Daddy Dada ("Ironic")

Let letters loose! lay language loose like leis

Or line-like lie, yet let 'er lay a loom

That she should weave a word within a haze

Lest we would leave the world within a tomb.

-Ben Adam

A bit of doggerel to kick off today's post. This week we examined the roots of certain digital poetries in Dada. As BP Nicholls has it, Dada would "redefine antagonism as a form of absolute skepticism," this in opposition to Futurism's violent attack on history which yet maintained a surprisingly naive faith in the future. In early forms of Dada, too (such as Hugo Ball's "mystical" "affirmative" "buffoonery"), we find this faith still in operation: Dada would become a kind of stripping away of the artifice of signification to lay bare a field of primitive play. It would take Tristan Tzara to bring Dada's irony to its logical (non-)conclusion.

What Tzara realized is what Paul de Man would later articulate in The Rhetoric of Temporality: irony is an essentially destructive force, a process that, once put in motion, must progress infinitely. De Man will call it "a relationship, within consciousness, between two selves." When the consciousness divides into two selves, the "ironic" one then laughs at the "mystified"/"authentic" one (here he cites Baudelaire on dedoublement).

Is the ironic self, then, demystified? Do we then reach Duchamp's "meta-irony" that "destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative"?

The answer is no, because as soon as one's self claims an affirmative stance, it opens itself up to irony once again. The ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then, the second-level ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then the third-, fourth-, fifth-levels, etc. Go as far down the rabbit hole as you'd like, you'll never reach the end.

Case in point: the stanza I wrote at the beginning of this post, about Joerg Piringer's wir alle, which I attributed to "Ben Adam" (a name meaning "son of man" in Hebrew). To what extent is it genuine? Obviously, a certain amount of effort was put into the puns and alliteration of the first two lines, yet they're definitely overwrought and the last two lines end somewhat lamely. Also, it's written in ABAB rhyme, iambic meter, a form that went out of style somewhere around Swineburne's time.

Then, perhaps, my derogatory comment about it being "doggerel" should be ironized. Do I really mean it? Am I in fact proud of my few quickly written rhymes?

And that last paragraph: are my questions disingenuous? Are they rhetorical? Shouldn't it be ironized, too?

Etc.

How I

now lie.