Lipstick Traces (33 page)

Still, all this was hard to get across. In January 1917 Huelsenbeck crossed the border from Switzerland into Germany far more easily than his neighbor Lenin would four months later; for Huelsenbeck, no sealed train was required. The police weren’t stupid: for Huelsenbeck there would be no Finland Station. He too returned to revolution, but not to power; the invisible empire aside, he returned, first, to pedantry. When he first spoke publicly in Germany on dada—in a lecture hall, for a fee—he simply recounted the discovery of the philosopher’s stone: it was, he said then of the Cabaret Voltaire, a “hexen-sabbath,” a sorcery. “I was the cantor, an almost mythic figure,” he said—“with plenty of schmaltz.” You know: Ball’s “aesthetic production” in the face of what, in those days, passed for total war. A nightclub versus a theme park.

The history of the twentieth century was to be the account of the creation of reality through its erasure: through killing people, through the extermination of subjective objects, of realized or potential individuals as forests to be cleared. The triumph of this work can be found in the fact that we have neither art nor language to translate it—that when we try to think about those who were exterminated in Europe in the 1910s and 1940s (Hitler, 1939: “Who today remembers the Armenians?”) or in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, in China in the 1950s, Indonesia in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s (out of the ashes, the New Man), we can’t think of those people as such. We can see Alben Barkley, but we can’t see what Barkley saw. When Ball wrote of the need to erase everything that had been written, when Tzara said he didn’t care if anyone existed before him, when Huelsenbeck chanted “The End of the World,” the dadaists fed on this impulse, even as their disgust over its wastes brought them to life.

Dada, like the century, was the right to piss and shit in different colors:
white, yellow, black, and red. Repeatedly in the first years of the Nazi regime, the Gestapo came looking for Huelsenbeck (Is
this the residence of Huelsenbeck the dadaist? No,
his wife would answer,
this is the residence of Huelsenbeck the doctor);
safe in the United States, he would never tire of citing the 1936 Nuremberg speech in which Hitler condemned dada as a slime pit as proof of dada’s innocent power. But it is not difficult to conclude that Hitler, once part of a bohemian milieu, always a painter, an artist, railed so long and hard against dada because it had touched him, because he felt its pull, just as Ball felt the nihilism in Marinetti’s “Parole in libertà,” Siurlai the whiff of death in Hennings’ “Gloire,” Huelsenbeck the thrill of total rule in “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?” Certainly Carl Jung, speaking in London in the same year Hitler spoke in Nuremberg, would not have found it difficult; he knew the pull went in two directions.

A purely personalistic psychology, by reducing everything to personal causes, tries its level best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. I consider this a rather dangerous procedure which cannot be justified medically . . . Can we not see how a whole nation is reviving an archaic symbol, yes, even archaic religious forms, and how this mass emotion is influencing and revolutionizing the life of the individual in a catastrophic manner? The man of the past is alive in us today to a degree undreamt of before the war [of 1914–1918], and in the last analysis what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?

That had been Ball’s argument, which could have been Hitler’s: “I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation.” It is no matter that, in all his megalomania, Ball would have been horrified by Nazism—which, as a fact of history, Jung went on to weave into a version of the thesis Norman Cohn would set forth in 1957, in
The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Cohn was greeted with incredulity when he argued that the exterminating impulses of the twentieth century could be traced to unsatisfied debts first levied by the heretics and inquisitors of the Middle Ages; to Jung it was obvious.

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years before, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions ready for death—why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool.

So Jung explained:

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as
forms without content,
representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will.

This was Jung’s account of Nazism. In it was the power principle Debord would grasp: the reversible connecting factor, the idea that the empty repetitions of modern life, of work and spectacle, could be detourned into the creation of situations, into abstract forms that could be infused with unlimited content. But the situationist idea was at bottom a dada idea, and Jung’s account of Nazism needs only an excision of its specific examples to serve as an account of what the dadaists sought in the Cabaret Voltaire. Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride. Dada was a prophecy, but it had no idea what it was prophesying, and its strength was that it didn’t care.

Dada was a traffic accident; it was a cult. Dada was a mask, eyes without a face. Dada was a religion, spawn of ancient heresies. Dada was a war, but over souls, not bodies.

For seventy years dada has been tended like a holy flame. The same lines, the same photographs, have been trotted out again and again. The trick is to catch dada triviality (Russian folk-song nights, vellum folios of “The New Poetry”) along with dada mystery (the burden of Huelsenbeck’s helpless, never-ending exegesis); to catch what has always been obvious and what has always been out of reach. Typically Huelsenbeck, who gained entry into the New York psychoanalytic community by way of a didactic analysis with Karen Horney, put it best: “and so as a doctor I was a success,” he wrote in 1969, five years before he died, “and as a dadaist (the thing closest to my heart) I was a failure.” The point is not to ask what he meant; that was his business. The point is to ask what it would mean to live with that kind of phantom in your heart.

Strange things happened in the Cabaret Voltaire. The members of the band played themselves, but they also called up a Frankenstein monster to
a hoodoo beat, which played them: a monster mash. Raoul Vaneigem replayed it for the situationists in
The Revolution of Everyday Life:

Working to cure themselves and their civilization of their discontents—working, in the last analysis, more coherently than Freud himself—the Dadaists built the first laboratory for the revitalization of everyday life. Their activity was far more radical than their theory. Grosz: “The point was to work completely in the dark. We didn’t know where we were going.” The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and rubbish cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end, everything was transformed. Though people and things stayed the same they took on completely new meanings. The reversal of perspective began in the magic of the rediscovery of lost experience.

