Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde

Transcription

1 Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde

2 Avant-Gardes in Performance Series Editors Sarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Martin Harries, University of California, Irvine Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication By Arndt Niebisch

3 Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde On the Abuse of Technology and Communication Arndt Niebisch

4 media parasites in the early avant-garde Copyright Arndt Niebisch, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Niebisch, Arndt. Media parasites in the early avant-garde : on the abuse of technology and communication / Arndt Niebisch. pages cm 1. Communication and the arts. 2. Technology and the arts. 3. Arts Experimental methods History 20th century. I. Title. NX180.C65N dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: December

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7 Contents List of Illustrations ix Foreword xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction: An Avant-Garde Parasitology 1 1 The Press and the Parasites 17 2 Poetic Media Effects 45 3 Parasitic Media 81 4 Parasitic Noise Ether Parasites 143 Conclusion: Odradek and the Future of the Parasite 175 Notes 181 Bibliography 215 Index 225

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9 Illustrations 2.1 The poem Karawane from Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Almanach (1920) Front page of Der Dada 1 (1919) OFFEA by Raoul Hausmann (1918), Berlinische Galerie K perioum by Raoul Hausmann (1920), Berlinische Galerie Jump Chronophotograph (1888), College de France Suonatore di violoncello ( ) by A. and A. G. Bragaglia Dada-Rundschau (1919) by Hannah Höch, Berlinische Galerie Der Dadaist Wieland Herzfelde by John Heartfield from Der Dada 3 (1920) Photograph of Russolo and intonarumori from l arte dei rumori (1916) Sveglio di una città score from l arte dei rumori (1916) 118

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11 Foreword Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase death of the avant-garde, interest in experimental, innovative, and politically radical performances continues to animate theatre and performance studies. For all the attacks upon tradition and critical institutions (or perhaps because of them), the historical and subsequent avant-gardes remain critical touchstones for continued research across media and disciplines. We are, it seems, perpetually invested in the new. Avant-Gardes in Performance enables scholarship at the forefront of critical analysis: scholarship that not only illuminates radical performance practices, but also transforms existing critical approaches to those performances. By engaging with the charged phrase avant-garde, the series considers performance practices and events that are formally avant-garde, as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional structures, practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the global aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, including modernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, defined by identification with extreme political movements on the right and left alike. Arndt Niebisch s Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde argues for a renewed understanding of the politics of two of the formative movements in the early historical avant-garde, Futurism and Dada. Niebisch unsettles expectations about form, history, and politics alike by insisting on the importance of media to both of these foundational movements. In this context, Futurism and Dada were irritants in media systems that, by refusing the straightforward circuit of communication, made the underlying mode of those systems visible: the noise of the avant-garde revealed the code underlying all standard communication. As the avant-garde harnessed available media to its own ends, the medium of media, so to speak, became more readily accessible. The importance of Niebisch s argument becomes clear in comparison with what remains one of the foundational texts in the study of the

12 xii F OREWORD avant-garde, Peter Bürger s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Bürger argues that the avant-garde s aim is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life... 1 Further, Bürger claims, the avant-garde attempts to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art (49). Niebisch s emphasis on the avant-garde s engagement with media troubles the divide essential to Bürger s formulation. Bürger s Marxist phrase, praxis of life, might promise a new order of living undamaged by modern alienation. Niebisch s focus on media is, however, also at a fundamental level a focus on mediation. If life is lived through newspapers and gramophones, then the renewal of the praxis of life cannot happen independent of these media. And what life comes before or after them? In Niebisch s account, the avant-garde makes the peculiar nature of the mediated nature of modern life distinctly visible. In his introduction Niebisch stresses the avant-garde s role in what he calls, on the book s first page, a synesthetic reeducation of humankind. Rather than an additional stream in the flows of communication, the force of the avant-garde, here, lies largely in the way it makes the stuff of these codes apparent. The newspaper s need for news, for example, becomes apparent when the avant-garde uses the newspaper as a forum for nonsense that cannot pass as news. Media Parasites presents the avantgarde in a resolutely social light: far from the formations of self-enclosed coteries, Futurism and Dada here are constantly at work on, and at work with, the growingly dominant mass cultural codes of a common culture. His title announces his central figure to describe this relationship between media and the avant-garde: the parasite. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, Niebisch rethinks the parasite as a way to theorize the avant-garde s combination of dependence upon and irritation of mass media loops. Irritation is another of the book s crucial terms: Niebisch never makes inflated claims for avant-garde revolution. Rather than an overturning of the mass media that serve as its hosts, Niebisch s parasitic avant-garde intervenes through education, by marking what might otherwise pass unnoticed. The shock of the new, here, is the shock of an art that makes its audience aware of what it has already taken for granted. Avant-garde irritation makes the force of media newly graspable. Another of the great strengths of this book is that it does not assimilate these two important early avant-garde movements to one another: throughout, Niebisch is careful to stress that while Futurism and Dada worked within roughly similar media environments, their modes of parasitic irritation were distinct. In Chapter 3 s discussion of the different disruptions of poetic language in Futurism and Dada, for instance, he argues that, where Marinetti sought a language resistant to noise, Dada poets wanted to generate noise through poetry. A larger distinction between what one might call Futurism s communicative strategy and

13 F OREWORD xiii Dada s anti-communicative stance is central to the book s understanding of the two movements. Niebisch is also careful not to reduce the disparate members of one or the other movement to a false unanimity of practices: differences inside the movements are as important here as the general projects Futurists or Dadaists had in common. Certain figures emerge here with special force. As the editor of a volume of the technical and scientific writings of Raoul Hausmann, Niebisch is particularly alert to the extraordinary corpus of this fascinating and complex figure. Throughout Media Parasites, however, there are detailed and compelling readings of the work of a wide range of figures from Marinetti to Hugo Ball readings that include verbo-visual materials, photographs, and other forms, as well as somewhat more straightforwardly literary productions. Media Parasites initiates a new series, Avant-Gardes in Performance, by placing the formal innovations of two exemplary early avant-garde movements in relation to the media that made these innovations possible. Skeptical of claims about the revolutionary force of the avant-garde, Media Parasites is nevertheless a book about its political work. If life is lived in part through media, this is a book about the politics of everyday life. Sarah Bay-Cheng and Martin Harries

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15 Acknowledgments A project like this could never have been accomplished without the help of many others. I especially thank David Marshall for his continuous interest and support for this project from its beginning many years ago in Florence. My great gratitude goes to the Berlinische Galerie, especially to Ralf Burmeister and Wolfgang Erler, for giving me access to Hausmann s unpublished technical and scientific writings. William Dodson was an extraordinary help in editing the final version of the manuscript, and everything would not have come together without Julia s support.