Dada and Digital Poetics

Nicholls' chapter on Dada, and as with with the other chapters from Modernisms: A Literary Guide, is well-written. One of the things that struck me the most in this chapter was his statement that while "Dada's spirit of negation is generally understood as merely anti-bourgeois polemic, it actually entails a more complex unleashing of violence against the self" (230). On the next page are brief quotes from Hans Arp and Hugo Ball detailing their conceptions of the negation of individualism. As I read this text, I am keen to make connections to our course on digital poetics. Immediately, acknowledging there are probably more, I can name a few commonalities: the play of negating a theoretical conception of the subject, a comment on normative structures of narrativity and meaning, and a passive violence.

I would like to open up the comment on the passivity of the violence in both Dadaism and digital poetics (and I believe this is a comparable critique that Andre Breton made when he commented on "'the intellectual poverty of Dada,' its confinement to a 'vicious circle' of its own making" [Nicholls 242]). The violence in Dada, as Nicholls comments on and to which he quotes Breton, became routine, expected. It became more of a curious side show than a truly critical polemic. The 'violence' against normative structure, the general cultural critique of digital poetics I have thus far experienced has also entered this realm of expected surprise. There is pleasure and charm in the experiencing of the online work (Brian Kim Stefan's work is both lyrical and exquisite); however, claims to be deconstructive acts on normative representation fall short in that these critiques are themselves purely representational critiques: they are images and figures on a screen, playing out particular roles dictated by the limitations of the programming and programmer. One might assert they are castrated rebuttals against castrated systems of normative structure. An "unexpected" violence against normative structure, in my view, would be viral programming, a poetics of hacking and planting computer bugs into systems. A language that would enact/embody destructive capacities in normative systems.

Of course, we must get into a conversation about an ethical poetics in regards to this course of action. In many ways, a violent digital poetics of this nature would be more akin to Artaud's Theater of Cruelty than to Dada: the deconstruction of the distance between audience and performer in the spectacle, the invitation to a realization that may be unwanted, a visceral emotional response, an art as plague. Transcendent? An ethics of violent realization?