Han and Dada: Early Expressions of New Affliction
Abstract
This thesis studies affliction as it appears in the proto-avant-garde art movement of Dada. I analyse affliction through the theoretical frameworks of the ‘neuronal’ and ‘immunological,’ as presented by cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society. By applying Han’s theories to Dada, I challenge Han’s argument that our affliction underwent a shift at the end of the Cold War: No longer produced by negativity (the immunological), affliction is now produced by excess positivity (the neuronal). Such excess blocks our access to and erodes the existence of ‘somewhere else,’ causing a crisis in the arts, which I argue should be attributed to neuronal affliction and traced back to Dada. Their response to World War I, both in content to some extent but particularly in method, during a period of globalization, alliances and rapidly changing technology and beliefs displays many features of neuronal affliction. Hence, the refusal, nihilism and negativity Dada has so often been characterized by in the past are misunderstandings of its inventive and playfully excessive methodologies. The aforementioned thesis is explored through the ‘bacteriological’ in Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918,” the collage’s hybrid nature and the power of tiredness in Max Ernst’s Murdering Airplane (1920), and the positivity of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘possiblism,’ as it appears in his readymade artwork, Fountain.