Dada 1916 in Theory Practices of Critical Resistan... - (Chapter 3)

3
A Disintegrating Culture:
Dada Violence and Degradation
The International of Arses is the only worldwide organization

that has no statutes, ideology, or dues. Its solidarity cannot be
shaken.
– Peter Sloterdijk, 19831
The appeal to and exercise of violence in Dada during its initial and
probably most ambivalent manifestation situate the formation somewhat
awkwardly and contradictorily at times, for instance with regard to
the strategic deployment of violent means in achieving transformative
socio-political ends. Aggression, hostility, assault – the demarques of
violence – rarely absent themselves beyond shallow recess. Their presence
can of course be read as continuing the potentialities of antecedents,
most notably Futurism’s art of provocation and dinamismo universale,
but there is an equally critical reading of the necessity in deployment
Copyright © 2014. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.
of such methods that accords them centrality within the entire Dada
project. The project, we were once told, would happily set out to destroy.
But it would not, and perhaps the Dadaists ultimately believed that it
could not, pass judgement upon others; prerequisite to judgement is
an opinion, and an opinion, as Kierkegaard had long since suggested,
presupposes ‘a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife
and children in this mortal life’.2 The doubly farcical and notorious mock
trial of Maurice Barrès, staged under the auspices of later Paris Dada,
is demonstration enough of Dada’s self-reflexive proximity to a reading
of juridical authority, while the philosophical complexity of passing
judgement was widely and well recognised into the early twentieth
century.3 Passing judgement, with its attendant quality of ‘justice’,
functions to mandate and maintain the interests of defined groups and
Jones, Dafydd. Dada 1916 in Theory : Practices of Critical Resistance, Liverpool University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook
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Jones D, DADA.indd 73 21/05/2014 15:00:10

74 dada 1916 in theory
defined ways of life by means of positive forms of law (of law that can be
posited; indeed ‘all law … is dependent on a positing (Setzung)’).4
The indiscriminate and all-inclusive aggression of Dada remains
embodied for many in the confrontational poses struck at the Cabaret
Voltaire and sporadically at the Dada soirées, and this chapter will begin
by considering the quality of the ‘violence’ that initially manifested itself
at those performances. It was violence to be validated under Dada’s red
flag as a critical medium, and is here to be considered against a reading
of Walter Benjamin’s later commentary on violence. Positions on what
constitute violence are illuminated by Benjamin’s philosophy of language
as an anti-politics – contentious as his position on language is due to its
sources in idealism – extending to examine the complicity of language in
violence (with recourse to the idea that language functions as a medium
of violence, enacted in Dada language through a discursive performa-
tivity). In constructing his tradition, for instance, Benjamin applies
modes of prompting the minor deviations from the anticipated ‘self’ or
‘norm’, mobilising a ‘politics of pure means’ and duly insisting on the
presence in our conduct and action of something that the destructive
Dadaists would have denied: that in the act of critique there resides also
the act of passing judgement. For Benjamin, however, this act assumes
critical form in the possible application of language as a means beyond
all legal systems and, therefore, beyond all violence – posing ‘just
violence’ as pure means – in order potentially to escape the means–ends
syllogism. Alongside Benjamin, Ernst Bloch will here supplement the
live philosophical context within which Dada took shape. A decade after
Dada, Bloch invoked an always incomplete, unfinished subjectivity in the
specific of the cabaret, which he described as one of the most open and
honest forms of the present, admitting and embracing the fragmentary.
By this reading, the eclectic and anti-narrative nature of cabaret was as
varied, incongruous and disjunct as the experience of everyday life –
always straining to contain its elements and stuttering when something
struck a wrong, discordant note. The language of cabaret itself similarly
fragments and fractures, responding affirmatively to Judith Butler’s
elsewhere pursuit of means that will sever the tie between speech acts
and their enunciation in such a way not only to destabilise structure but
actively to dismantle it. The physical conditions of the exchange between
the Dada body and its audience is then considered, in demonstration
of which the usual suspects (notably Huelsenbeck with his aggressive
posturing and, pairing this chapter with the chapter that follows, Tzara
and Serner with their assaultive texts) each take the stage in turn.
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a disintegr ating culture 75
It is to this very complex of law, then, as inextricably bound to

violence that Benjamin famously directed his thoughts in the essay on
the ‘Critique of Violence’, written post-Zurich Dada in 1921 (incidentally,
the year of Paris Dada’s Barrès trial) and designed to capture ‘something
essential’ of its object of critique;5 the essay that conceptually exercises
the eventual impossibility of ‘justice’ by means of law that is the
expression of the dialectic between ‘the law-imposing and law-preserving
formations of violence’.6 For the present context, one of the aleatory
beauties of Benjamin’s essay is that, as a distillation of his longer
treatise on violence, it is a significant reflection on his association with
his seniors in the years leading up to its writing – namely Hugo Ball
and Ernst Bloch, two among the anti-Kaiser Germans of Bern during
1918–19. Ball and Bloch were close associates during this period, both
contributing political writings to and editorial duties for the ‘heroic’
Hermann Rosemeier’s anti-war weekly Die Freie Zeitung; Richter was
to recall many years later Ball’s participation in the editing of this
publication, which ‘fought a hopeless battle against the past, present
and future of All-German arrogance’.7 It was indeed the now-retired
magic bishop of Zurich who introduced Bloch, author of Geist der
Utopie (the spirit of utopia, that ‘wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic
and proto-socialist ideas’,8 which had advocated the violent-if-necessary
opposition of established power ‘with appropriately powerful means, like
a categorical imperative with a revolver in your fist’),9 to the younger
Benjamin in March or April 1919 (Benjamin was at this time writing
his doctoral dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German
Romanticism, at the University of Bern).10 Of note in Bloch’s output
from this phase is a short essay that he contributed to René Schickele’s

