spring 2013

German & Romance Lang & Lit Travel Grant, Johns Hopkins University, Winter 2012

CU Boulder Office of International Education Award for Outstanding Photography, 2010

Comparative Literature Travel Grant, University of Colorado Boulder, Fall 2009

Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures Grant, University of Colorado Boulder, Fall 2009

Office of International Education Scholarship, University of Colorado Boulder, Fall 2009

Diplôme d’Études Françaises; Mention–Très Bien, Université Catholique de Lyon, Spring 2007

Certificate in Industrial Mathematics, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Spring 2003

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PRESENTATIONS

Conference Presentations

Reading /i/: Ideology in the Dadaist Mark, Graduate Colloquium, University of Colorado,

Boulder, May 12-14, 2016.

Radikale Dekontextualisierung: Dada und Massenmedien, Graduate Conference “Student Days,”

Free University, Berlin, October 8–11, 2014.

Within and Against: Dada in the Marketplace, Northeast Modern Languages Association, Forty-

Fifth Annual Convention, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, April 3–6, 2014.

Heidegger’s Disappearing in Space and Time, Graduate Conference “Disappearance: Spatial and

Temporal Horizons,” Comparative Literature, City University of New York, November 7–8,

2013.

No More Hangovers: Dada’s Mimetic Intervention, Graduate Conference “Hangover–Epigones

and the Mourning After,” Germanic Literature, Columbia University, April 26–27, 2013.

Forgetting and Repetition in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Graduate Conference “Repetition: The

Future Remembered the Self Dismembered,” Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University,

February 22–23, 2013.

Forgetting in Heidegger and Proust, Summer school “Time and Literature,” University Bonn,

Germany, July 23–27, 2012.

Forgetting and Reification: Reading Proust and Tieck with Adorno and Benjamin, International

Conference “(An)Aesthetic of Absence,” Center for Comparative Literature at University of

Toronto, March 8–10, 2012.

Lectures, Events, Panels Organized

Center for Advanced Media Studies Symposium, Johns Hopkins University, April 24, 2014

Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars, Viewing and Q&A panel with director, commentators, and

critics for the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, April 21, 2014.

Kevin Vennemann, New York University: Reading and Discussion — Close to Jedenew,

November 15, 2013.

Campus Presentations

Strategic Reification: Dada’s Engagements with Media, Fellowship Symposium of the Center

for Advanced Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, April 24, 2014.

Proust with Benjamin and Freud, Invited Lecture to graduate course “Proust,” Johns Hopkins

University, Baltimore, April 3, 2012.

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Critiquing Systems: Tzara and Irigaray, Graduate Conference “Dada-rama,” German & Slavic

Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado Boulder, April 22, 2011.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE


Cosmic Imagination: How Lit. Changes Our Understanding of the Universe, TA, Spring 2017

Advanced German I: Cultural Foundations: Post-War Divided Germany, Instructor, Fall 2016

Advanced German II: Contemporary Issues in German-Speaking World, Instructor, Spring 2016

Dada’s Ideologies: Literature, Art, & Politics, Instructor of Record, Fall 2015

Chaplin in Germany: Tramp to Dictator, Instructor of Record, Winter 2014

DADA! Avant-Garde Exorcism, Instructor of Record, Winter 2013

Intermediate German I, Instructor, Fall 2012

German Elements II, Instructor, Spring 2012 & Spring 2013

German Elements I, Instructor, Fall 2011

University of Colorado Boulder

Introduction to Modern Russian Culture, Supplemental Instructor, Spring 2009 & Spring 2011

Introduction to Russian Culture, Supplemental Instructor, Fall 2010

Courses in Preparation Irony, Parody, and Satire: From Quintilian to Colbert

The Historical Avant-Garde: “Blurring the Firm Boundaries”

“Estranged, Maladjusted, and Discontented”: Frankfurt School and Critical Theory

“Irresistibly into the Future”: Literature, Memory, and History

Ideology and Symbolic Violence

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Editorial Assistant, “Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School” Modern

Language Notes 127.3 (April 2012).

UNIVERSITY SERVICE

Johns Hopkins University, German & Romance Languages & Literatures

Co-President, Graduate Student Forum, AY 2013–14

Representative, Graduate Student Forum, AY 2012–13

University of Colorado

Representative, Comparative Literature, United Government of Graduate Students, AY 2010–11

Representative, German & Slavic, United Government of Graduate Students, AY 2010–11

Representative, French & Italian, United Government of Graduate Students, AY 2010–11

Representative, Boulder Faculty Assembly Library Committee, AY 2010–11

Representative, Norlin Library Planning Team, AY 2010–11

Representative, University Libraries Special Materials Steering Committee, AY 2010–11

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LANGUAGES

English – native

German – near native

French – excellent

Russian – reading

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

Modern Language Association

German Studies Association

REFERENCES

Andrea Krauss, Associate Professor


3400 N. Charles Street

Baltimore, MD 21218


phone: +1 (410) 516 4239

Elisabeth Strowick, Professor



Baltimore, MD 21218


phone: +1 (410) 516 7509

Bernadette Wegenstein, Professor



Baltimore, MD 21218


phone: +1 (410) 516 7511

Deborah Mifflin, Associate Teaching Professor (Teaching Reference)



Baltimore, MD 21218


phone: +1 (410) 516 7592