What is
important
for it is presence of mind in the chaos.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
.
.
already conscious false consciousness, consequently de- ception" (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol.
I, p.
169).
This way of seeing presumes a psychostructure in which it would be just a short step from the uncovering of the "swindle," that is, from the making conscious of the "putrefying ideology" to the pithy truth.
Today's situation is far removed from this, psychologically as well as sociologically, and today scarcely anybody still deludes himself that he has a firm relationship with the truth.
A pre- or postmorbid stage expands into a new normality.
After a hundred-year-long crisis, the word "crisis" is as wilted as the individuals who once were supposed to be shaken up by it.
The modern, reflec- tively cynical structures have obviously survived the motley phases of decadence: The gray cynicisms of modern matter-of-factness too are still cynicisms, even when they no longer have anything of the great pose of aristocratic morbidity, of aestheticism, or dandyism or of the spiritually decayed life-style of overbred late-bourgeois individualities.
We live today in a cynicism from which absolutely no flowers of evil sprout, no grand cold gazes and fireworks in the abyss.
Instead, cement cities, bureau-democracy, listlessness, endless mediocrity, administra- tion of deplorable states of affairs, lamenting prattle about responsibility, miserly pessimism, and insipid ironies.
It may be that we will have to put up with this "spirit" for a long time.
That is a mentality that is not even decadent because it was not preceded by any high point from which it could decline.
What today is cynical has long since been sliding along unperturbed in this style.
As we have said, there is no longer any "exposure" that corresponds to reflec- tive ideology.
No critique can cope with gelatinous realism, for critique cannot achieve any validity when it is not confronted by an ignorance.
In diffusely cyni- cal consciousness, no genuine ignorance reigns, only an inner splintering, un- reachable by any sort of enlightenment, and a conscious semidarkness that in its gloom still finds the energy, God knows where, to go on.
Even a critique that it- self becomes cynical in order to smash the predominating cynicism is deflected.
In exactly this way, incidentally, we could summarize critique in the Weimar Republic in the shortest possible formula.
The Weimar Republic is one of those historical phenomena through which we can best study how the modernization of a society has to be paid for. Enormous technical achievements are exchanged for an increasing uneasiness, in the uncul- ture; conveniences of civilization for the feeling of meaninglessness. Huge enter- prises shoot up, but in the half-shadow the question remains: What is the meaning of it all, and what does it have to do with me? In the intelligentsia, which con- sciously went through and participated in the process, there is no longer anywhere a "false consciousness" in the simple sense but rather dissolute consciousness on all sides. Because nothing is "sacred" to this consciousness anymore, it becomes greedy. A world of instruments lies at the feet of this amorphous and imprecise greed, but it finds no real enjoyment in them.
386 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
In the Weimar culture--as I hinted in chapter 1 --cynicism finds a more salient language than today. Then cynicism was acidic and productive, whereas today it expresses itself only in the no-thanks style, sullenly or bureaucratically. For the leaders of Weimar culture, in spite of everything that happened, reveal an inti- mate proximity to the heights of values
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and the ideals of the metaphysical tradi- tions, whose collapse is now writ large in thousands of bold and fresh, aggressive disillusionments and dismantlings. Kynical and cynical elements are to be found in almost all the progressive aesthetics of the time, not to mention the petit- bourgeois phenomena of disinhibition on the martial-political level (fascism). Among the productive spirits of the time there are not a few who take it on them- selves to articulate their disappointments, their derision, and their new, grand coldness in aggressive art forms. They create an expressive language in which negativity and modernity, unhappiness and conscious contemporaneity become almost identical. From this circle come grand poses, individuals holding firm in a glaringly unholy reality. Here, the First World War can still be seen as an event in the history of metaphysics --in a certain way as the militaristic commentary on Nietzsche's "God is dead. " The ego after the war is an inheritance without testa- ment and is almost inevitably doomed to cynicism. Once again, it throws itself into grand expressive postures: aesthetic autonomy in dismemberment; destruc- tion of oneself in the general destruction; a superior mien even when being torn apart; cold affirmation of relations that deny our dream of life; the coldness of the world outdone by the coldness of art. Weimar art cynics train themselves to play masters of the situation, while the situation in fact is one in which things have gotten out of control and sovereignty is no longer possible. They practice elevat- ing themselves above the absurd, the inconceivable, and above what has long since been seen through. They impudently place their poses against the equally overwhelming and mediocre destiny of the period: cynically allowing themselves to be swept along--Hey, we're alive. The modernization of unhappy con- sciousness.
Chapter 12
Weimar Crystallization: Transition of a Period from Recollection into History
Three-quarters of your literature and your entire philosophy are expressions ofdiscontent.
Bruno Frank, Politische Novelle (1928)
In the course of the decade during which I have occupied myself with Weimar culture, an initially very quiet mistrust regarding research on the Weimar period developed that gradually has been transformed into a well-founded theoretical doubt. The more I read, the more uncertain I become about whether we are at all in a position to say anything sensible about the culture and the consciousness of those years from 1918 to 1933. The more research undertaken, the clearer this doubt becomes. The existence of a series of exceptional scientific analyses and accounts does not change this in any way. The doubt is related not to the possibil- ity of giving a historically critical account of this or that aspect of the cultural life of this time but to our ability to assume a sensible stance toward our continuity and discontinuity with Weimar. This can be understood as the expression of a dis- quiet stemming from the "philosophy of history. "
There are two easily distinguishable points of access to Weimar: a nostalgic- archaeological one and an apologetic- political one. The first leads through the literature consisting of memoirs to the oral tradition of older people and finally to the projective curiosity of present-day marginal political groups. According to this perspective, there was a time in Germany when life was "still interesting," when politics and culture proceeded dramatically, vitally, tumultuously, full of ups and downs --as if histrionics had been the common denominator of a whole gamut of social manifestations of life- from expressionism to Marlene Dietrich's spectacular legs in The Blue Angel, from the bloody comedy about the Hitler putsch in 1923 to The Threepenny Opera, from the impressive Rathenau burial in 1922 to the villainous staged arson against the Reichstag in 1933. The perma-
387
388 ? WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION
nent crisis, spoken about by everyone, proved itself to be a good director who knew how to arrange eye-catching effects. In addition to the nostalgia of the recollectors, we also observe a pronounced homesickness on the left for the Wei- mar Republic, where there was indeed a highly remarkable spectrum of political culture--from the leftist liberalism of Tucholsky, Ossietzky, Kastner, Heinrich Mann, etc. , to authors and sympathizers of social democracy and communism up to the leftist radicals, anarchists, and independent Marxists such as Benjamin Korsch,Brecht,anduptotheearlyCriticalTheory . . . TheWeimarRepublic became something like a playground for leftist historicism, an exercise field for retrospective allegiances and commitments, as if it were useful to know, at least after the event, to which side one would have beaten a path. Because the connec- tion to the ideas and potentials of Weimar culture was cut off by the Third Reich and the restoration of the Adenauer period, the New Left had to construct a quasi- archaeological access to the buried layers of German political culture. Archival work, skimming, reading; what came to light was impressive: An interrupted tra- dition had to, in a certain sense, exhume itself, and discovered to its surprise that everything had already been there once before--our entire intellectual "identity"
under the rubble.