avant-garde-friendly journal Die weissen Blätter in 1919, ‘Das Noch Nicht
Bewusste Wissen’ (To know the not-yet-conscious), an essay in which
he progressed the foundations of the ontology of not-yet-being that
would find maturity as a developed system in his much later published
writings; and it was for Die weissen Blätter that Benjamin’s ‘Critique of
Violence’ had originally been commissioned by the journal’s editor, Emil
Lederer (the essay would eventually be published in the less obviously
fitting Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft). The marked difference in positions
that we can identify at this time, however, is between Bloch’s gradual
move towards Marxism in opposition to Benjamin’s rejection of politics
– the latter despite the combined efforts of Ball and Bloch to convince
their younger acquaintance of the necessity of political activity. In
mobilising his philosophy of language as an anti-politics, Benjamin read
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the instrumentalisation of language in all political judgement as making

it, language, complicit in violence. There is, we might then suggest, a
moderating function to which the 1921 essay can now be directed in our
reading of the ‘violence’ of Zurich Dada that broke out five years before
its writing, recognising how we will correctly understand the quality of
Dada violence as being found more in the staging of a discontinuous and
ruptured reality than in any physical aggression that might conclude in
a bloodied nose or worse.
The formalities of violence

Physically demonstrated instances of violence are not, of course, absent in
Zurich Dada, although such instances as we do encounter often acquire
more than a passing pantomimic quality – consider, for instance, the
deliberately menacing gait of Huelsenbeck, ‘an aggressor, a noise-maker,
a fighter, a Götz von Berlichingen’,11 armed with his college-boy insolence
dedicated to the infuriation and excitation of his audience; he who strode
arrogantly upon the Dada platform with quivering nostrils and arched
eyebrows, haranguing any and all in attendance, slashing the air ‘and,
metaphorically … the public’s collective behind’ with his Oxford cane.12
This parodying is ultimately of the totalitarian mindset – although, lest
we forget, beyond any authoritarian menace, ‘it is not necessary to wear
a uniform or carry a club or a whip’ in order to be participant in that
mindset – rather, ‘it is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and
to delight in the subjection of others’.13 Huelsenbeck had first cultivated
this particular confrontational stance, flinging out verses ‘like so much
invective’,14 revelling in the hostility of as much negative reaction as

he could muster, during his pre-Dada collaborative activity with, yes,
Hugo Ball in Berlin 1915. And it was Ball’s drafting of Huelsenbeck into
the Cabaret Voltaire, it has been said, that provided the ‘trigger event’
to rouse in the already resident cabaret players ‘feelings and aggressions
which had been reserved and repressed’.15 The quality of Dada violence
that first erupts at the end of February 1916 is exercised in Huelsenbeck’s
strutting parody of the violence of modernity, in the ‘conjuration and
critique’ that Richard Sheppard describes as attempting ‘not to imitate
and celebrate but to enact discordant, chaotic, heteroglossic reality’.16
The violence is, of course, less in what is done than in how it is done
– and we register such enacting within the broader confrontation of
the question of political activity that acquired an urgency of heroic
proportions in Europe as the decade so brutally punctured by the First
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World War roused to a crescendo of failed, successful and failed-again

revolutions (of ‘revolving revolutions’ or the ‘revolution of revolutions’).
The means deployed were the means by which precisely the Dadaists
engaged and disturbed the normative. Benjamin’s essay on violence
would become in the twentieth century eventually a prompt to a variety
of conclusions, as critical thought from the 1960s onwards, complicated
by the occasions of left-wing violence in Germany, for instance, sought
routes beyond Oskar Negt’s interpretation of the essay’s negotiation
of its subject matter as ultimately serving to maintain violence in all
its structural and institutional forms.17 Responses invoked Benjamin’s
‘politics of pure means’ in their workings out of Negt’s materialistic-
political position, though the positioning of Benjamin on the side of
conservative anti-liberalism by Jürgen Habermas in the 1980s, for instance,
was hardly restoration and rehabilitation for Benjamin as theologian of
the revolution.18 Peter Bürger’s collapse of a viable sense of the historical
avant-garde after Dada and early Surrealism arose from a similar concern
that the posturing of oppositionality does effectively nothing more than
reproduce the object of critique with all its operations intact. Critical for
Benjamin, however, and for a recovery of his observations to a broader
application, is his reflection on the instability of seemingly stable ground
that could so easily give way to fascism. Such slippage can occur when
left-wing and right-wing violence come precariously close to a point of
indistinction – this itself being a self-styled relation between fascism
and Bolshevism, characterised by Benjamin in 1927 as assuming to be
as close as that between twin, though they may be hostile, brothers.19
And, as reflections go, Benjamin’s is far from unproblematic; though he
rejects the idea that the conflict between the fascist and the Bolshevik
is a fraternal one, what he attempts in his ‘Critique of Violence’ is a
description of different modes of violence that are consequent to different
modes or manifestations of force (divine force versus inauthentic force).
His ‘critique’ is more accurately, therefore, the Kantian Kritik (that is,
transcendental critique accepting of subjective and universal judgements,
but rejecting any governing role for determinate concepts).20
Differences are prerequisite; from the breaks and fragments that
condition differences, Benjamin constructs his own tradition out of
the one that he experienced disintegrating all around him. For this
philosopher, who ‘had nothing of the philosopher in the traditional
sense’,21 his insistence on the connection between knowledge and
experience directed the Kantian system of philosophical knowledge
towards the ‘different’ or ‘higher concept of’ experience that Benjamin
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engaged philosophically. His move was deliberately against and beyond

