Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde. Dafydd Jones, ed. Editions Rodopi BV, 2006.
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How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance.
The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture.
Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.
Contents
Short preface
Introduction: der Holzweg der Holzwege
I. Manifestos and Evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire
Cornelius PARTSCH: The Mysterious Moment: early Dada performance as ritual
John WALL and Dafydd JONES: The Body of the Voice: corporeal poetics in Dada
II. Dada and Language
T. J. DEMOS: The Language of “Expatriation”
Anna Katharina SCHAFFNER: Assaulting the Order of Signs
III. Dada Siegt!
Martin Ignatius GAUGHAN: The Prosthetic Body in Early Modernism: Dada’s anti-humanist humanism
Curt GERMUNDSON: Montage and Totality: Kurt Schwitters’s relationship to “tradition” and “avant-garde”
IV. Thinkers on Stage
Stephen C. FOSTER: The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and spiritual materialism
Dafydd JONES: To Be or Not To Be ... Arthur Cravan: subject, surface and difference
V. Philosophy, Theory and the Avant-Garde
Joel FREEMAN: Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: toward an ontology of the avant-garde
David CUNNINGHAM: Making an Example of Duchamp: history, theory, and the question of the avant-garde
VI. Dada Critical Bibliography
Timothy SHIPE: A Decade of Dada Scholarship: publications on Dada, 1994–2005
List of illustrations
Contributors
The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture.
Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.
Contents
Short preface
Introduction: der Holzweg der Holzwege
I. Manifestos and Evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire
Cornelius PARTSCH: The Mysterious Moment: early Dada performance as ritual
John WALL and Dafydd JONES: The Body of the Voice: corporeal poetics in Dada
II. Dada and Language
T. J. DEMOS: The Language of “Expatriation”
Anna Katharina SCHAFFNER: Assaulting the Order of Signs
III. Dada Siegt!
Martin Ignatius GAUGHAN: The Prosthetic Body in Early Modernism: Dada’s anti-humanist humanism
Curt GERMUNDSON: Montage and Totality: Kurt Schwitters’s relationship to “tradition” and “avant-garde”
IV. Thinkers on Stage
Stephen C. FOSTER: The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and spiritual materialism
Dafydd JONES: To Be or Not To Be ... Arthur Cravan: subject, surface and difference
V. Philosophy, Theory and the Avant-Garde
Joel FREEMAN: Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: toward an ontology of the avant-garde
David CUNNINGHAM: Making an Example of Duchamp: history, theory, and the question of the avant-garde
VI. Dada Critical Bibliography
Timothy SHIPE: A Decade of Dada Scholarship: publications on Dada, 1994–2005
List of illustrations
Contributors
Dada historicized itself. However ironic it might seem for the artifacts, posters, films, and pamphlets of the Dada movement to have found their way into some of the world's leading institutions of modern art this past year, a significant part of Dada's critical enterprise consisted in seeing itself not only as an attack on history, but also as a movement that possessed a history of its own. Richard Huelsenbeck wrote histories of the movement as early as 1920; Hugo Ball kept and published a Dada Diary; Raoul Haussmann, Hans Richter, and Emmy Hemmings began publishing books on Dada after WWII. More recently, a ten-volume series of essay collections entitled Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, edited by Stephen Foster between 1996 and 2005, has maintained this historiographical imperative.
Rather than simply continuing to historicize the movement, the essays in Dada Culture situate Dada's practices of radical negation within a theoretical and philosophical context. The collection aims to conceptualize Dada in ways that resist the tendency for many scholars to reduce it to a fleeting act of post-war negation, soon to evolve into more constructive movements like Expressionism or Surrealism. Dada Culture instead focuses on the ways in which Dada's cultural impact finds its expression in twentieth-century thought, especially in the work of Julia Kristeva, Peter Bürger, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.
Dada Culture might be read as an attempt to rescue Dada from the museum world. To what extent, though, does Dada need to be rescued? Of course, it's easy to notice how beautiful Dada objects now seem: Schwitters' trash-based Merz collages are remarkable exercises in composition and form; Sophie Tauber's dolls and tapestries expertly manipulate fields of color; and the typefaces of even the most incendiary Dada documents are now touchstones of graphic art. The recent traveling Dada exhibition of 2005-2006 strove to outmaneuver this aestheticizing tendency by highlighting the movement's geographical trajectory, spatializing its development in Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, and New York. Pedagogical rather than contemplative, its aim was to show the movement in its material and technical specificity. By contrast, Dada Culture presents an epistemological map of Dada's conceptual landscape, situating Dada studies within its scholarly history, as well as within a theoretical and philosophical genealogy that amplifies its practices of radical negation.