The second point of access to Weimar chooses fascism, the rule of national socialism, as its perspective. Here, the interest is almost completely apologetic and didactic: why this or that party or person had to act in that way; why Nazi
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fascism could not have been stopped or how it could have been hindered; why everything was as terrible as it was. Weimar appears in this light as prefascism, the period before Hitler. This how-was-it-possible literature already comprises libraries. In it, Weimar functions as an augury of political ethics-what flourishes when a democratic middle is lacking, when illiberal forces become too strong, when the workers' parties mutilate each other, when monopoly capital does not know how to go on, etc. A line of authors knew "even then" the truth, but unfor- tunately did not gain influence; another line, admittedly, made "errors," back then, but today it knows the correct view. Weimar thus serves on all sides as a political-moral history class from which everyone can learn. Democrats in East and West Germany compete against one another in the posture of those who have learned from the mistakes of the past. Because today the generation of eyewit-
nesses is aging and dying out, nothing stands in the way of a political pedagogi- fication of those years anymore -- except perhaps the academicization.
Doubts arise concerning both ways of proceeding. Could it not be the case that to date only a research in the "mirror stage" [Lacan; --Trans. ] has resulted from them, which lingers under the spell of naive relations of "interests" to the "object. Projection, apologetics, overcoming, nostalgia, salvation: They are all positions and images in a historical gallery of mirrors. "What you call the spirit of the times / That is the masters' own spirit / In which the times mirror one another" (Faust
WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION ? 389
I). Is then the "object Weimar" visible at all for us? Can we already try out ways of seeing other than merely nostalgic, projective, apologetic, and didactic ones? I think the specific forms of consciousness of Weimar culture are beginning to become visible for us again through the prism of the cynicism of our time, which is now coming into its own. The clearer the modern cynical structure be- comes for us, the more we gain the optics that belongs to the innermost core of the object. We then see the Weimar culture as the essential "founding period" of this cynical structure in its culturally dominating dimension. Back then for the first time, strategic immoralisms seeped out of the previously hermetically sealed milieus into collective consciousness, and what previously was regarded as the trade secrets of realpolitik, of diplomacy, chiefs of staff, secret services, or- ganized crime, prostitution, and the direction of enterprises is now taken up by a blatant rage for the truth and placed irrevocably in the twilight of "open secrets. "
As long as we do not explicitly grasp what cynicism is, the essence of Weimar culture must escape us. Our self- reflection, therefore, has precedence over historiography. As naive historiography, it has already come up against its limits. Only a more precise self-reflection again makes possible a more profound histori- cal experience--if we then think it is necessary. But conversely, one must have absorbed in long studies the specific scent of Weimar and Fascist cynicism in or- der to recognize that structures are at work in them that live on and connect us with our past. Historical objects do not simply "exist"--they emerge through the development of the eye.
Another doubt about the usual accounts of Weimar is a pure reflex of the study of the sources. In reading the documents, the impression is awakened that many texts of that time were written on a far more elevated plane of reflection, insight, and expression than the later cultural histories "about" them. The latter often profit only through distance in time, and their only way of being cleverer comes from the later perspective. That is, however, the insidiousness of the Weimar ob- ject. We cannot simply talk about this period as if its contemporaries had not al- ready said enough about themselves. In its extraordinary achievements in articu- lation, Weimar culture, in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch of history; it was a highly reflective, thoughtful, imagina- tive, and expressive age that is thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self- observations and self-analyses. If we simply speak "about" it, we all too easily go right past it. Our commentary risks summarizing things that exceed our under- standing because the self- understanding in the texts has often climbed to such heights that a later period cannot automatically assume that its powers of under- standing could again reach the earlier peaks. (This holds, of course, not only for the culture of these years but especially for it. ) I think I can show how, in the vari- ous areas of Weimar culture, a summit of cynical structures was reached that only now, from the perspective of the disillusioned, kynical-cynical, crisis-conscious Zeitgeist of the late seventies and early eighties, can be brought into view. The
390 ? WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION
periods understand each other over a stretch of half a century on the basis of the reconstructed proximity of experience. As far as self-reflection disorders, clever irritabilities, and pensive demoralizations are concerned, they have again become congenial to one another. That is expressed positively but describes a threatening phenomenon. Here we are working with a hypothesis that we think is right but that we hope, like a self-destroying prophecy, will sublate itself namely, that such structures articulate typical features of interludes between wars, in which no in- telligence and no goodwill suffice to stop catastrophic tendencies in the system.
The method of presentation is associative and simultaneously construing. For it, extensive quotations are fundamental. I
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would like to communicate to the reader something of the perplexity that can be summoned through a pure reading --of course, in a prepared context. The themes are relatively mul- tifaceted; they are not pursued to their end anywhere. Every chapter has to remain a hint. Altogether, a methodically thought-out labyrinth results, as if we could gain knowledge of an epoch by going through texts from that time as through and between the mirrored walls of a carnival fun house. Any other way would not succeed. I want to make an object more comprehensible by showing how, in its own inner many-sidedness and fracturedness, it exceeds our normal powers of understanding. What we need is a logical and historical "cubism," a simultaneity in thinking and in seeing. In daily life, we are not deranged [verriickt, meaning also "displaced"; - Trans. ] enough to get a proper perspective on the derangement that has coagulated to normality of our everyday life and our history. One can thus read the "Weimar Symptom" as a methodological adventure --as a journey through the madness from which we come.
Chapter 13
Dadaistic Chaotology: Semantic Cynicisms
1. Around a fireball races a pellet of dung on which ladies' stockings are sold and Gauguins valued . . .
78. A swift kick for the cosmos! Vive Dada! ! !
Walter Serner, Letzte Lockerung (1918-20)
We have the right to every diversion, whether it be in words, in forms, colors, sounds; but all this is a glorious bit of nonsense
that we consciously love and prepare--a huge irony, like life it- self; the exact technique of finally comprehended senselessness as the meaning of the world.
Raoul Hausmann, Des deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
Hindendorf Ludenburg are not historical names. There is only one historical name: Baader.
Johannes Baader, Reklame fur rnich Everything should live--but one thing must cease: the citizen.