the discipline of philosophy, thinking to exceed the predicate of
thought, and expanding towards a ‘philosophy of the future’ that ‘had
to be concerned with demarking the provinces of experience denied or
ignored by Kantianism, with its blindness to religion, the irrational,
and history’.22 So Dada is shot through with the same post-Kantian
impulse, advancing art against art. As Bloch would in 1928, during the
‘Golden Twenties’ of Cabaret, acknowledge the differences and multiple
subgenres of Benjamin’s One-Way Street by the invocation of ‘philosophy
as cabaret’, for instance, the Dadaists’ designation of ‘art as cabaret’ had
been around the Niederdorf block a couple of times already:
Whenever a Cabaret appears, we cheerfully go along to see it – then,
one moment something strikes a wrong note, the next moment
something else has changed and doubled back in its tracks … The self
that it projects is very close to ours, but keeps changing.23
Bloch invokes an always incomplete, unfinished subjectivity in the specific
of the cabaret, to be understood in the general of society by reference to
his principle of the not-yet, operative within his philosophical system to
describe ‘an open process of movement toward an unknown that cannot
be described in positive terms’.24 In constructing his tradition, Benjamin
productively applies modes of prompting the minor deviations from
the anticipated ‘self’ or ‘norm’. He mobilises a ‘politics of pure means’,
duly insisting that in the act of critique there resides the act of passing
judgement (which conclusion the Dadaists would have resisted). For
Benjamin, this politics of pure means assumes critical manifestation
in ‘just violence’. It is Benjamin’s essay on violence, I suggest, that will

begin to yield the coordinates to move away from both a celebration and
an aestheticisation of violence – from the elevation of war as expressive
of national triumph, let’s say, to the art of state power as consolidant of
fascism – to make way for the violence of anarchy and destruction that
seizes the false continuum of progress.
In 1916, the Munich-based Expressionist poet Ferdinand Hardekopf
(whose translation of Aristide Bruant’s ‘A la Villette’ had been performed
by Emmy Hennings during the first week of the Cabaret Voltaire, and
who later participated in the Zurich Dada soirées of 1917) wrote his ‘Der
Wintergarten’ from Munich’s variety land, a prose passage in drunken
embrace of the rousing clamour of central Europe against the backdrop
of war:
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We want rebellion: for that is our peace; we want excitement at

any price: for that is our cure. Welcome: you howling storms and
thundering organs, you terrors in the catacombs of derangement,
revolver shots, atropine conflagrations and you disciplined confusions
of Cancan dancing camisoles!25
Such tempered violence, the stock in trade of flaming youth, conjures so
much of what we familiarly recognise in the widespread abandonment
of theatre in favour of the popular and vulgarised theatrical forms of
variety shows at the start of the twentieth century – Hardekopf’s variety
dancing camisoles a muffled echo of the seriously more skewed ‘athletic-
style form-fitting costumes … with wonderful open-topped canvas shoes’
that were ‘Dada suicide’ Jacques Vaché’s preferred attire for the ‘amusing
deception’ of a brutal and bloody war, described by him in his infamous
‘War Letters’26 – yet Hardekopf suggests a resolution that, frankly, fails
to convince any more:
We can enjoy all this in unified desire. For the booming of the
bells, the pealing of the Carmagnole and the rhythmic barbarism
of the steam-hammers is brusquely and blissfully drowned out by a
harmonizing, idiotic melody …27
If only it could be. The way in which the variety theatre negotiated its
declarations of violence is a far more problematic proposition than any
possible ironing out that was achievable in the form of the variety show
itself, which was by 1916 among the defining modern cultural forms, a
direct product and consequence of life in the city, the locus of modernity.
And far from unifying or harmonising the discontinuities of the modern
city, the fragmented urban consciousness was further fractured by the

form of variety, wherein precisely lay the form’s redemptive quality as
Bloch described it:
cabaret may be employed as one of the most open and – contrary
to its own intentions – most honest forms of the present; it then
becomes the mirror of that empty space in which nothing can be
made whole without a lie and where only fragments can still meet
and intermingle.28
The eclectic and anti-narrative nature of the performances themselves
was, therefore, as varied, incongruous and disjunct as the experience of
everyday life. Reading cabaret thus does all but convey upon it that which
Hardekopf would have claimed, resisting temptation to acknowledge in
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it anything so unified as ‘an emergent new sensibility’ that the Futurists

to the south were also desiring.29
Staging disintegration
Into the Weimar years cabaret would gain marked distinction as a
socio-political phenomenon as well as gaining procedural integrity. Its
deployment ahead of Weimar, however, was not infrequently as ‘a
potentially optimum vehicle for artists and intellectuals who had made
a public political commitment’.30 Art historian Allan C. Greenberg has
debated this particular point, proposing that the production of art as a
social activity can be considered political whatever its precise content,
to the extent that ‘a political discussion is one that focuses on the
nature of society’s governing norms and values … and on how they are
determined’.31 Greenberg contributes preliminary observations to such
readings of cabaret as a socio-politically critical medium that we might
now embark upon, despite his being distinctly unprepared to commit
much beyond hypotheticals to any ‘scholarly, after-the-fact, analysis’:32
Only a conjectural analysis may make it possible to examine Dadaist
impact via the cabaret. And while impact may be the more important
interest ultimately, we may, nonetheless, reflect on presentations and
apparent intent and hypothesize a relationship between the Dadaists
in the cabaret and … society.33
To an important extent, the point that Greenberg fails to develop
– although he makes simultaneous and significant concession to it
here – is that rather than thinking always in terms of Dadaist impact

