He did it first!

Seriously, though, take Schwitters, a Dadaist desperately trying to escape war and Nazis. Can't we see his nonsense syllables as a sort of refusal of the 'chivalric', sequential langauge of war? Dada emerged in 1916, right in the middle of World War 1. Schwitters spent much of the end of his life on ice breakers fleeing to Norway and in internment camps, escaping not just the Nazis but the kind of simple cause and effect logic their language carried to extremes ('Germany was humiliated, now we must prove ourselves. The Jews are in league with international finance against us. Modern art is decadent' etc etc).

It may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to reject logic and sequence per se, saying they lead inevitably to Nazism, and it may be possible to imagine dictators even more terrible than Hitler using meaningless phonemes, uninterested in giving their brutal actions even the gloss of rationality. But I think we can see where, in the dialectic of the 20th century, Dada and Surrealism were coming from -- they were a rejection of the corruptible, exploitable, sequential logic of language, particularly language used as an instrument of persuasion and coercion.

Schwitters was also interested in our underused senses: he claimed to have 27.

Mike, our posts crossed. The book you describe sounds like it makes some of the same points as Benjamin Barber's new one, which talks about replacing the Declaration of Independence with a Declaration of Interdependence.

paradoxical that to expound dada we constantly return to the historically institutionalised founders of dada, instead of just firing off into our own gibberish: quoting schwitters to confound is kind of missing schwitters' *actual* point, no?

also v.tempting to say, if nazis = apogee of logic (which incidentally is a mentalist proposition, as momus well knows) then no wonder all momus's arguments are so full of holes and easily taken to pieces ha!

Just as non-violence is actually violence taken to a different level, so the language of texture is still language. Neither transcends its context, it just sets more ambitious, more ambiguous goals for already-existing forms (how can fighting be simultaneously not-fighting? How can language mean something and not-mean something at the same time?)

I think this is precisely what many find most chilling about the Nazis: they were, in one reading, the culmination of the Enlightenment (with its double whammy of rationalism and colonialism). They were people who listened to Wagner and Beethoven in the morning then gassed their opponents at noon, with horrible efficiency.

Actually, Mark, there is something in what you say about my arguments being full of holes. I prefer to think of them as the holes in the cardboard tubes Shigeru Ban uses to construct his low-cost, low-weight, lifesaving houses. I have developed a style of argument which darts around playfully rather than pursuing some Panzer-line of resolute thought, flying a flag which says Dass muss zein! I try to assemble and disassemble lightweight logical structures more like Japanese screens or temporary exhibitions than the domes of Albert Speer.

There's another thing that we could look at free of the 'He did it first!' mentality, another thing that we should try freeing from time. Copyright. It's self-evident to many creative people that scientific inventions and artistic ideas are often 'in the air'. They belong to no-one, and it's pretty accidental who gets there first. Calling them your property holds up human development.

I quote from the AP wires:

Bush Warns N. Korea Against Any Moves
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush, embarking on a trip to Asia, said today that the dividing zone between North and South Korea is ``one of the most dangerous places on earth.''

This, added to his recent comments about an 'axis of evil', makes Bush's main concern clear: to paint lines at various places around the world, designating people that side evil and this side good. Clearly this 'linesman strategy' is good for arms sales. It is bad for ambiguity, though. It demonstrates all that is worst about human thinking and human language: the arbitrary assignment of simple qualities to a complex world, the implied imperative to choose sides and prepare for a fight. It gives a new meaning to the Bush buzz phrase 'Let's roll!' No longer is 'Let's roll!' what the plucky (gay) passengers said when they went to storm the cabin of the fourth plane on 9/11. Now it means getting down on your knees and rolling the little wheeled paint pot they use on tennis courts, painting stupid white lines at various places in the world.

Let's roll out a few more simplistic binary oppositions. Never have we needed Dada more.

HOPEFULLY BUSH'S ENRON CONNECTION WILL GET HIM IMPEACHED. UNTIL THEN HE WILL MAKE MANY MORE IDIOTIC AND MONEY -ORIENTED MISTAKES. HE WILL PROBABLY NEXT ACCUSE RUSSIA OF BEING EVIL BECAUSE OF THEIR SKATING JUDGES.

That's frustratingly sensical (and cyclical), Mike. Try again.

No, wait, I think I missed the point. Surely Mik e communicating in fully realized and seemily logical sentences is just as much an assault to our sense-bound universe as would be Nitsuh (fr'instance) shouting garbled Dada-isms?

Wouldn't a rejection of the 'vicious cycle of reprisal' firstly entail a rejection of the notion of this thing 'hate', or of hate as the opposite of love? I feel I know what love is, but whatever I've felt can never live up to 'hate'. I don't know what hate is. Some say that the opposite of love is indifference, but I think indifference is orthogonal to love. This thing 'hate' just seems to be dustbin into which we chuck all sorts of feelings we don't want to confront - fear, discomfort, irritation, hormone fluctuations. Does hate really exist? Does love have an opposite? Can it be negated, is it subject to arithmetic, or is it something that is present to the extent that you're aware of it?

I don't get how "love-hate" or "do-don't" are supposed to be ways around the sequential nature of language. Aren't they just very short sequences? Surely you'd need to invent a new word which simultaneously means love/have or do/don't (nb this is not v.relevant to rest of discussion)