by Don Hall

The creators of Dadaism found that when language—meant to communicate thoughts and ideals—amounted to the first world war, a chaotic, meaningless conflict during which 22 million were killed and an additional 25 million wounded, language no longer had any pragmatic use. They sought to then destroy meaning via deconstruction, breaking down and rendering words into sounds and repurposing those sounds into art.

It was a brilliant disruption, begging the question of what is and is not art and poetry and what is or is not worthy of consideration in the pantheon of artistic achievement.

In the mid-nineties I was introduced to DADA by Joel Jeske and Joe Janes. I immediately became obsessed with what these ideas could do to the already non-traditional theater we were doing in Chicago at the time. Joel's focus was to create artistic chaos within a rigid framework. Joe's was to utilize the concepts within the structure of a play which we produced in 1996. Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue was exceptional, maddening, and entertaining in that what the fuck am I seeing now? sort of way.

I poured through the various manifestos written by the Dadaists as well as the critical appraisals of their work by critics of their time. DADA became for me less an artform to embrace and more an ingredient to use within linear narratives of meaning. And it was fun in a prankster sort of angle. The audience was our mark and we dictated what occurred within the space of the show. Their reaction, like the sounds of John Cage's 4'33", was the point of the experiment.

In teaching workshops in DADA, I like to use an example I got through one of the texts of the movement.

Say the word "cake." The second you think of the word an image pops in your head. Most English speakers have a common understanding of what cake is but each of us has a different interpretation centered on its execution. For me it might be a slice of German Chocolate cake on a plate. For another it might be a whole Bundt cake with frosting drizzled. Yet another might visualize a thin slice of Red Velvet.

Now say the word "cake" one thousand times in succession. At some point the word loses its meaning in your mind's eye and becomes nothing more than a sound. At that point the sound "cake" becomes the verbal clay with which to build something else. The word has been deconstructed and is now ready for reassignment.

DADA is what DADA does.

It's a trick, like magic, that forces reevaluation of language, both what it means and how we use it. Given that most of us use language as a blunt instrument, it is an especially dangerous trick in the hands of yellow journalism, philosophers, and those seeking to influence the body politic.

When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, twenty of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest in which they argued:

M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

What happens when, unlike Jeske's chaos within a rigid structure or Janes's moments of chaos to weave a different meaning within a play structure, the ideas of DADA are let loose without consideration for a leash to reel it in before the chaos becomes the communication?

Rage and misunderstanding.

Jonathon Haidt (co-author of ‌The Coddling of the American Mind) harkens it to the mythical Tower of Babel. Men built a tower so high that they could reach God so God smote them with hundreds of competing languages so they could not cooperate and thus end the construction of the tower. Haidt believes that the linguistic tricks being played today have rendered us all to speaking in competing languages which prohibits cooperation of purpose. We are a million different people with no common understanding of "cake."

The result? Rage and misunderstanding.

We all acknowledge that words can have great power. If I type "the N-word" you know exactly what word I mean and instantly thought of it which is funny in that the replacement invokes the word silently. Within the boundaries of English speaking societies that word has several different meanings depending on who is using it. This complicates its use. Being thick creatures, we place upon it rigid constraints as to who can and cannot say it out loud. Some say that its power comes from the very restrictions placed upon us; others posit that it is powerful due to its historical use. Either way, no one can deny the anger or fear provoked by the use of two simple syllables.

"Upon this rock I build my church," says the zealot.

Say "racism."

Most of us have a fairly common understanding of the word and its meaning but Ibram X. Kendi defines it as “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.”

Racism is what Racism does. Unfortunately, this circular definition only serves to obfuscate any pragmatic meaning of the term.

What is Communism? “A collection of communist policies that lead to communist inequity that are substantiated by communist ideas.”

What is activism? “A collection of activist policies that lead to activist inequity that are substantiated by activist ideas.”

It's academic gibberish, a language that sounds like commonly understood words but with no genuine meaning. Add the nearly meaningless word "systemic" to it and the trick is playing out. The only way to eradicate "systemic racism" is to destroy the system. What then is "the system"? Because the phrase is effectively useless, we dull idiots apply a rigid binary to make some sort of sense out of the phrase.

Say "woman."
Say "new and improved."
Say "violence."
Say "organic."
Say "freedom."
Say "justice."
Say "pronoun."
Say "segregation."
Say "privilege."

In the five DADA Soireé's I directed in Chicago, a part of my advice to the performers was to have very defined meanings behind their nonsense. Their job was to get an audience to understand that meaning without the use of common language. The result was frustration, anger, and thus the shows always felt antagonistic. Some audience members really hated the 75-minutes. Others loved it. My guess is that if the show were unending, a perpetual Rube Goldberg Machine of angry, unintelligible nonsense, few could stomach it without fighting back. And we wonder why our society cannot function.

Without common understanding, we devolve into bickering morons unable to build a tower let alone a functioning public school system or appropriate restrictions on gun ownership.

Leonard Downie, Jr. in The Washington Post last month wrote a piece that sums up that the concept of "objectivity" in journalism is a waning virtue. The very definition of the word "objectivity" is distorted and mislabeled within the piece. Like "honesty" the word is not so much a practice as it is a goal but in the digitized economic maelstrom journalism has faced in recent years, that goal seems to be a thing of the past. When editors can't even agree on what objectivity is, how can anyone expect its pursuit?

There is no longer a common understanding of what "cake" is. To me, it is a slice of German Chocolate Cake on a plate and, if you see something different, you're my enemy and must be either convinced I'm the arbiter of cake or be destroyed.