via the cabaret, we might do better not to overcomplicate matters. In
February 1916, for instance, critically, fundamentally and quite simply,
the Dadaist impact was the cabaret with its chaotic breaks and seizures
(just as subsequently the Dada manifesto impact was its disorienting
effect, as will be argued in chapter 4, with the ballistic force that
Benjamin elsewhere described).34 Cabaret has variously been theorised
for us – Manfred Berger’s Kabarett nach vorn (1966) described a typology
that naturally included forms affirmative of dominant orders; but also
types that operated critically in relation to such orders, especially in
their imperialist forms, and that self-consciously aligned the cabaret
performers with working-class struggle (though not necessarily driven
by any explicitly Marxist commitment) in pursuit of change. And what
is argued to be the only consistently politically significant cabaret,
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effectively mobilising art in class struggle, is submitted in the form of

the proletarian cabaret. But the outlining of typology does not advance
any engagement with the pure means of cabaret as a form, nor with its
physical impact (or shock) or the violence of thought enacted upon the
audience.35
The shape assumed by cabaret is initially its most arresting aspect,
reeling disparate, unconnected, even random – certainly chaotic – items
before its audience, read as the miniature forms that Bloch observes in
Benjamin’s thought experimentation and exercise:
a considered improvisation, debris from an exploded totality, a sequence
of dreams, aphorisms and catchwords linked at most by a variety of
oblique associations … a journey through a disintegrating culture.36
Early on, Bloch had intimated how the shape of cabaret would always
strain to contain its elements and how the shape or form would stutter
when, one moment, something struck a wrong, discordant note. At this
juncture of ‘failure’, of course, in the unhinging of each faculty, the form
itself becomes critical. The moment of creation, as it might be argued
that which is no longer chaotic in chaos, intimates the faculty of order
that Deleuze describes:
Rather than all the faculties converging and contributing to a common
project of recognising an object, we see divergent projects in which,
with regard to what concerns it essentially, each faculty is in the
presence of that which is its ‘own’. Discord of the faculties, chain of
force and fuse along which each confronts its limit, receiving from
(or communicating to) the other only a violence which brings it face
to face with its own element, as though with its disappearance or its
perfection.37
This is the impress of violence upon thought, its necessity indeed, testing
the limit of thought in chaos that is at the same time order, the bearing of
each faculty ‘to the extreme point of its dissolution’.38 To give shape to the
thought of ‘justification’ (to conceptualise ‘justification’) poses particular
difficulties for the Dadaists, therefore – though in their declarations they
may flee, in their deeds they are implicitly locked in combat with ‘justifi-
cation’. The struggle stems from the violence perceived as being present
in the establishing of a thought, as Foucault once summed it up: ‘There
is never … an interpretandum that is not already interpretans, so that it
is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established
in interpretation.’39 This might well appear to confound all attempts at
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achieving justification, to the extent that what is fully acknowledged is

the impossibility that any interpretation (for Foucault), or any decision
(elsewhere, for Derrida), can ever be just – as the judge’s decision effects a
suspension of the law, despite its conceding to the necessity of the rule of
law in determining that decision. David Couzens Hoy describes it thus:
The decision is said to be a performative that exceeds itself. It is
violence at the beginning, because it represents a break with past law,
and it is violence in the outcome, because it imposes its interpretation
on the present in the name of the law … The law depends on violence
being misrecognized as legitimate.40
Present, perhaps, in the Dadaists’ wish not to be implicated in the
violence of the acts of interpreting and decision-making is the transcen-
dental empiricism that Deleuze intimates in the passage from Difference
and Repetition previously quoted. This is transcendental empiricism that
will not attempt to achieve adequate description from the point of view
of empirically established common sense (ultimately in the imprecise
form of universalising abstractions given in stock transcendentalism), but
that will rather embrace the uncertainty about the outcome of research
as ‘the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines
of the empirical’.41 Hence the celebration of the discontinuities, contin-
gencies and varieties of individual lives.
From violent means to radical ends

We recognise how Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism provides a basis
for a politics of difference, distinctly so to the extent that any evaluation

(that is, judgement) of practices effects the enabling or disabling of an
individual’s power to act (that is, an individual’s agency). The conditions
of individual agency themselves arise from our deference to universal
norms – and it is among such norms that Benjamin, in 1921, placed our
philosophical complicity in violence, at least since Aristotle established
the means–ends relation that bound the two polarities inextricably
together. Benjamin’s motive is radically to rethink the conception of
violence as instrumental in any move towards desired ends – specifically
when those ends are political ones – to found a critique aimed at
revising a philosophical current that has been reinscribed at intervals
in the Western tradition (by Kant’s Gewalt or Engels’s Anti-Dühring).
Rethinking evidently does not repeal violence, but it does initiate the
formulation of violence as a phenomenon that escapes its historicised
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alignment with positive legal norms inside a liberal constitution – and

