DADA CULTURE N° 18 CRITICAL TEXTS ON THE AVANT-GARDE

Review par Marc Décimo

It has the appearance of a book. It benefits from a cardboard cover. The paper is glossy. There are quite numerous black and white vignettes for illustration. It is in English. Such is the DADA CULTURE magazine. The mastermind of the very academic n°18 is Dafydd Jones, who teaches at the University of Cardiff (Wales). This issue ends with a reasoned and fairly well-supplied bibliography of works published recently on DADA and, as it should be, on the list of contributors, about ten British or American authors. A foreword gives thanks and an introduction specifies the plan of the work and what, in sum, readers will have to grind: five parts each comprising two articles. The whole thus intends to be resolutely very balanced.

The first article worries about the Manifestos and the Event-Evenings that were held in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire. From the outset the somewhat metatextual tone is given: the choice of the manifesto as a type of text or the fact of organizing an evening amounts to taking the floor, a will to emancipate oneself, a revolt, a conscious passage to action. This orients DADA towards the side of an eccentricity (if the center is defined by the sum of prejudices and habits that shape a society) rather than towards the side of a clean slate or a Russian-style revolution. From then on, very necessarily, the sequel must deal with language or language. What is more conventional indeed in a given society than language? What is more imposed on the individual? Language is therefore the privileged place of subversion.

DADA's attitude in this regard will have been to privilege in language and the representations one makes of it those uses on which one previously insisted more or less. To forget meaning (if one wants to go fast) in favor of various semiotic tropisms: the inflections of voice and body, rhythm and cadence both sound and visual; in short, DADA to linger on both the visual and the sound which already make sense underneath. The subversion would be exercised by thus bringing out aspects more or less neglected or rarely put forward during the learning of this social activity that is the body of language. By exploring and forcing certain semiotic aspects (which theorists such as Peirce and Saussure signal at about the same time), DADA creates. DADA adds to the social universe to which one generally held, the additional universe of a multiform oasis.

This underneath borrows from the discoveries revealed by technique. Does one not readily give to see and hear in the images of movement borrowed from chronophotography and nascent phonetics? New technical knowledge nourishes DADA from time to time. What one did not see before (or what one neglected) must now be looked at, discovered, by a detour, an exteriorization, a "bovarism". Who other than Duchamp can better serve the cause here? But that's not all. Machinism and Taylorism are not without incidence either and, in the representation they allow themselves of bodies, Otto Dix, Grosz or Heartfield lead art no longer in a realist or naturalist vein but they engage art towards a critical reflection. Like language, the body is no longer consigned to conventional use. It overflows. DADA adds. In a tradition finally marked by denial, DADA wants to be more clairvoyant. One will have good reason here to point out that the invention of psychoanalysis coincides with the emergence of DADA and, moreover, crosses through it.

The conditions of appearance of a Schwitters, a Baader and a Cravan (studied in turn) are thus to be situated in the practice of this Western society before the First World War and to be interpreted as the expression of a desire. There is a fierce will for "civil disobedience", which, I would dare to add, comes from far. Creation of idiolects (Schwitters), various bravados constitute the testimony, the certainly acmeic moment. But one must face the evidence: DADA is indeed part of the system. One must then think of this system seeking expansion, and DADA as the "m" moment of a spiral unrolled towards infinity. If one wants to apply oneself to describing in one word what the Avant-gardes were, DADA is this thrust.

This is what the n°18 of DADA Culture magazine would tend to define approximately. However (but this is to be undoubtedly conforming to the announcement value of the title "Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde"), one would like to reproach most of the texts of this n°, nonetheless, for considering the DADA phenomenon in its diversity only from a retro-reading conducted from the contemporary point of view of consecrated authors (for French theorists alone come and return Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Blanchot...), with concepts perhaps more or less passepartout... The more clearly historical approach — and the study of sources — has its merits.