Zürich, Switzerland
June 23, 1916
A thin and severe man in his early thirties stands on the stage before the crowded bar. He is wrapped in brightly colored cardboard, wearing a tall, striped, wizard's hat. His hands are lobster claws. Three music stands arrayed about him support his "score." As the crowd grows quiet, he begins. He intones nonsense words into the darkness. His voice modulates, taking on the affective mantle of a "magical bishop," his cadence growing in intensity and conviction. He panics as he feels the performance surrounding him, filling him, possessing him. It builds, and builds, taking on the rhythm and tone of a requiem. He cannot stop . . . he can only finish. When he is finally silent, he stands unable to move, trembling and sweating in shock, until he is finally carried from the stage.
The man is Hugo Ball. The bar: the Cabaret Voltaire.
For Hugo Ball, dada was a reaction to the rational-technological "progress" that propelled Europe's descent into world wide war. Dada, according to Ball, was an artistic-political protest that wanted nothing less than the destruction of the "language of journalism": the tongue of rationality that had driven the world to madness. For a few short months in 1916, Ball coordinated the whirling chaos of the Cabaret Voltaire--a nightclub entertaining the disaffected european intellectuals that had gathered in Zürich--and served as the spiritual and intellectual core of the nascent dada movement--a movement Ball never wanted.
Despite Ball's objections, dada would spread far beyond Zürich, becoming a world art movement with tremendous resonance throughout the 20th century. But for Ball, dada had reached its singular peak on a summer night in 1916. Ball's lautgedicht, or "sound-poems," were the culmination of his attempt to conjure a magical anti-language, to recapture the spiritual overflow that the language of reason was unable to contain. Ball's verse ohne worte attempted to create a transcendental language: a secret code--like Biblical glossolalia--that could contain spiritual truths. He sought a mystical flight out of time to escape the world of rationality. Ball's performance took him to the edge of sanity, and when he looked into the abyss, it was not what he expected. Saint Hugo blinked, recoiled, and was unable to carry on.
Ball would retreat from the radical experiments of dada as an 'ism. He returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, but with a decidedly mystic orientation. Ball, however, never forgot, or denied, the singular event of June 23, 1916.
Looking back, nearly a century later, how can we make sense of Ball's bizarre performance at the Cabaret Voltaire. What did Hugo see, peering into the abyss, sweating beneath his cardboard mantle? Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternate perspective from which we can examine Ball's process of creation. Rather than viewing his efforts as an attempt to create a language of transcendence, we can view Ball's efforts as working to embody language. His verse ohne worte emerge from the body--pure immanence. His non-sense sounds, intoned into darkness, can be conceptualized as analog poetry of pure affect, celebrating-exploring what Barthes would call the "grain of the voice." Ball's resistance to the language of journalism and rationality provides a model for us to resist the digital reduction of language, and consciousness, to information.
The contemporary prophets of the Singularity attempt to predict the future-event horizon, beyond which we can no longer recognize "human" life. The exponential rate of increase in machinic intelligence is progressing technology beyond the realm of human comprehension. Again, language has become a central nodal technology, a strange attractor, about which varied forces are arrayed, deployed, and induced. Reductionists attempt to capture human language, and through it human consciousness, in a digital code. But what happens if we code our machines to think for us, solely through pure, digital, "information"--through 1s and 0s? Contemporary cybertheorists and visionaries are contemplating how we can re-produce affect in the space between the binary code. Like Saint Hugo, we need to risk our sanity by gazing into the abyss, but unlike Ball, we need to be prepared to cast our consciousness down into the singular: the fractal-affective abyss of the body.
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