Da-da: “Articulatory Gestures” and the Emergence of Sound Poetry

1. Da-da

“Dada-Rätsel gelöst!” (“The Riddle of Dada Solved!”), declared the headline of a newspaper article published by the German daily die tageszeitung (taz) in November 1994.¹ Written by the paper’s renowned columnist and editor-in-chief Arno Widmann, and prominently placed in the rubric “topic of the day,” the piece sets out to provide a new and definitive answer to the question of what the word “Dada” actually means. To that end, the text proceeds rhetorically by recounting, in its first half, the various accounts of the word’s provenance as proposed by the Dadaists themselves, in order to argue, in its second half, that in fact none of these established versions reveals the true historical origin of the name. Rather than having been discovered “by chance” in a conventional German-French dictionary, as the most famous of the Dadaist stories goes,² the designation “Dada” originated, according to the newspaper, from a somewhat more delicate context: It was chosen, quite intentionally, for a connotation rooted in the unofficial lexicon of contemporary sexual slang—a connotation documented, for instance, in a highly explicit erotic treatise published pseudonymously by the French writer Alphonse Gallais in 1903. This book, entitled Les Paradis charnels, and translated into German as Das Paradies des Fleisches in 1909, describes the “art of enjoying voluptuousness” in no fewer than 136 different ways; and it contains, amid the broad spectrum of its suggestions, an entire chapter on erotic “art forms” that share the linguistic denomination “à dada.”³ By appropriating this sexually charged expression as their slogan and name, the taz article suggests, the Dadaists sought to perform a violation of public discourse and morals—a violation, moreover, that could not even be explicitly rejected as such, since any rhetorical attempt to ban the word Dada from public speech would have had to acknowledge, and perhaps even explicate, its “unspeakable” references.

For all its self-assertive rhetoric, this “solution” to the Dada riddle offered by the taz turns out to be less than thoroughly persuasive—attempting, as it does, to eliminate the multiplicity of the word’s potential meanings by pinning it down genetically to one, and only one, semantic field. While the newspaper’s front page promises, as one of its top news items, an explanation of “why Dada is not called Lollo” (“warum Dada nicht Lollo heißt”),⁴ and in doing so takes issue with Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s insistence on the interchangeability of these two words,⁵ the corresponding story falls short of fulfilling its promise. And it does so not primarily by relying on insufficient philological evidence, but rather by opting for the wrong level of argument altogether. The question of “why Dada is not called Lollo”—and thus also of why Dada is not, as Hausmann claims, interchangeable with other, structurally analogous creations like Bébé or Sisi—cannot be answered by attempting to determine what Dada really means.⁶ Rather, such an answer becomes possible only through a closer look at what the word, considered linguistically, but prior to any specific connotations, in itself actually is. And only the clarification of this linguistic status can make evident the deep affinity, both generic and structural, between Dada and the project of sound poetry.⁷ Only such a clarification of linguistic status, in other words, can provide sufficient insight into the aesthetic function that the word Dada acquires in the mid-to-late 1910s. Not coincidentally, the way in which it comes both to encode and embody a poetics of sound is also one of the avant-garde’s most significant contributions to literary history.

Some passages from the “Eroeffnungsmanifest” (“Opening Manifesto”)—delivered by Dada’s founding member Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916, the night of the first official “Dada soiree” in Zurich—may serve to support this claim; and they may do so because they make visible the extent to which the word Dada and the conception of “poems without words” are intertwined from the very beginning:

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can...