Richard Huelsenbeck
With Dada, the first neokynicism of the twentieth century strides on stage. Its thrust is directed against everything that takes itself "seriously"--whether it be in the area of culture and the arts, in politics or in public life. Nothing else in our century has so furiously smashed the esprit de serieux as the Dadaist babble. Dada is basically neither an art movement nor an anti-art movement, but a radical "phil-
1osophical action. " It practices the art of a militant irony.
From bourgeois "institution art" (Peter Burger), Dada makes a claim only on
that motif that had given the arts their philosophical momentum in the bourgeois century: that of the amoralist freedom of expression. But art had long since ceased to be what it had been at its center and in its neokynical founding phase (i. e. , in the bourgeois Sturm und Drang of the eighteenth century-a medium of expres- sion for the "truth. " What the Dadaists saw before them was an art of the aes-
391
392 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
theticistic type, an artists' art that took itself totally and ceremoniously seriously, a substitute religion and a means for beautifying the "hideous bourgeois-capitalist reality. " The Dadaists, therefore, simply rehabilitated the philosophical impulse of the arts --their will to truth --in a counterattack against its submersion by aes- thetics, finesse, and elitist vanities. With an act of violence, they equated art with what at that time was called contemptuously "arts and crafts" -- with that innocu- ous decorative art that accommodated the need of the upright citizen (Spiesser) for being cheered up and for diversion from reality. For the supporters of the avant-garde, by contrast, reality smacked of the rawest negativity, and it could thus happen that the peaceful and antimilitarist Dada people of Zurich in 1916 (almost without exception emigrants from warring countries) even reckoned the pacifists among their enemies because they, disgracefully unrealistic, merely counterposed an ideal of peace to reality. Here, the handwriting of kynical modernity appears for the first time: affirmation of reality as reality in order to be able to smash in the face everything that is merely "aesthetic thinking. "
The handicraft artisans from all of Zurich began a resolute campaign against us. That was the most beautiful thing: Now we knew whom we had to deal with. We were against the pacifists because the war had given us the possibility to exist at all in our entire glory. And at that time, the pacifiists were even more respectable than today, where every stupid kid wants to exploit the conjuncture with his books against the times. We were for the war, and today Dadaism is still for war. Things have to collide; things are not proceeding nearly as horribly as they should.
Those were the words with which Richard Huelsenbeck obliged his audience in his first Dada speech in Germany (Berlin, February 1918). Morally we will probably never be able to come to terms with such a text, psychologically
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scarcely any better. We must first gain experience with ironical-polemical ways of speak- ing in order to comprehend Huelsenbeck's way of proceeding: He was trying out the new tactics on an immeasurably ticklish subject, namely, the art of declaring oneself, in an ironic, dirty way, to be in agreement with the worst possible things. With cynical speeches he produced an ego beyond good and evil that wanted to be like its mad epoch.
At that time, the war was still raging on all fronts. Western "values" were "collapsing"-like the German Western front at that time and, beyond that, a whole age that will be called the bourgeois period: the aged nineteenth century. In the battles of matter of the World War, Europe experienced the "return of the repressed"--the return of the beast out of the false peace of an imperialist, re- spectable bourgeoisie. The bourgeois spirit of progress had been an irrealism; it was answered by what had been denied for all too long, in fearful explosions. Af- ter Nietzsche, the Dadaists were the first who tried to take up the return of the
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 393
4 DER BLUTIGEERNST'eo l JAM A UiNUKM WOCKEMICHMIPT HIMUICFBE*: <<<<i EINSTEIN. GEORai &aosi
Arbeiten und nicht verzweifdnl SONDERNUMMER IV. DIESCHIEBER
Bloody Earnest: "Work and don't despair! " (Special Issue IV: "The Racketeers"). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
repressed from a positive angle. In doing so, they gave the artistic right to unin- hibited "free" expression a new twist. Between the mentality of the generals, who are respectably for war, and the mentality of the pacifists, who are respectably against it, the Dadaists erected a maliciously clashing third position "free" of all scruples: to be unrespectably for it.
Dada draws a part of its driving force from the feeling of seeing the world in an indomitably sober way. One assumes a pathetic positivistic air. One unrelent- ingly separates "naked facts" from phrases, mere culture from hard reality.
"We propagate no ethics, which always remain ideal (swindle). . . . We want to arrange economy and sexuality rationally, and we don't give a damn about culture, which was not a palpable thing. We want its demise. . . . We want the world to be moved and movable, turmoilin- stead of calm --away with all chairs, to hell with feelings and noble gestures.
? Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
live in their rhythm.
394 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
In the Dadaist Manifesto we read:
The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relation to the surround- ing reality; with Dadaism, a new reality comes into its right. Life ap- pears as a simultaneous whirr of sounds, colors and spiritual rhythms that is taken over into Dadaist art together with all sensational screams and fevers, its audacious everyday psyche and its entire brutal reality. In Dadaism, individuals consciously execute for the first time the inversion of the modern ego-world relationship characteristic of all modern subjectivity: Kynical individuals put an end to the pose of the self-sufficient creative artist (gen- ius), the world thinker (philosopher), the expansive entrepreneur; rather, they consciously let themselves be driven along by what is given. If what drives us is brutal, then so are we. Dada does not look onto an ordered cosmos.
What is important for it is presence of mind in the chaos. In the middle of the murderous tumult, every pose of a great thinker, as was usual in the calmly excited Lebens-
philosophien of the time, would have been senseless. Dada demanded from exis- tence (Dasein) an absolute simultaneity with the tendencies of its own time-- existential avant-garde. Only what was most advanced lived with Dada on one time line: war as mobilization and self-disinhibition; the most advanced destruc- tive procedures even into the arts; an tipsy chology, antibourgeoisie. It is the pa- thos of truth in this current to have the times in one's nerves and to think and to
2We can hear a philosophical echo here; namely, Dada anticipates motifs of Heidegger's existential ontology, which, for its part, criticizes the lie of the sub- ject in the European philosophy of domination on the highest conceptual plane. The ego is not the master of the world but lives in it under the sign of thrownness (Geworfenheit); we make at most "projections" (Entwurfe), but these too are in turn "projected projects" (geworfene Entwurfe), so that primarily a passive struc-
ture toward being holds true. Next door we hear:
To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to be against every formation of a sediment, to have sat for a moment on the chair means: to have brought life into danger.
dadaistisches manifest (leaflet, 1918)
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The idea could occur to us that existential ontology is an academic catching up to "Dada philosophy" or "Dadaology"-- whereby Martin Heidegger would have contested the status of head Dada held by the master, Johannes Baader, with enormous success. The secret of Heidegger's success touches the point that con- stitutes the "failure" of Dada: respectability. Instead of the unrespectably glitter- ing productions of Dadaist "projected" artists of life and politicking satyrs, projectedness in its respectable variant won out.
