Dada, or A users' guide to kung fu art survival (Repost)

From Tuesday we know that Dada was a reaction to the belief that rational thought and culture would elevate mankind to some sort of heightened state. The prevalent view at the time (early 19teens) was that technology, powered by logic and driven by science, would complete man as a species via enlightment and truth. To the founders of Dada, these things had instead lead to World War I, effectively lowering mankind's status beneath possible repair. The only response that made sense, therefore, was a complete abandonment of rational processes.

Their beliefs, by-laws, and boasts can be found in several "Dada Manifestos" from various members of the movement. In particular, we focus on one by Tristan Tzara, called shockingly, Dada Manifesto.

The assignment for Thursday is to figure out what they meant by one of the following statements:

---

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardines

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

---

What I want you to do is pick one of these statements (e.g. ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things) and decipher it. I don't want you to draw connection willy and/or nilly like our earlier exercises, but find out what ultraism is, for example, then what they meant by the 7 artistic things and so on.

Make me understand.

Damn you Baudrillard!

As if we had any doubt about House of Leaves, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of "authenticity." A series of documents about a film about a house. Layers one, two and three of Simulacra. This is turning out even better than I thought.

House of Leaves

OK. The book we will attempt to model as a general system is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's a big 'un, so we will need to read like the wind. Like the wind itself.

Mapping

The mapping software we chose turned out to be pretty nice. I hesitate to use the term "mindmapping" as it

1. Indicates that we are somehow tracing a topography of Thought. Since we are not using some ridiculously advanced brain scanning mechanism in the classroom (and unless the students have some fat NSF green they haven't mentioned yet) claiming something like this is ridiculous. The brain is made of meat with lightning inside. None of the class's instruments measure anything like this. What we are doing is recording the iterative processes that occur during our attempts to understand a given system--organizing our thoughts in the order they appear and looking for connections that do not necessarily depend on that order.
   
2. Implies a sort of trademark on what I would just call brainstorming. Evidently brainstorming is what helps kids decide on a science fair project but mindmapping is what marketing directors do to motivate their teams to pursue an operational paradigm-shift that strikes strategic brand equity. If you found yourself making air-quotes during either of the italicized phrases, you see what I mean.

What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.

I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.

The rest of the text.

After running the Billy the Kid piece through the ringer a few times, we extracted some promising patterns about simulacra, biblical imagery, lost pilots and the rugged individualism of the american psyche. Now let's use those patterns as the basis for a set of filters on the rest of the data set, i.e. the full text of Daumier, by Donald Barthelme.

By treating the first excerpt as a representative element of the whole space (text) we can focus tightly on behaviors that we suspect might turn up throughout the data.

Text I want you to map.

We Have All
Misunderstood
Billy the Kid

I was speaking to Amelia.
"Not self-slaughter in the crude sense. Rather the construction of surrogates. Think of it as a transplant."
"Daumier," she said, "you are not making me happy."
"The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self, which is a dirty great villain, as can be testified and sworn to by anyone who has ever been awake."
"The self also dances," she said, "sometimes."
"Yes," I said, "I have noticed that, but one pays dear for the occasional schottische. Now, here is the point about the self: It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full. I need only adduce the names of Alexander, Bonaparte, Messalina, and Billy the Kid."
"You have misunderstood Billy the Kid," she murmured.
"Whereas the surrogate, the construct, is in principle satiable. We design for satiability."
"Have you taken action?" she asked. "Or is all this just the usual?"
"I have one out now," I said, "a Daumier, on the plains and pampas of consciousness, and he is doing very well, I can tell you that He has an important post in a large organization. I get regular reports."
"What type of fellow is he?"
"A good true fellow," I said, "and he knows his limits. He doesn't overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum. Just enough left to make him go. Loved and respected by all."
"Tosh," she said, "Tosh and bosh."
"You will want one," I said, "when you see what they are like."
"We have all misunderstood Billy the Kid," she said in parting.

Donald Barthleme

why don't poets just say what they mean (I)

An important question came up in class today. "Why don't poets just say what they mean."

If an absinthe maddened verse-jockey somewhere wants to tell me that he's upset over his most recent lover's decision to spend the rent money on a collection of needlepoint replicas of scenes from the patriotic body-art documentary "Tattoos of our Founding Fathers," he could just say it. This is often a source of frustration for science students attempting to navigate literature classes. The science student, as an ostensibly logical being, wants information that is direct and free of distortion. In fact, this is an issue for any person with a growing expertise in one field. After working so hard to compile a library of information and skills, we might not be terribly interested in having to adapt it to another, purposefully complex, system.

The poet is more likely to wonder (or probably opine) about the apparent sterility of mathematics and the engineer laments the theorist's ignorance of utility. What I want you guys to recognize is that underlying all these fields is a meaningful foundation: There is information in this system and you can get it.