Fixing the precedent for Debord’s reversible connecting factor, Vaneigem didn’t care what dada had been. Like the dadaists as they tried to say what they’d done, he was trying to find the limits of what their moment could be made to say. Attempting to put into play the central tenet of situationist theory—that the nature of social reality and the means to its transformation were to be found not in the study of power, but in a long, clear look at the seemingly trivial gestures and accents of ordinary experience—Vaneigem was glamorizing what once actually happened, not caring if it had or not. He was writing a how-to manual on revolution in modern society, a revolution to be made with the means available to anyone who at home felt like a tourist; with his glamorization in place, Vaneigem was calling on his readers, whoever they might turn out to be, to act it out. He was contriving a prophecy of May ’68, when so many of the lines in his book would be copied onto the walls of Paris, then across France, and then, as the years went on and the words floated free of their source, when the book had been lost in the vagaries of publishing and fashion, around the world. “
ACT LOCALLY
,
THINK GLOBALLY
,” I can read today on a bumper sticker in my hometown; Vaneigem wrote the words, though the person who bought the sticker will never know it.

Vaneigem wouldn’t mind. That was the idea. That was why each number of
Internationale situationniste
opened with an anti-copyright: “Any of the texts published in ‘I.S.’ may be freely reproduced, translated, or adapted,
even without notice of their origin.” But if the situationists wanted readers freed from the authority of authors, what Vaneigem found in the Cabaret Voltaire was a father he could love: “amidst this upheaval,” he said, was the first realization of Lautréamont’s demand for a “poetry made by all.” Putting the pieces together, Vaneigem was living up to his patrimony by increasing it: if Huelsenbeck could get up and declaim his corny Negro poems and make the history books, then anyone could make those books irrelevant. Any spot could be a stage, and any stage could be a real terrain: anyone could make history. This was how much experience had been lost, and how much remained to be discovered: under the paving stones, no one knew what treasure might be found. “May ’68 was an enormous street theatre with the service personnel on strike waiting for it to happen,” Alain Tanner said of
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000,
his 1976 film about people who found themselves in that event and then found themselves cast out of history by its failure. “And much more important than the ‘events’ are the cast-offs, exactly insofar as this theatre brought out hopes and caused hidden desires to flower which have remained on the surface ever since.”

It isn’t hard to demonstrate that a few one-time art students purposefully coded a crude version of all this—a subterranean tradition of chimerical events and manifestos written in invisible ink—into the punk milieu in 1976 and 1977. It is less easy to demonstrate that, as a constellation of hidden desires, the time during which those desires remained hidden, and the magic of rediscovering both the desires and the time, all of this was blindly coded in certain rhythmic shifts and turns of phrase, so that each gesture and accent bespoke the negation of an old world and a reach for a new one—but that is why every good punk record can sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. And that is why the dadaists never got over it: they saw the transformation of the world for a few days in a Zurich bar, and while they glimpsed fragments of that vision for the rest of their lives, they never again saw it whole. “Though people and things stayed the same they took on completely new meanings”: as the dadaists walked the clean streets of Zurich the day after the night before, they saw shoppers taking off their clothes, heard clerks saying blago bung instead of thank you very much, felt alleys rising into fire escapes that leaped over buildings which collapsed under the weight of the people pouring up the stairs. The dadaists sensed the power to
think anything, to say anything, to do anything—but they kept quiet, talking only among themselves, storing up their doubt, their laughter, and their rage for the night to come, when they would pour it all out, when everything would be thought, said, and done.

That was the legend of freedom. Dada was the notion that in the constructed setting of a temporally enclosed space—in this case, a nightclub—anything could be negated. It was the notion that, there, anything might happen, which meant finally that in the world at large, transposed artistically, anything might happen there, too.

It was not art—not exactly. One can look at Janco’s painting
Cabaret Voltaire:
behind the jumping crowd, the frozen dancers on the stage, and the man bent over the piano, the word DADA appears on the wall over the piano player’s head. It appears: it does not seem to have been written, painted, put there. On this wall, the word communicates not as a slogan, or even a talisman, but as an emanation—rising out of some primeval memory, the shout of a forgotten voice. That was culture, in the Cabaret Voltaire.

Arp: “We were given the honorary title of ‘nihilists.’ ” All they shared was the conviction that the world they were asked to accept was false. They were gratified by reviews accusing them of turning the legacy of Western civilization into manure; damned for their barbarism, the next night they tried to see how far they could take it. Legs were ripped off tables; they saw legs ripped off bodies. Glasses were smashed; they saw spectacles smashing, eyes lying on the ground. Blood was spilled; they swam in the river. It was a play, staged in competition with another theater. Ball, 16 June 1916: “The slaughter increases, and [people] cling to the prestige of European glory . . . they cannot persuade us to enjoy this rotting pie of human flesh they present to us . . . One day they will have to admit that we reacted very politely.” In 1918, in Berlin, that would be Huelsenbeck’s argument—his first rebuke to all that had happened in the Cabaret Voltaire, and all that hadn’t.