The Dada attack has both a kynical and a cynical aspect. The atmosphere of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 395
the first is playful and productive, childish and childlike, wise, generous, ironi- cal, sovereign, unassailably realistic; the second aspect reveals strong destructive tensions, hate and haughty defensive reactions against the internalized fetish of the citizen, considerable projection, and a dynamic of affects of contempt and dis- appointment, self-hardening and loss of irony. It is not easy to separate these two aspects. They make the Dada phenomenon as a whole into a scintillating complex that evades simple evaluations and uncomplicated emotional responses. Dada also behaves ambiguously toward fascism: With its kynical elements, Dada be- longs definitely to antifascism and to the logic and "aesthetic of resistance. " With its cynical elements, by contrast, it leans toward the prefascist aesthetics of anni- hilation that wants to enjoy the intoxication of demolition to the full. Dada tends to struggle against the "bloody earnestness"--which, however, with its aggressive aspects, lies deep within Dada itself. The Dadaists by no means succeeded in treating their own motives ironically: In their ironic poses, much unfree destruc- tiveness remained stuck and in their way of letting themselves go, a lot of resis- tance and self-hardening could be demonstrated.
"Dadasophy" develops here and there mystically ironic visions that celebrate life in its undivided fullness, but these are despairingly exaggerated in tone, as in the proclamation of the chief Dada, Johannes Baader.
"A Dadaist is someone who loves life in all its limitless shapes and who knows and says: Not only here, but also there, there, there, (da, da, da) is life! The genuine Dadaist thus also masters(? ) the whole regis- ter(! ) of human expressions of life, starting with grotesque self- persiflage up to the most holy word of the church service on the ball, called earth, which has become mature and which belongs to all people.
Even in such megalomaniac hymns of the sect's chieftain, Baader, who proclaimed himself president of the universe, the typical attempts of a more en- compassing affirmation appear, in which Dada irony fits well with the kynical as- pect of religion (see the works on mysticism by Dadaists, especially Hugo Ball).
In Dadaism, a provisional philosophy of Yes is attempted that refers, above all, to the concrete, momentary, droll, and creative energy of the Dada in- dividual. The Yes holds for the state of the world, which it treats ironically, but even more for the lived moment, in which the miracle of an eternal, fleeting pres- ent and the existentialist paradox of the inner "duration," simultaneously per-
3meated and untouched by the turbulence in the world, are realized. superstructure must be annihilated so that this vital- dynamic element can step into the foreground. The Dadaists thus often see even in expressionism only the con- tinuation of German idealism: "nauseous mystification of things, called expres- sionism. "
The first expressionist, a person who invented "inner freedom," was a
The cultural
396 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
gluttonous and sodden Saxon, Martin Luther. He effected the protesting turn of the German to an inexplicable "inwardness" amounting to men- dacity, a juggling with imagined sufferings, abyss of the "soul" and its power beside a servile malleability toward official power. He is the fa- ther of Kant, Schopenhauer and today's idiocy in art, which stares past the world and thereby thinks it has overcome it.
Hausmann, Riickkehr zur Gegenstdndlichkeit in der Kunst
Nietzsche's kynical realism echos here --with the same anti-Protestant compo- nent of hate. The Dadaist Yes to reality and to realization does not concern itself with the opinion of experts, connoisseurs, snobs, and critics. One may understand Dadaism as a prelude to an emancipation of dilettantes that assumes that the joy in creating is more important than the successful result. Ability is only an embel- lishment of genuineness. It is not the lasting works that count, but the moment of their intensive realization.
A further Nietzschean motif--the recurrence of the Same --can be found in Dadasophy. In a brilliant sketch, It Was Done by Dada: A Trialogue between Hu- man Beings, broad historical dimensions are skimmed through.
There has always been Dada, in old Egypt just as much as in Europe or Mexico. The Dadaist, my dear Doctor Smartney, is independent of time. . . .
. . . it is continually reborn, it is handed down through the chain of generations; Dada is an eminently metaphysical matter. . . .
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. . . Dada is the great scrutinizer and catcher of moralists. . . .
You regard it as the religious worldview of an ancient Egyptian
sect --but Dada also appeared in India. The Sivaites of the left hand cul- tivated it. In the Gilgamesh epic of the old Assyrians you will find references that Dada is identical with the birth of the world. In the Di- onysus mysteries Dada is to be found just as much as in the oracular sayings of the priests of Dodona. . . .
Dada is the greatest irony. It appears as a tendency but is no ten- dency. . . .
The sexual criminal Alton was a Dadaist when he wrote in his diary: Killed a young girl today, it was fine and hot . . . Manolescu was a Dadaist when he appeared as a prince and took lodgings in the emperor's court without knowing how we would pay the bill. Dada is the American side of Buddhism . . .
Dadaist documents are always forged, (pp. 110-13)
That Dadaist thinking cannot be summarized and reduced to a formula lies in its structure based on instantaneity. It moves entirely within processes, leaps, points that in their very essence cannot be abbreviated. The thing itself is its exe- cution (a theme that, by the way, dominates reflection philosophy, particularly in Fichte and Hegel). To talk "about" Dada consciousness means almost automati-
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 397
cally to place oneself beneath its plane. If we nevertheless try to say something general about it, we do this with the express remark that the object is not the Dada documents but the Dada method.
I want to call it a procedure of "reflected negation"--in other words, a tech- nique of disordering meaning, a nonsense procedure. Wherever firm "values," higher meanings, and deeper significance emerge, Dada attempts a disordering of meaning. Dada provides an explicit technique in the disappointment of meaning --and thereby stands in a broader spectrum of semantic cynicisms with which the demythologization of the world and of metaphysical consciousness
4 reachesaradicalfinalstage. Dadaismandlogicalpositivism arepartsofaproc-
5ess that pulls the ground out from under all faith in universal concepts,
for the world and totalizations. They both work like a garbage disposal in the de- praved European superstructure of ideas. The Dadaists indeed were all descended from a generation that a short time before had still genuflected with insuperable awe before everything called art, work of art, culture, and genius. For them the first task was a grand cleaning up in one's own head, of one's own past. They ne- gate, as apostates of an earlier faith in art, their previous way of living and the tradition in which they can no longer "stand": bestowing meaning through art and the elevation of the ordinary to the significant. In the backlash against this declin- ing way of living, Dada finds acidic words, particularly with regard to the "last" tendency in art, expressionism:
No, gentlemen, art is not in danger --for art no longer exists. It is dead. It was the development of all things, it still enveloped the bulbous nose and the swinish lips of Sebastian Miiller with beauty, it was a beautiful illusion proceeding from a sunny serene feeling toward life(! ) --and now nothing elevates us any longer, nothing at all! . . . The absolute in- capability . . . this is expressionism . . . The writing or painting petit-bourgeois could regard himself as solidly sacred; he finally grew somehow beyond himself into an indeterminate, universal world drowsiness --Oh expressionism, you turning point in the world of romantic falsehood.
Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
It is no accident that this posture that storms against art had its day once more around 1968 when the Dada of the New Left was "reborn" in activism, happen- ings, go-ins, love-ins, shit-ins--all the body Dadaisms of a renovated kynical consciousness.
6Dada does not revolt against bourgeois "institution art. " Dada turns against
art as a technique of bestowing meaning. Dada is antisemantics. It rejects "style" as pretense of meaning just as much as the deceitful "beautifying" of things ? . . As antisemantics, Dadaism systematically disrupts-not metaphysics but the talk about it: The metaphysical domain is laid bare as a festival ground; there,
formulas
398 Q DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and
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demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
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ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall.
The Weimar Republic is one of those historical phenomena through which we can best study how the modernization of a society has to be paid for. Enormous technical achievements are exchanged for an increasing uneasiness, in the uncul- ture; conveniences of civilization for the feeling of meaninglessness. Huge enter- prises shoot up, but in the half-shadow the question remains: What is the meaning of it all, and what does it have to do with me? In the intelligentsia, which con- sciously went through and participated in the process, there is no longer anywhere a "false consciousness" in the simple sense but rather dissolute consciousness on all sides. Because nothing is "sacred" to this consciousness anymore, it becomes greedy. A world of instruments lies at the feet of this amorphous and imprecise greed, but it finds no real enjoyment in them.
386 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
In the Weimar culture--as I hinted in chapter 1 --cynicism finds a more salient language than today. Then cynicism was acidic and productive, whereas today it expresses itself only in the no-thanks style, sullenly or bureaucratically. For the leaders of Weimar culture, in spite of everything that happened, reveal an inti- mate proximity to the heights of values
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and the ideals of the metaphysical tradi- tions, whose collapse is now writ large in thousands of bold and fresh, aggressive disillusionments and dismantlings. Kynical and cynical elements are to be found in almost all the progressive aesthetics of the time, not to mention the petit- bourgeois phenomena of disinhibition on the martial-political level (fascism). Among the productive spirits of the time there are not a few who take it on them- selves to articulate their disappointments, their derision, and their new, grand coldness in aggressive art forms. They create an expressive language in which negativity and modernity, unhappiness and conscious contemporaneity become almost identical. From this circle come grand poses, individuals holding firm in a glaringly unholy reality. Here, the First World War can still be seen as an event in the history of metaphysics --in a certain way as the militaristic commentary on Nietzsche's "God is dead. " The ego after the war is an inheritance without testa- ment and is almost inevitably doomed to cynicism. Once again, it throws itself into grand expressive postures: aesthetic autonomy in dismemberment; destruc- tion of oneself in the general destruction; a superior mien even when being torn apart; cold affirmation of relations that deny our dream of life; the coldness of the world outdone by the coldness of art. Weimar art cynics train themselves to play masters of the situation, while the situation in fact is one in which things have gotten out of control and sovereignty is no longer possible. They practice elevat- ing themselves above the absurd, the inconceivable, and above what has long since been seen through. They impudently place their poses against the equally overwhelming and mediocre destiny of the period: cynically allowing themselves to be swept along--Hey, we're alive. The modernization of unhappy con- sciousness.
Chapter 12
Weimar Crystallization: Transition of a Period from Recollection into History
Three-quarters of your literature and your entire philosophy are expressions ofdiscontent.
Bruno Frank, Politische Novelle (1928)
In the course of the decade during which I have occupied myself with Weimar culture, an initially very quiet mistrust regarding research on the Weimar period developed that gradually has been transformed into a well-founded theoretical doubt. The more I read, the more uncertain I become about whether we are at all in a position to say anything sensible about the culture and the consciousness of those years from 1918 to 1933. The more research undertaken, the clearer this doubt becomes. The existence of a series of exceptional scientific analyses and accounts does not change this in any way. The doubt is related not to the possibil- ity of giving a historically critical account of this or that aspect of the cultural life of this time but to our ability to assume a sensible stance toward our continuity and discontinuity with Weimar. This can be understood as the expression of a dis- quiet stemming from the "philosophy of history. "
There are two easily distinguishable points of access to Weimar: a nostalgic- archaeological one and an apologetic- political one. The first leads through the literature consisting of memoirs to the oral tradition of older people and finally to the projective curiosity of present-day marginal political groups. According to this perspective, there was a time in Germany when life was "still interesting," when politics and culture proceeded dramatically, vitally, tumultuously, full of ups and downs --as if histrionics had been the common denominator of a whole gamut of social manifestations of life- from expressionism to Marlene Dietrich's spectacular legs in The Blue Angel, from the bloody comedy about the Hitler putsch in 1923 to The Threepenny Opera, from the impressive Rathenau burial in 1922 to the villainous staged arson against the Reichstag in 1933. The perma-
387
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nent crisis, spoken about by everyone, proved itself to be a good director who knew how to arrange eye-catching effects. In addition to the nostalgia of the recollectors, we also observe a pronounced homesickness on the left for the Wei- mar Republic, where there was indeed a highly remarkable spectrum of political culture--from the leftist liberalism of Tucholsky, Ossietzky, Kastner, Heinrich Mann, etc. , to authors and sympathizers of social democracy and communism up to the leftist radicals, anarchists, and independent Marxists such as Benjamin Korsch,Brecht,anduptotheearlyCriticalTheory . . . TheWeimarRepublic became something like a playground for leftist historicism, an exercise field for retrospective allegiances and commitments, as if it were useful to know, at least after the event, to which side one would have beaten a path. Because the connec- tion to the ideas and potentials of Weimar culture was cut off by the Third Reich and the restoration of the Adenauer period, the New Left had to construct a quasi- archaeological access to the buried layers of German political culture. Archival work, skimming, reading; what came to light was impressive: An interrupted tra- dition had to, in a certain sense, exhume itself, and discovered to its surprise that everything had already been there once before--our entire intellectual "identity"
under the rubble.