this Benjamin takes as his point of departure, ultimately to establish
‘[d]ivine violence … [as] the sign and seal but never the means of sacred
execution [of law, and which] … may be called sovereign violence’.42
‘Divinity’ and ‘sovereignty’ sit uneasily within the broader sweep and
discourse of modernity, but their function for Benjamin is to provide
markers as he engages (in order to disrupt) the means–ends syllogism.
If there is continuity in relation to Kant as far as a maintenance
of distinction between morality and legality is concerned, Benjamin’s
interest beyond this is to resist the slightly too comfortable correlation of
justified means and just ends. This is precisely his prompt in questioning
Kant’s formulation that cautions against the qualification of violence
– ‘Act in such a way that at all times you use humanity both in your
person and in the person of all others as an end, and never merely as a
means’43 – in turn to question whether Kant’s injunction may perhaps
‘contain too little, that is, whether it is permissible to use, or allow to be
used, oneself or another in any respect as a means’.44
The nature of means are then prioritised for Benjamin, recognising
from the outset that ‘all violence as a means … is implicated in the
problematic nature of law itself’,45 and so thinking to ‘extract’ means
from their corruption when they are applied instrumentally in the
positing and preserving of law. His interests are in the possibilities of a
‘pure’ (pure by virtue of their non-instrumentality) application of means
‘beyond all legal systems and therefore beyond violence’46 – the results
of which may veer into bloody consequences but, as disengaged from
political ends, retain integrity in the non-instrumentality that is consti-
tutive of the laws of their means. Just or revolutionary violence is then

manifest for Benjamin in the form of ‘the violence of an action [that] can
be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the
law of its means’.47 Might such a politics of pure means, however, appear
to reinscribe the potentially problematic constant, or foundation, for
the same authority that posits and preserves law? To recoil on principle
from such constants is to forfeit a possible strategy of escape from the
means–ends syllogism; just as Deleuze resists the outright rejection
of binaries if they can be put to strategic use, we should surely resist
dogmatic rejection of constant and stable points of reference because,
though their use may at times prove to be necessary, we will always
exercise caution against their privileging and reifying as absolute, and
so moderate their use as always and only provisional. For Benjamin, ‘if
the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is
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assured, then this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the
highest manifestation of unalloyed [pure] violence by man, is possible,
and by what means’.48 The means then depose (Entsetzung) rather than
substitute for (Ersetzung) the positing of violence, which is the point at
which the means become revolutionary:
Pure violence does not posit, it ‘deposes’; it is not performative, but
afformative. If the pure violence of de-posing exists even beyond
the sphere of law, this pure, and thus non-violent, non-instrumental
violence may at any time … break through the cycle of laws and their
decay.49
Literary theorist Werner Hamacher here observes the beginning of
Benjamin’s sense of a pure, revolutionary violence as afformative, which
deposes positive violence and which is made known to us in political
acts, as we would expect, but also and critically in linguistic ones.
The politics of the afformative

The move from performative to afformative marks a transformation
that takes place at more than one level, but the most remarkable as we
assess the Zurich cabaret activities of 1916 is surely the transformation
that occurs at the linguistic level. The nature of the transformation
is as a reversal, whereby the effect of speech is reversed in its return
to the speaker. Judith Butler has identified this change in what she
terms ‘discursive performativity’, through a ‘ritual chain of resignifi-
cation whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable’.50 Within a
developing theory of linguistic agency, the possibility of resignification

arises from the recontextualisation of the initial intention, an intention
offensive or even injurious as it was spoken or written on the early Dada
platform by the Dada ‘actor’ (or, multiply, ‘actors’), when ‘the one who
acts … acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor
and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints
from the outset’.51 So, though her theorising clearly aims beyond the
Zurich instance, Butler narrates the perlocutionary that begins in the
speech act, which progresses by way of consequences that are, ultimately
and critically, not the same as the initial speech act itself. Huelsenbeck,
reviewing the initial Dada phase, recounted how
we did not neglect from time to time to tell the fat and utterly
uncomprehending Zurich philistines that we regarded them as pigs …
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Then there was always a big fuss, and the students, who in Switzerland
as elsewhere are the stupidest and most reactionary rabble – if in view
of the compulsory national stultification in that country any group of
citizens can claim a right to the superlative in that respect – at any
rate the students gave a preview of the public resistance which Dada
was later to encounter on its triumphant march through the world.52
With barbed invective or fantastic prayers – ‘what do you want from me
with my tender years … who kicked the old aunt in her rubber bum
it was I ladies and gentlemen I am the great event’53 – Huelsenbeck is
exemplary as his pronouncements act upon his audience and listeners in
a process that Butler refers to in the more directly political context of
assaultive speech, as read in the introduction by Mari Matsuda to the
volume Words that Wound (1993), for example. Indeed, the direction of
speech towards its listeners becomes constitutive of them as audience,
and contributes to their social interpellation:
The listener is understood to occupy a social position or to have become
synonymous with that position, and social positions themselves are
understood to be situated in a static and hierarchical relation to one
another. By virtue of the social position he or she occupies, then, the
listener is injured as a consequence of that utterance.54
So, Huelsenbeck’s hurling of derision at his audiences in Zurich was
not an act shy of assuming the position of high superiority that even
the low cabaret platform gave him, reinscribing ‘a structural relation
of domination … [and constituting] the linguistic occasion for the
reconstitution of that structural domination’.55 Where Butler invokes a
politics of the performative, then, our revision of the coordinates will