Daffyd Jones' introduction to the volume begins in medias res with a long discussion of twentieth-century Marxisms—Lenin, Dietzen, and Althusser—in order to secure a definition of revolution that restores to the term a violent negativity he considers proper to Dada. "How we invoke the idea of revolution," Jones writes, "requires a deliberate revision of readings that have hitherto dominated art historically" (12); such readings have tended, Jones argues, to delimit Dada as a mere anarchic gesture, and, at the same time, to characterize as "revolution" only those organized historical processes that create a new order. Jones' introduction—and, by extension, the volume itself—seeks a critical language that resists such ordering definitions and categorizations. Jones instead urges scholars to approach Dada through performances, practices, and events, rather than through definitions and manifestos (14). In Jones' eyes, both revolution and Dada can be seen as historical events that produce effects, yet without the need for goals or platforms: Jones calls this "agency without an agency, or as a subjectless subjectivity" (17). Jones' insight here is compelling, yet his pursuit of this resistance to categorization as Dada's defining characteristic risks itself becoming a means for categorizing the movement all over again, this time as an object of "pure" theory rather than as a movement that performed real intellectual and material work.
The essays in Dada Culture similarly find correspondences in twentieth-century theory in order to conceptualize Dada as a series of events around which history took shape. The risks of such a project are twofold. First, the volume's emphasis on Dada's "resistance to governability" and "subjectless subjectivity" explicitly de-materializes the movement's historical practices in favor of theorizing its effects. As a result, many of the volume's ten essays subject Dada practices to... - Jonathan P. Eburne
Rather than simply continuing to historicize the movement, the essays in Dada Culture situate Dada's practices of radical negation within a theoretical and philosophical context. The collection aims to conceptualize Dada in ways that resist the tendency for many scholars to reduce it to a fleeting act of post-war negation, soon to evolve into more constructive movements like Expressionism or Surrealism. Dada Culture instead focuses on the ways in which Dada's cultural impact finds its expression in twentieth-century thought, especially in the work of Julia Kristeva, Peter Bürger, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.
Dada Culture might be read as an attempt to rescue Dada from the museum world. To what extent, though, does Dada need to be rescued? Of course, it's easy to notice how beautiful Dada objects now seem: Schwitters' trash-based Merz collages are remarkable exercises in composition and form; Sophie Tauber's dolls and tapestries expertly manipulate fields of color; and the typefaces of even the most incendiary Dada documents are now touchstones of graphic art. The recent traveling Dada exhibition of 2005-2006 strove to outmaneuver this aestheticizing tendency by highlighting the movement's geographical trajectory, spatializing its development in Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, and New York. Pedagogical rather than contemplative, its aim was to show the movement in its material and technical specificity. By contrast, Dada Culture presents an epistemological map of Dada's conceptual landscape, situating Dada studies within its scholarly history, as well as within a theoretical and philosophical genealogy that amplifies its practices of radical negation.
Daffyd Jones' introduction to the volume begins in medias res with a long discussion of twentieth-century Marxisms—Lenin, Dietzen, and Althusser—in order to secure a definition of revolution that restores to the term a violent negativity he considers proper to Dada. "How we invoke the idea of revolution," Jones writes, "requires a deliberate revision of readings that have hitherto dominated art historically" (12); such readings have tended, Jones argues, to delimit Dada as a mere anarchic gesture, and, at the same time, to characterize as "revolution" only those organized historical processes that create a new order. Jones' introduction—and, by extension, the volume itself—seeks a critical language that resists such ordering definitions and categorizations. Jones instead urges scholars to approach Dada through performances, practices, and events, rather than through definitions and manifestos (14). In Jones' eyes, both revolution and Dada can be seen as historical events that produce effects, yet without the need for goals or platforms: Jones calls this "agency without an agency, or as a subjectless subjectivity" (17). Jones' insight here is compelling, yet his pursuit of this resistance to categorization as Dada's defining characteristic risks itself becoming a means for categorizing the movement all over again, this time as an object of "pure" theory rather than as a movement that performed real intellectual and material work.
The essays in Dada Culture similarly find correspondences in twentieth-century theory in order to conceptualize Dada as a series of events around which history took shape. The risks of such a project are twofold. First, the volume's emphasis on Dada's "resistance to governability" and "subjectless subjectivity" explicitly de-materializes the movement's historical practices in favor of theorizing its effects. As a result, many of the volume's ten essays subject Dada practices to... - Jonathan P. Eburne
