J. Brandon Pelcher

In 1951, Tristan Tzara looked back upon Dada and its works and attempted to summarize the breadth of their aggression: “Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety.” For Tzara, however, this had a specific goal: to “direct . . . [their] attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (Tzara, “Introduction,” 404). In many ways, Dadaist poetry uniquely embraced and embodied these attacks. To linguistically attack language requires something of an internal sabotage, a subversive performance. This subversion of language, however, does not confine itself as an attack on what language is, but rather comes to include an attack on what language does and how it functions as communication between individuals. Dadaist poetry’s attack on language, then, functions as an attack on those who utilize it. While it, by implication, often took aim at the crescive consumerist capitalism and militant nationalism, along with capitalists and nationalists, the attack would most immediately fall upon the role of language in their creation with those ideologies, and indeed within ideology itself. This article aims to theorize the ways in which Dadaist poetry, as investigations and confrontations with language and ideology, came to function less as a direct confrontation with the ideology of nationalism, militarism, capitalism, or some other, and more as an incisive subversion of the creation of stable ideological subjects, who then functioned as agents of the reproduction and reinforcement of ideology and still more ideological subjects. That is, how does Dadaist poetry function as a subversion of what Louis Althusser called interpellation? There are, of course, no shortage of examples of ideologically imbued Dadaist poetry from which to begin our investigation. Indeed, various ideologies appear in many of the first Dadaist works. Hugo Ball’s introductory note to Cabaret Voltaire, the first Dadaist journal, places the works of the fledgling Dada in relation to the ideologies of militarism and nationalism: “The activity and interests of those involved in the cabaret clearly show that it is aimed at the few independent thinkers whose ideals extend beyond the war and their native lands.” Tzara’s “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” (“The Admiral Searches for a House to Rent”), a simultaneous poem given prominent placement as the first work printed after Ball’s introduction, continues with the imagery of militarist and nationalist ideology. In the three languages of the Great War’s combatants, Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Richard Huelsenbeck belligerently speak, shout, scream, and chant only to coalesce and answer simultaneously the implied question of the title in the final line: “The admiral found nothing.” The admiral returns to his warship, the war continues. Rather than investigating a chronological or conspicuously ideological work in order to theorize Dada’s poetic subversion, however, it may prove helpful to focus nearer the end and closer to the periphery of Dadaist poetry, with a somewhat quieter work engaged less with these or those ideologies than with the constitutive elements of ideology itself. That is, the work of an artist whose involvement with Dadaists afforded insight and whose tangentiality to them encouraged a more critical analysis may show that even in its simplicity, it remains similarly subversive of the smooth operation of ideology: the work of Kurt Schwitters.