find Huelsenbeck moving towards what can be termed, after Benjamin,
a politics of the afformative.
This distinction of de-posing rather than positing violence is clearly
of some import. Matsuda recognises how, rather than simply reflecting
relations of social domination, the ‘hate’ speech that she describes
constitutes and enacts such domination, ‘becoming the vehicle through
which that social structure is reinstated’.56 This constitutive enactment
proves to be reconstitutive and consequently resistant to the fixity of the
present, appealing to a future form that duly escapes the constraints and
containment of time and history; appealing to ‘a future context, not yet
delineable and, hence, not yet precisely a context’.57 On a high philosophical
plateau, we might suggest that facing his audience Huelsenbeck found
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‘the people to come and the new earth’ outside democracy and inside
himself: ‘The people is internal to the thinker because it is a “becoming
people”, just as the thinker is internal to the people as no less unlimited
becoming.’58 In the encounter, we note, Huelsenbeck is more inclined to
bend than break the system (just as he does his Oxford cane), goading
and challenging his audience as both readers and listeners of the fantastic
prayers: ‘who can doubt then in the ascension of the speaking man’.59 In
his 1920 Dada narrative, moreover, he concedes how ‘[t]o make literature
with a gun in hand, had for a time, been my dream’.60 To inflict injury
in the enacting of domination, with its converse of subordination, ‘where
the injury is understood as social subordination’,61 does yield alternatives
through subversion as the permanence of any structure enunciated in
speech is, patently, illusory; rather than look for permanence of structure
in the open temporality of the speech act, it is in terms of continuity of
structure that the language of Dada registers. And Butler poses the timely
question, ‘[c]an there be an enunciation that discontinues that structure,
or one that subverts that structure through its repetition in speech?’62 –
timely because it suggests the possibility that the tie between speech acts
and their enunciation might be severed in a way that not only destabilises
structure but actively dismantles it.
Language, and its particular use by the Dadaists, is then charged
beyond the communicative to make structural intervention, dismantling
as it claims to uphold, and not always operating on the structural plateau
that we might anticipate for strategies of opposition. Such a mode of
operation that has the appearance of contradiction is familiar enough
within Dada (most enduringly in Tzara’s 1918 principled manifesto
commitment against principles), but we now find its presence in the

paradox of Benjamin’s anti-liberalist liberalism when the violence of
worker strike action, for example, clatters into his Unterredung and as
he grapples with the paradoxical politics and implications of legitimate
(rather than legal) modes of violence. Whatever else we might conclude
from the ‘Critique of Violence’, the proposition of a pure and therefore
just form can only come about by escaping the means–ends circuitry
(the very possibility of pure means or pure violence, of course, encounters
failures and breakdowns of its own conditions). The conditions of escape
might be glimpsed in Tzara’s coexistence of opposites, let’s say, when
he lectures on Dada to commend the manifesting of creative intensity
at ‘the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not
solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street
corners’ or in dingy cabaret rooms.63 And it is to ‘exceptional events’
Jones D, DADA.indd 86 21/05/2014 15:00:11

generated out of the same conditions that, in a very different world to

Tzara’s, Jean Baudrillard once made his appeal, naming the point the
‘singularity’ that possesses its own aesthetic in the face of nihilism:
The fragment is like a nucleus of an ephemeral destiny of language,
a fatal particle that shines an instant and then disappears. At the
same time it allows an instantaneous conversion of points of view, of
humours and passions.64
In such conversion is posed an escape from the circuitry of the syllogism,
if not the subversion and discontinuity of structure to which Butler
appeals, tied to the medium of enunciation itself; and this medium, this
material body of the voice, is posited potentially and ultimately as the
revolutionary moment in history.
The universal installation of the idiot

So we are presented with a linguistic corporeality emerging out of the
very medium that Benjamin reasoned in 1921 as being ‘nonviolent to
the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere
of “understanding”, [that is] language’.65 The register of differences,
however, rather than reduction to dualisms, admits for language currents
that move to confront the state, or the ‘law’ in Benjamin’s lexicon,
carrying an implicit threat in the eyes and ears of the ‘law’ that a
new law might be declared; and, precisely, ‘law sees violence [which it
identifies with some indiscrimination]66 in the hands of individuals as
a danger undermining the legal system’.67 The parodic and extrovert
wielding of violence (Huelsenbeck) made Dada as suspect in 1916 as,

bizarrely, did quiet introversion (Arp),68 because in one as in the other
there resided an implied declaration of a new law. And though any such
implied ‘Dada law’ would barely have achieved the semblance of stability
necessary for its implementation, we are minded of Dada’s continuous
and deliberate contradictions and its embrace of that which is ostensibly
objectionable, and of its strategic detour of the flawed concept of
‘revolution’ as conventionally understood (which does declare a new law
to replace the old, before then proceeding to implement and uphold the
new – Benjamin’s two functions of violence apply here, the lawmaking
and the law-preserving, and Dada recoil from the latter is what we can
safely anticipate). There never was any declaration of ‘Dada Revolution’
in 1916, and for good reason: the very notion would have necessitated
the validation of critique through the subsequent passing of judgement.
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When Tzara said that Dada was ‘working with all its might to
introduce the idiot everywhere’ (or the ‘universal installation of the
idiot’, as alternatively translated),69 what he had in mind for the idiot
was the social correlative of the desubjectivised, fragmented voice of
the Dadaist poem – the idiot as a social actor refusing the certainty of
the relation between signifier and signified that society would offer –
perhaps even the ‘real idiot of the family’ that Peter Sloterdijk once so
memorably situated in the arse.70 This idiot is not to be construed as
a person who has been violently crushed by society, but rather as the
necessary figure through whom desire can move in flows far exceeding
those of the individual subject. The corporeal dynamic creating and
created by the forces of our inculturation draws into its gathering pace
a reinscribed notion of agency and, inevitably, a not-easily dismissible
aspect of autonomy (as embodied in Serner’s disengaged identity in his
Letzte Lockerung, we might say, which will be considered along with
Tzara’s 1918 manifesto in the chapter that follows).71 But disengagement
restores for us the compulsive concern with meaning that we strive for
in deployment of the parts of language to say something through the
symbolic constructions that they constitute. The residence of meaning
therein as significant by virtue of the individual’s aspiration rests on
what we can break down in the symbolic object to its initial dimension
as designative, as being meaningful by what it can be used to refer to
or talk about in the world; out of the designative emerges the expressive
wherein feelings are made manifest in a way that cannot be contrasted
with a non-expressive (that is the empiricist designative) mode of presen-
tation: ‘what expression manifests can only be manifested in expression’.72
The combined functioning of the designative and the expressive therefore