The second point of access to Weimar chooses fascism, the rule of national socialism, as its perspective. Here, the interest is almost completely apologetic and didactic: why this or that party or person had to act in that way; why Nazi
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fascism could not have been stopped or how it could have been hindered; why everything was as terrible as it was. Weimar appears in this light as prefascism, the period before Hitler. This how-was-it-possible literature already comprises libraries. In it, Weimar functions as an augury of political ethics-what flourishes when a democratic middle is lacking, when illiberal forces become too strong, when the workers' parties mutilate each other, when monopoly capital does not know how to go on, etc. A line of authors knew "even then" the truth, but unfor- tunately did not gain influence; another line, admittedly, made "errors," back then, but today it knows the correct view. Weimar thus serves on all sides as a political-moral history class from which everyone can learn. Democrats in East and West Germany compete against one another in the posture of those who have learned from the mistakes of the past. Because today the generation of eyewit-
nesses is aging and dying out, nothing stands in the way of a political pedagogi- fication of those years anymore -- except perhaps the academicization.
Doubts arise concerning both ways of proceeding. Could it not be the case that to date only a research in the "mirror stage" [Lacan; --Trans. ] has resulted from them, which lingers under the spell of naive relations of "interests" to the "object. Projection, apologetics, overcoming, nostalgia, salvation: They are all positions and images in a historical gallery of mirrors. "What you call the spirit of the times / That is the masters' own spirit / In which the times mirror one another" (Faust
WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION ? 389
I). Is then the "object Weimar" visible at all for us? Can we already try out ways of seeing other than merely nostalgic, projective, apologetic, and didactic ones? I think the specific forms of consciousness of Weimar culture are beginning to become visible for us again through the prism of the cynicism of our time, which is now coming into its own. The clearer the modern cynical structure be- comes for us, the more we gain the optics that belongs to the innermost core of the object. We then see the Weimar culture as the essential "founding period" of this cynical structure in its culturally dominating dimension. Back then for the first time, strategic immoralisms seeped out of the previously hermetically sealed milieus into collective consciousness, and what previously was regarded as the trade secrets of realpolitik, of diplomacy, chiefs of staff, secret services, or- ganized crime, prostitution, and the direction of enterprises is now taken up by a blatant rage for the truth and placed irrevocably in the twilight of "open secrets. "
As long as we do not explicitly grasp what cynicism is, the essence of Weimar culture must escape us. Our self- reflection, therefore, has precedence over historiography. As naive historiography, it has already come up against its limits. Only a more precise self-reflection again makes possible a more profound histori- cal experience--if we then think it is necessary. But conversely, one must have absorbed in long studies the specific scent of Weimar and Fascist cynicism in or- der to recognize that structures are at work in them that live on and connect us with our past. Historical objects do not simply "exist"--they emerge through the development of the eye.
Another doubt about the usual accounts of Weimar is a pure reflex of the study of the sources. In reading the documents, the impression is awakened that many texts of that time were written on a far more elevated plane of reflection, insight, and expression than the later cultural histories "about" them. The latter often profit only through distance in time, and their only way of being cleverer comes from the later perspective. That is, however, the insidiousness of the Weimar ob- ject. We cannot simply talk about this period as if its contemporaries had not al- ready said enough about themselves. In its extraordinary achievements in articu- lation, Weimar culture, in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch of history; it was a highly reflective, thoughtful, imagina- tive, and expressive age that is thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self- observations and self-analyses. If we simply speak "about" it, we all too easily go right past it. Our commentary risks summarizing things that exceed our under- standing because the self- understanding in the texts has often climbed to such heights that a later period cannot automatically assume that its powers of under- standing could again reach the earlier peaks. (This holds, of course, not only for the culture of these years but especially for it. ) I think I can show how, in the vari- ous areas of Weimar culture, a summit of cynical structures was reached that only now, from the perspective of the disillusioned, kynical-cynical, crisis-conscious Zeitgeist of the late seventies and early eighties, can be brought into view. The
390 ? WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION
periods understand each other over a stretch of half a century on the basis of the reconstructed proximity of experience. As far as self-reflection disorders, clever irritabilities, and pensive demoralizations are concerned, they have again become congenial to one another. That is expressed positively but describes a threatening phenomenon. Here we are working with a hypothesis that we think is right but that we hope, like a self-destroying prophecy, will sublate itself namely, that such structures articulate typical features of interludes between wars, in which no in- telligence and no goodwill suffice to stop catastrophic tendencies in the system.
The method of presentation is associative and simultaneously construing. For it, extensive quotations are fundamental. I
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would like to communicate to the reader something of the perplexity that can be summoned through a pure reading --of course, in a prepared context. The themes are relatively mul- tifaceted; they are not pursued to their end anywhere. Every chapter has to remain a hint. Altogether, a methodically thought-out labyrinth results, as if we could gain knowledge of an epoch by going through texts from that time as through and between the mirrored walls of a carnival fun house. Any other way would not succeed. I want to make an object more comprehensible by showing how, in its own inner many-sidedness and fracturedness, it exceeds our normal powers of understanding. What we need is a logical and historical "cubism," a simultaneity in thinking and in seeing. In daily life, we are not deranged [verriickt, meaning also "displaced"; - Trans. ] enough to get a proper perspective on the derangement that has coagulated to normality of our everyday life and our history. One can thus read the "Weimar Symptom" as a methodological adventure --as a journey through the madness from which we come.
Chapter 13
Dadaistic Chaotology: Semantic Cynicisms
1. Around a fireball races a pellet of dung on which ladies' stockings are sold and Gauguins valued . . .
78. A swift kick for the cosmos! Vive Dada! ! !
Walter Serner, Letzte Lockerung (1918-20)
We have the right to every diversion, whether it be in words, in forms, colors, sounds; but all this is a glorious bit of nonsense
that we consciously love and prepare--a huge irony, like life it- self; the exact technique of finally comprehended senselessness as the meaning of the world.
Raoul Hausmann, Des deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
Hindendorf Ludenburg are not historical names. There is only one historical name: Baader.
Johannes Baader, Reklame fur rnich Everything should live--but one thing must cease: the citizen.
Richard Huelsenbeck
With Dada, the first neokynicism of the twentieth century strides on stage. Its thrust is directed against everything that takes itself "seriously"--whether it be in the area of culture and the arts, in politics or in public life. Nothing else in our century has so furiously smashed the esprit de serieux as the Dadaist babble. Dada is basically neither an art movement nor an anti-art movement, but a radical "phil-
1osophical action. " It practices the art of a militant irony.
