Dada! Abba!

Hugo Ball reciting at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 1917.

I’ll begin this post by quting at length an English translation of Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto, written and read aloud in 1916 Zurich, meant to initiate or consolidate the Dada movement — a movement in European art during the First World War:

  “Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means “hobby horse”. In German it means “good-bye”, “Get off my back”, “Be seeing you sometime”. In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right”. And so forth.

…

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimetres long. It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.”

Dada. A sequence of four sounds. The same two sounds repeated twice over. A consonant and a vowel. Dada is a simple repeated alternation between a consonant and a vowel. Dada is meant to ” serve to show how articulated language comes into being”. Indeed, every human child, prior to learning the use of particular syllables in the appropriate situation, passes through the stage of babbling, where all sorts of consonant-vowel sequences are endlessly tested and played with. Babababa, Dadadada, Mamamama, Wawawawa.

The dadaists wanted to escape from the systems of conventional language, systems which force us so make use of particular sounds, syllables, words, and sentences, if we want to make ourselves unterstood, to communicate. They wanted to go back to “the heart of words”, somehow imagining, it seems, that they could truly express the individual self and its feelings by spontaneously combining random consonant and vowel sounds – i.e. by babbling. By making language up on the spot, they wanted to set free the spontaneity of the self, which they felt was always betrayed by the (linguistic) conventions of civilisation (a civilisation which was, to be fair, not proving itself worthy of that much confidence at the time).

Needless to say, wanting to have language without conventions is like wanting to both keep and eat the proverbial cake at the same time. Language is social, it requires that the same sound mean the same thing for two or more people. And the question is whether such a thing as the self, which the dadaists want to express immediately, can exist at all without language and sociality – and conventions.

Michael Kvium: So Simple

But about Dada being the heart of words, the movement may have had a point. The consonant-vowel babbling of babies seems to have prompted eager parents all over the world, all through history, to ascribe approximately the same meaning to these sound-combinations: Mama, Papa, Adda, Baba, Dada, Daddy, Mommy, Mami, Papi, Anna…

Why do the words for mother and father sound similar in so many, and such different, languages? Because they’re based on the first word-like sounds that babies come up with. Are we then wrong in thinking that babies are trying to address their parents, calling them by name, with their babbling? Of course not. The babbling itself, which imitates the language sounds the child hears from the parents, expresses the fact that the child-parent relation forms the child’s entire horizon, its life-world. The child was saying “mother”, “father”, way before consonants entered the picture. And it’s definitely appropriate that children come to know these words way before they master the words “I” or “Me”.

So in this sense, yes, Dada is the heart of words. On this the entire system or chain of words and meanings hinges. The question is, then, whether Dada, the pre-linguistic babbling of the parent-focused infant, may truly serve as a heart of all words. At the seemingly empty centre of language and sociality, where I am truly and terribly alone, because some things just cannot be communicated (or simply because I may, in spite of all efforts, become a social outcast), is there still a primary Word by which I may escape the void of the self? Or am I, as the Dadaists thought in appropriate despair, forced to be only that which I can acceptably communicate to others, with all their expectations, prejudices, moral requirements etc.?

I think this is probably the most important question I know how to ask. In response, for now, I’ll end with another quote:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Paul’s epistle to the Romans, ch. 8, v. 14-15)

In Terra Pax.

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