positions symbolic constructions as meaningful by relating both to
the objects that they are about and to the feeling or thought that they
express. We ultimately locate the violence of Dada critique in what
constitute the sustained assaults on established meaning that emerged
and found form in the precincts of a low-brow social environment – ‘the
street, the fairground, the circus and cheap fiction … forms associated
with despised corners’ – and that were loudly and proudly declaimed
from the traditional stage:
The clown has burst in upon the dying ballet, the light and airy
dwelling-machine usurps the place of architectural styles long dead,
and the old harmonious stage-drama is replaced by the open-work
cabaret.73
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The violence we encounter is not performed by the clown, but is rather a

violence of de-posing. The forms that the language of Dada assumes in
1916 are – far from being complicit in violence – subject themselves to a
violence enacted upon language. What we witness is violence exercised
afformatively upon the body, violence where ‘every rule is to be applied
as an exception, for the rule is an exception’,74 of the radically revised
form that Benjamin summatively critiqued in 1921.
Notes
1 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London and New
York: Verso, 1988), p. 148.
2 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7.
3 ‘[T]he ultimate distinction between philosophical heads and the others would be that
the former desire to be just, the others to be a judge.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), p. 223.
4 Werner Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Andrew
Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and
Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 110.
5 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gersholm
Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 174.
6 Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’, p. 111.
7 Hans Richter, ‘Dada X Y Z …’ (1948), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters
and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 285. Richter continues to
describe how Ball ‘had become a hardworking, whispering diplomat … not really. In
a city [Bern] that was full of spies, intrigues and “pulls”, he was clearly one of the few
idealists, whose intelligence was obviously great enough to attract political figures.’
8 NLB, Aesthetics and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1980), p. 9.
9 Cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch
and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin:
Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, III (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),
p. 139.
10 Bloch and Benjamin would eventually find mutual and productive interests: ‘In the
later twenties … [they] took narcotics together, cross-annotating their impressions of
the experience’. NLB, Aesthetics and Politics, p. 10, n. 2.
11 Hans Richter, Dada Profile (Zurich: Arche, 1961), p. 70.
12 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 20.
13 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (London:
Atlantic Books, 2007), p. 232.
14 Marcel Janco, ‘Schöpferischer Dada’, in Willy Verkauf (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a
Movement (New York: Wittenborn, 1957), p. 34.
Jones D, DADA.indd 89 21/05/2014 15:00:11

15 Miklavž Prosenc, Die Dadaisten in Zürich (Bonn: Hans Bouvier, 1967), p. 55.
16 Richard Sheppard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2000), p. 216.
17 See Oskar Negt, ‘Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt’, in Heinz Grossmann and
Oskar Negt, Die Auferstehung der Gewalt: Springerblockade und politische Reaktion in der
Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), pp. 168–85.
18 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’
(1972), in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), pp. 118–19.
19 Walter Benjamin, ‘Für die Diktatur: Interview mit Georges Valois’, in Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 4, 1/2, ed. Rolf Tiedmann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 487–92.
20 See Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of
Reflection’, trans. Robert J. Kissin, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical
Evaluations in Cultural Theory, I (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 56–57:
‘critique is not a judgemental “reflecting on a work of art”, but rather a consciousness-
raising “unfolding”, in a new formation, of that “reflection” which itself already exists
in the work as its structural principle’. See also Joshua Rayman, Kant on Sublimity and
Morality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), pp. 38, 40.
21 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and
Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983), p. 229.
22 Rabinbach, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment’, p. 132.
23 Ernst Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’ (1928), in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin:
Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, I (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),
p. 1.
24 Joel Freeman, ‘Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: Toward an Ontology of the Avant-garde’,
in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 229.
25 Ferdinand Hardekopf, ‘Winter Garden’, in Malcolm Green (ed.), Black Letters
Unleashed: 300 Years of ‘Enthused’ Writing in German (London: Atlas Press, 1989),
pp. 96–97.
26 Jacques Vaché, ‘War Letters’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press,
1995), p. 231. Vaché was once described thus: ‘Dandy, anglomaniac and opium addict,
a young man who rejected life’; Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, ‘History of Dada’
(1931), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and
Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 105.
27 Hardekopf, ‘Winter Garden’, pp. 96–97.
28 Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’, p. 2.
29 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theatre’ (1913), trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio
(ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 127.
30 Allan C. Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, in Stephen
C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 25.
31 Greenberg, ‘The Dadaists and the Cabaret as Form and Forum’, p. 26.
34 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in
Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1838–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,
Jones D, DADA.indd 90 21/05/2014 15:00:11

trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 267.
35 Further to this discussion, see Raymond Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in
The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London and
New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 81–94.
37 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994),
p. 141.
38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 143.
39 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, trans. Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi, in
James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology
(New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 275.
40 David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique
(Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2005), p. 130.
41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 144.
42 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Anthropological
Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books,
1986), p. 300.
43 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment?,
trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959).
44 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 285.
49 Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’, p. 115.
50 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 14.
51 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 16.
52 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’ (1920), trans. Ralph
Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 23–24.