From bourgeois "institution art" (Peter Burger), Dada makes a claim only on
that motif that had given the arts their philosophical momentum in the bourgeois century: that of the amoralist freedom of expression. But art had long since ceased to be what it had been at its center and in its neokynical founding phase (i. e. , in the bourgeois Sturm und Drang of the eighteenth century-a medium of expres- sion for the "truth. " What the Dadaists saw before them was an art of the aes-
391
392 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
theticistic type, an artists' art that took itself totally and ceremoniously seriously, a substitute religion and a means for beautifying the "hideous bourgeois-capitalist reality. " The Dadaists, therefore, simply rehabilitated the philosophical impulse of the arts --their will to truth --in a counterattack against its submersion by aes- thetics, finesse, and elitist vanities. With an act of violence, they equated art with what at that time was called contemptuously "arts and crafts" -- with that innocu- ous decorative art that accommodated the need of the upright citizen (Spiesser) for being cheered up and for diversion from reality. For the supporters of the avant-garde, by contrast, reality smacked of the rawest negativity, and it could thus happen that the peaceful and antimilitarist Dada people of Zurich in 1916 (almost without exception emigrants from warring countries) even reckoned the pacifists among their enemies because they, disgracefully unrealistic, merely counterposed an ideal of peace to reality. Here, the handwriting of kynical modernity appears for the first time: affirmation of reality as reality in order to be able to smash in the face everything that is merely "aesthetic thinking. "
The handicraft artisans from all of Zurich began a resolute campaign against us. That was the most beautiful thing: Now we knew whom we had to deal with. We were against the pacifists because the war had given us the possibility to exist at all in our entire glory. And at that time, the pacifiists were even more respectable than today, where every stupid kid wants to exploit the conjuncture with his books against the times. We were for the war, and today Dadaism is still for war. Things have to collide; things are not proceeding nearly as horribly as they should.
Those were the words with which Richard Huelsenbeck obliged his audience in his first Dada speech in Germany (Berlin, February 1918). Morally we will probably never be able to come to terms with such a text, psychologically
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scarcely any better. We must first gain experience with ironical-polemical ways of speak- ing in order to comprehend Huelsenbeck's way of proceeding: He was trying out the new tactics on an immeasurably ticklish subject, namely, the art of declaring oneself, in an ironic, dirty way, to be in agreement with the worst possible things. With cynical speeches he produced an ego beyond good and evil that wanted to be like its mad epoch.
At that time, the war was still raging on all fronts. Western "values" were "collapsing"-like the German Western front at that time and, beyond that, a whole age that will be called the bourgeois period: the aged nineteenth century. In the battles of matter of the World War, Europe experienced the "return of the repressed"--the return of the beast out of the false peace of an imperialist, re- spectable bourgeoisie. The bourgeois spirit of progress had been an irrealism; it was answered by what had been denied for all too long, in fearful explosions. Af- ter Nietzsche, the Dadaists were the first who tried to take up the return of the
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 393
4 DER BLUTIGEERNST'eo l JAM A UiNUKM WOCKEMICHMIPT HIMUICFBE*: <<<<i EINSTEIN. GEORai &aosi
Arbeiten und nicht verzweifdnl SONDERNUMMER IV. DIESCHIEBER
Bloody Earnest: "Work and don't despair! " (Special Issue IV: "The Racketeers"). ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
repressed from a positive angle. In doing so, they gave the artistic right to unin- hibited "free" expression a new twist. Between the mentality of the generals, who are respectably for war, and the mentality of the pacifists, who are respectably against it, the Dadaists erected a maliciously clashing third position "free" of all scruples: to be unrespectably for it.
Dada draws a part of its driving force from the feeling of seeing the world in an indomitably sober way. One assumes a pathetic positivistic air. One unrelent- ingly separates "naked facts" from phrases, mere culture from hard reality.
"We propagate no ethics, which always remain ideal (swindle). . . . We want to arrange economy and sexuality rationally, and we don't give a damn about culture, which was not a palpable thing. We want its demise. . . . We want the world to be moved and movable, turmoilin- stead of calm --away with all chairs, to hell with feelings and noble gestures.
? Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
live in their rhythm.
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In the Dadaist Manifesto we read:
The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relation to the surround- ing reality; with Dadaism, a new reality comes into its right. Life ap- pears as a simultaneous whirr of sounds, colors and spiritual rhythms that is taken over into Dadaist art together with all sensational screams and fevers, its audacious everyday psyche and its entire brutal reality. In Dadaism, individuals consciously execute for the first time the inversion of the modern ego-world relationship characteristic of all modern subjectivity: Kynical individuals put an end to the pose of the self-sufficient creative artist (gen- ius), the world thinker (philosopher), the expansive entrepreneur; rather, they consciously let themselves be driven along by what is given. If what drives us is brutal, then so are we. Dada does not look onto an ordered cosmos.
What is important for it is presence of mind in the chaos. In the middle of the murderous tumult, every pose of a great thinker, as was usual in the calmly excited Lebens-
philosophien of the time, would have been senseless. Dada demanded from exis- tence (Dasein) an absolute simultaneity with the tendencies of its own time-- existential avant-garde. Only what was most advanced lived with Dada on one time line: war as mobilization and self-disinhibition; the most advanced destruc- tive procedures even into the arts; an tipsy chology, antibourgeoisie. It is the pa- thos of truth in this current to have the times in one's nerves and to think and to
2We can hear a philosophical echo here; namely, Dada anticipates motifs of Heidegger's existential ontology, which, for its part, criticizes the lie of the sub- ject in the European philosophy of domination on the highest conceptual plane. The ego is not the master of the world but lives in it under the sign of thrownness (Geworfenheit); we make at most "projections" (Entwurfe), but these too are in turn "projected projects" (geworfene Entwurfe), so that primarily a passive struc-
ture toward being holds true. Next door we hear:
To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to be against every formation of a sediment, to have sat for a moment on the chair means: to have brought life into danger.
dadaistisches manifest (leaflet, 1918)
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The idea could occur to us that existential ontology is an academic catching up to "Dada philosophy" or "Dadaology"-- whereby Martin Heidegger would have contested the status of head Dada held by the master, Johannes Baader, with enormous success. The secret of Heidegger's success touches the point that con- stitutes the "failure" of Dada: respectability. Instead of the unrespectably glitter- ing productions of Dadaist "projected" artists of life and politicking satyrs, projectedness in its respectable variant won out.
The Dada attack has both a kynical and a cynical aspect. The atmosphere of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 395
the first is playful and productive, childish and childlike, wise, generous, ironi- cal, sovereign, unassailably realistic; the second aspect reveals strong destructive tensions, hate and haughty defensive reactions against the internalized fetish of the citizen, considerable projection, and a dynamic of affects of contempt and dis- appointment, self-hardening and loss of irony. It is not easy to separate these two aspects. They make the Dada phenomenon as a whole into a scintillating complex that evades simple evaluations and uncomplicated emotional responses. Dada also behaves ambiguously toward fascism: With its kynical elements, Dada be- longs definitely to antifascism and to the logic and "aesthetic of resistance. " With its cynical elements, by contrast, it leans toward the prefascist aesthetics of anni- hilation that wants to enjoy the intoxication of demolition to the full. Dada tends to struggle against the "bloody earnestness"--which, however, with its aggressive aspects, lies deep within Dada itself. The Dadaists by no means succeeded in treating their own motives ironically: In their ironic poses, much unfree destruc- tiveness remained stuck and in their way of letting themselves go, a lot of resis- tance and self-hardening could be demonstrated.
