Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (review)

Dada historicized itself. However ironic it might seem for the artifacts, posters, films, and pamphlets of the Dada movement to have found their way into some of the world's leading institutions of modern art this past year, a significant part of Dada's critical enterprise consisted in seeing itself not only as an attack on history, but also as a movement that possessed a history of its own. Richard Huelsenbeck wrote histories of the movement as early as 1920; Hugo Ball kept and published a Dada Diary; Raoul Haussmann, Hans Richter, and Emmy Hemmings began publishing books on Dada after WWII. More recently, a ten-volume series of essay collections entitled Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, edited by Stephen Foster between 1996 and 2005, has maintained this historiographical imperative.

Rather than simply continuing to historicize the movement, the essays in Dada Culture situate Dada's practices of radical negation within a theoretical and philosophical context. The collection aims to conceptualize Dada in ways that resist the tendency for many scholars to reduce it to a fleeting act of post-war negation, soon to evolve into more constructive movements like Expressionism or Surrealism. Dada Culture instead focuses on the ways in which Dada's cultural impact finds its expression in twentieth-century thought, especially in the work of Julia Kristeva, Peter Bürger, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.

Dada Culture might be read as an attempt to rescue Dada from the museum world. To what extent, though, does Dada need to be rescued? Of course, it's easy to notice how beautiful Dada objects now seem: Schwitters' trash-based Merz collages are remarkable exercises in composition and form; Sophie Tauber's dolls and tapestries expertly manipulate fields of color; and the typefaces of even the most incendiary Dada documents are now touchstones of graphic art. The recent traveling Dada exhibition of 2005-2006 strove to outmaneuver this aestheticizing tendency by highlighting the movement's geographical trajectory, spatializing its development in Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, and New York. Pedagogical rather than contemplative, its aim was to show the movement in its material and technical specificity. By contrast, Dada Culture presents an epistemological map of Dada's conceptual landscape, situating Dada studies within its scholarly history, as well as within a theoretical and philosophical genealogy that amplifies its practices of radical negation.

Daffyd Jones' introduction to the volume begins in medias res with a long discussion of twentieth-century Marxisms—Lenin, Dietzen, and Althusser—in order to secure a definition of revolution that restores to the term a violent negativity he considers proper to Dada. "How we invoke the idea of revolution," Jones writes, "requires a deliberate revision of readings that have hitherto dominated art historically" (12); such readings have tended, Jones argues, to delimit Dada as a mere anarchic gesture, and, at the same time, to characterize as "revolution" only those organized historical processes that create a new order. Jones' introduction—and, by extension, the volume itself—seeks a critical language that resists such ordering definitions and categorizations. Jones instead urges scholars to approach Dada through performances, practices, and events, rather than through definitions and manifestos (14). In Jones' eyes, both revolution and Dada can be seen as historical events that produce effects, yet without the need for goals or platforms: Jones calls this "agency without an agency, or as a subjectless subjectivity" (17). Jones' insight here is compelling, yet his pursuit of this resistance to categorization as Dada's defining characteristic risks itself becoming a means for categorizing the movement all over again, this time as an object of "pure" theory rather than as a movement that performed real intellectual and material work.

The essays in Dada Culture similarly find correspondences in twentieth-century theory in order to conceptualize Dada as a series of events around which history took shape. The risks of such a project are twofold. First, the volume's emphasis on Dada...