Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Colophon
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Dada's Radical Negation
- 2 Becoming the Dada Body
- 3 A Disintegrating Culture
- 4 Dadaist Disgust
- 5 Hans Arp
- 6 ‘L'amiral cherche une maison à louer’
- 7 The Rude Product of Luxury
- Conclusion
- Appendix Zurich Dada Chronology
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - ‘L'amiral cherche une maison à louer’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Colophon
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Dada's Radical Negation
- 2 Becoming the Dada Body
- 3 A Disintegrating Culture
- 4 Dadaist Disgust
- 5 Hans Arp
- 6 ‘L'amiral cherche une maison à louer’
- 7 The Rude Product of Luxury
- Conclusion
- Appendix Zurich Dada Chronology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What the language will look like when I have finished I don't know. But having declared war I shall go on jusqu'au bout.
– James Joyce, 1925The collision of the poetic-textual experiments of 1916 and the deliberate application of chance in the generation of new works produced one of the earliest of the Zurich Dada innovations to be formally named. The ‘simultaneous poem’ is the subject of this chapter, subjected to interrogation as a form that establishes means of critical engagement other than oppositionality, via bi- or multilingualism to the minorisation that Deleuze and Guattari first introduced in their 1974 book on Franz Kafka. The scoring and performance of the poem ‘L'amiral cherche une maison à louer’ will here be prioritised to extend beyond tired renditions of linguistic seizure in the proposition of series of linguistic contestation. From accounts of linguistic misrecognition, the potentialities of the Dadaists’ simultaneous poetry will begin to make themselves known; in his work on literary theory, for instance, Jean-Jacques Lecercle has provided commentary on literary minorisation with expansion from Kafka's German/Yiddish/Czech instance to the Scots/Irish/Welsh example of the English language that is reinvigorated by the process of minorisation as the minor variants impact upon it. Lecercle's commentary will duly be presented and developed here, foregrounding the minority deployment of a non-minority language not as the result of the subject's wilful aesthetic choice but rather as the result of an exigency. The existential situation in which the ‘minor’ subject finds him- or herself is crucially not one of possessing an abstract universal in the form of a single national language or cultural identity, with the result that a new economy of production and reception is called into being. This chapter will argue how the negation of established, dominant culture through the process of minorisation politicises minor literature at the point of enunciation, hence the analysis that follows of what is played out in the simultaneous poems themselves. Even if language becomes arid, it retains potentialities and it is Deleuze's charge to make language ‘vibrate with a new intensity’.
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- Information
- Dada 1916 in TheoryPractices of Critical Resistance, pp. 152 - 174Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2014