53 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘The Speaking Person’ (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago
Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995),
p. 62.
54 Mari Matsuda (ed.), Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the
First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 18.
55 Matsuda, Words that Wound, p. 18.
56 Matsuda, Words that Wound, p. 18.
58 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and
Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 109.
59 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘The Kettle Drum’ (1916), trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung
Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of German Dada (London: Atlas Press 1995), p. 69.
60 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, p. 28.
Jones D, DADA.indd 91 21/05/2014 15:00:11

63 Tristan Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’ (1922), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell
(ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 251.
64 Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London:
Routledge, 1993), p. 159.
66 ‘[E]ven conduct involving the exercise of a right can … under certain circumstances, be
described as violent’; Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, p. 282.
68 See Benjamin’s concise demonstration of how strike action, initially ‘an omission of
actions, a nonaction, which … cannot be described as violence’, will be reinterpreted
in the form of the revolutionary general strike wherein ‘the law meets the strikers, as
[perceived] perpetrators of violence, with violence’; Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’,
pp. 281–82. I develop the discussion on Arp’s ‘quiet studiousness’ in chapter 5.
69 Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’, trans. Ralph Manheim,
in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 94; the alternative translation is given in Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada
Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love’, trans. Barbara Wright, in Tristan Tzara,
Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (London: Calder, 1992), p. 42.
70 In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk advances an inverse representation
of the body, proposing a ‘physiognomic philosophy’. This he submits in the form of a
corrective to realms of brute reality overlaid by social symbolic systems, as a philosophy
wherein language and knowledge systems retain the dialectical relation with the body
that operates as a dynamic component in any symbolic system. Sloterdijk states, for
instance, what the inclusion of the arse would mean for any future philosophy: ‘The
arse seems doomed to spend its life in the dark, as the beggar among body parts. It is
the real idiot of the family. However, it would be a wonder if this black sheep of the
body did not have its own opinion about everything that takes place in higher regions
… Dying and shitting are the only things one must do … The arse is thus, of all
bodily organs, the one closest to the dialectical relation of freedom and necessity … To
understand the arse would be therefore the best preparatory study for philosophy, the
somatic propaedeutic’ (pp. 147–49). Relating these lines has an analytical as well as a
rhetorical function – not of the role of any particular organ in generating knowledge
or of the scatological intuitions secreted in the interstices of literary language, but of an
avant-garde preoccupation with the performative destruction of the formal qualities of
art.
71 Walter Serner’s intellectual disgust makes no concession for his own desperate subjectivity
– when he laughs destructively, he laughs at himself with unbiased and equal contempt
for all meaning and all generation of meaning. See Walter Serner, ‘Last Loosening
Manifesto’, trans. Malcolm Green, in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! First Texts of
German Dada (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 159.
72 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 219.
74 Walter Serner, ‘The Swig about the Axis’, trans. Caitríona Ní Dhubhgaill, in Dawn
Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006),
p. 58.
Jones D, DADA.indd 92 21/05/2014 15:00:11

Dada 1916 in Theory Practices of Critical Resistan... - (Chapter 3)

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3

The International of Arses is the only worldwide organization

Jones D, DADA.indd 73 21/05/2014 15:00:10

Jones D, DADA.indd 74 21/05/2014 15:00:10

It is to this very complex of law, then, as inextricably bound to

from this phase is a short essay that he contributed to René Schickele’s

Jones D, DADA.indd 75 21/05/2014 15:00:10

the instrumentalisation of language in all political judgement as making

The formalities of violence

invective’,14 revelling in the hostility of as much negative reaction as

Jones D, DADA.indd 76 21/05/2014 15:00:10

World War roused to a crescendo of failed, successful and failed-again

Jones D, DADA.indd 77 21/05/2014 15:00:10

engaged philosophically. His move was deliberately against and beyond

in ‘just violence’. It is Benjamin’s essay on violence, I suggest, that will

Jones D, DADA.indd 78 21/05/2014 15:00:11

We want rebellion: for that is our peace; we want excitement at

city, the fragmented urban consciousness was further fractured by the

Jones D, DADA.indd 79 21/05/2014 15:00:11

it anything so unified as ‘an emergent new sensibility’ that the Futurists

here – is that rather than thinking always in terms of Dadaist impact

Jones D, DADA.indd 80 21/05/2014 15:00:11

effectively mobilising art in class struggle, is submitted in the form of

Jones D, DADA.indd 81 21/05/2014 15:00:11

achieving justification, to the extent that what is fully acknowledged is

From violent means to radical ends

for a politics of difference, distinctly so to the extent that any evaluation

Jones D, DADA.indd 82 21/05/2014 15:00:11

alignment with positive legal norms inside a liberal constitution – and

tutive of the laws of their means. Just or revolutionary violence is then

Jones D, DADA.indd 83 21/05/2014 15:00:11

The politics of the afformative

developing theory of linguistic agency, the possibility of resignification

Jones D, DADA.indd 84 21/05/2014 15:00:11

politics of the performative, then, our revision of the coordinates will

Jones D, DADA.indd 85 21/05/2014 15:00:11

commitment against principles), but we now find its presence in the

Jones D, DADA.indd 86 21/05/2014 15:00:11

generated out of the same conditions that, in a very different world to

The universal installation of the idiot

wielding of violence (Huelsenbeck) made Dada as suspect in 1916 as,

Jones D, DADA.indd 87 21/05/2014 15:00:11

The combined functioning of the designative and the expressive therefore

Jones D, DADA.indd 88 21/05/2014 15:00:11

The violence we encounter is not performed by the clown, but is rather a

Jones D, DADA.indd 89 21/05/2014 15:00:11

Jones D, DADA.indd 90 21/05/2014 15:00:11

(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 23–24.

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Jones D, DADA.indd 92 21/05/2014 15:00:11

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