"Dadasophy" develops here and there mystically ironic visions that celebrate life in its undivided fullness, but these are despairingly exaggerated in tone, as in the proclamation of the chief Dada, Johannes Baader.
"A Dadaist is someone who loves life in all its limitless shapes and who knows and says: Not only here, but also there, there, there, (da, da, da) is life! The genuine Dadaist thus also masters(? ) the whole regis- ter(! ) of human expressions of life, starting with grotesque self- persiflage up to the most holy word of the church service on the ball, called earth, which has become mature and which belongs to all people.
Even in such megalomaniac hymns of the sect's chieftain, Baader, who proclaimed himself president of the universe, the typical attempts of a more en- compassing affirmation appear, in which Dada irony fits well with the kynical as- pect of religion (see the works on mysticism by Dadaists, especially Hugo Ball).
In Dadaism, a provisional philosophy of Yes is attempted that refers, above all, to the concrete, momentary, droll, and creative energy of the Dada in- dividual. The Yes holds for the state of the world, which it treats ironically, but even more for the lived moment, in which the miracle of an eternal, fleeting pres- ent and the existentialist paradox of the inner "duration," simultaneously per-
3meated and untouched by the turbulence in the world, are realized. superstructure must be annihilated so that this vital- dynamic element can step into the foreground. The Dadaists thus often see even in expressionism only the con- tinuation of German idealism: "nauseous mystification of things, called expres- sionism. "
The first expressionist, a person who invented "inner freedom," was a
The cultural
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gluttonous and sodden Saxon, Martin Luther. He effected the protesting turn of the German to an inexplicable "inwardness" amounting to men- dacity, a juggling with imagined sufferings, abyss of the "soul" and its power beside a servile malleability toward official power. He is the fa- ther of Kant, Schopenhauer and today's idiocy in art, which stares past the world and thereby thinks it has overcome it.
Hausmann, Riickkehr zur Gegenstdndlichkeit in der Kunst
Nietzsche's kynical realism echos here --with the same anti-Protestant compo- nent of hate. The Dadaist Yes to reality and to realization does not concern itself with the opinion of experts, connoisseurs, snobs, and critics. One may understand Dadaism as a prelude to an emancipation of dilettantes that assumes that the joy in creating is more important than the successful result. Ability is only an embel- lishment of genuineness. It is not the lasting works that count, but the moment of their intensive realization.
A further Nietzschean motif--the recurrence of the Same --can be found in Dadasophy. In a brilliant sketch, It Was Done by Dada: A Trialogue between Hu- man Beings, broad historical dimensions are skimmed through.
There has always been Dada, in old Egypt just as much as in Europe or Mexico. The Dadaist, my dear Doctor Smartney, is independent of time. . . .
. . . it is continually reborn, it is handed down through the chain of generations; Dada is an eminently metaphysical matter. . . .
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. . . Dada is the great scrutinizer and catcher of moralists. . . .
You regard it as the religious worldview of an ancient Egyptian
sect --but Dada also appeared in India. The Sivaites of the left hand cul- tivated it. In the Gilgamesh epic of the old Assyrians you will find references that Dada is identical with the birth of the world. In the Di- onysus mysteries Dada is to be found just as much as in the oracular sayings of the priests of Dodona. . . .
Dada is the greatest irony. It appears as a tendency but is no ten- dency. . . .
The sexual criminal Alton was a Dadaist when he wrote in his diary: Killed a young girl today, it was fine and hot . . . Manolescu was a Dadaist when he appeared as a prince and took lodgings in the emperor's court without knowing how we would pay the bill. Dada is the American side of Buddhism . . .
Dadaist documents are always forged, (pp. 110-13)
That Dadaist thinking cannot be summarized and reduced to a formula lies in its structure based on instantaneity. It moves entirely within processes, leaps, points that in their very essence cannot be abbreviated. The thing itself is its exe- cution (a theme that, by the way, dominates reflection philosophy, particularly in Fichte and Hegel). To talk "about" Dada consciousness means almost automati-
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 397
cally to place oneself beneath its plane. If we nevertheless try to say something general about it, we do this with the express remark that the object is not the Dada documents but the Dada method.
I want to call it a procedure of "reflected negation"--in other words, a tech- nique of disordering meaning, a nonsense procedure. Wherever firm "values," higher meanings, and deeper significance emerge, Dada attempts a disordering of meaning. Dada provides an explicit technique in the disappointment of meaning --and thereby stands in a broader spectrum of semantic cynicisms with which the demythologization of the world and of metaphysical consciousness
4 reachesaradicalfinalstage. Dadaismandlogicalpositivism arepartsofaproc-
5ess that pulls the ground out from under all faith in universal concepts,
for the world and totalizations. They both work like a garbage disposal in the de- praved European superstructure of ideas. The Dadaists indeed were all descended from a generation that a short time before had still genuflected with insuperable awe before everything called art, work of art, culture, and genius. For them the first task was a grand cleaning up in one's own head, of one's own past. They ne- gate, as apostates of an earlier faith in art, their previous way of living and the tradition in which they can no longer "stand": bestowing meaning through art and the elevation of the ordinary to the significant. In the backlash against this declin- ing way of living, Dada finds acidic words, particularly with regard to the "last" tendency in art, expressionism:
No, gentlemen, art is not in danger --for art no longer exists. It is dead. It was the development of all things, it still enveloped the bulbous nose and the swinish lips of Sebastian Miiller with beauty, it was a beautiful illusion proceeding from a sunny serene feeling toward life(! ) --and now nothing elevates us any longer, nothing at all! . . . The absolute in- capability . . . this is expressionism . . . The writing or painting petit-bourgeois could regard himself as solidly sacred; he finally grew somehow beyond himself into an indeterminate, universal world drowsiness --Oh expressionism, you turning point in the world of romantic falsehood.
Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
It is no accident that this posture that storms against art had its day once more around 1968 when the Dada of the New Left was "reborn" in activism, happen- ings, go-ins, love-ins, shit-ins--all the body Dadaisms of a renovated kynical consciousness.
6Dada does not revolt against bourgeois "institution art. " Dada turns against
art as a technique of bestowing meaning. Dada is antisemantics. It rejects "style" as pretense of meaning just as much as the deceitful "beautifying" of things ? . . As antisemantics, Dadaism systematically disrupts-not metaphysics but the talk about it: The metaphysical domain is laid bare as a festival ground; there,
formulas
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everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and
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demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
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ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall.
