From Dada to Digital: Experimental Poetry in the Media Age by Kurt Andrew Beals A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Anton Kaes, Chair Professor Niklaus Largier Professor Elaine Tennant Professor Robert Kaufman Spring 2013 From Dada to Digital: Experimental Poetry in the Media Age ©2013 by Kurt Andrew Beals Abstract From Dada to Digital: Experimental Poetry in the Media Age by Kurt Andrew Beals Doctor of Philosophy in German Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Anton Kaes, Chair At least since Mallarmé, if not before, poets in the Western tradition have responded to changes in media technologies by reflecting on their own relationship to language, and by reassessing the limits and possibilities of poetry. In the German- speaking world, this tendency has been pronounced in a number of experimental movements: Dada, particularly in Zurich and Berlin between 1916 and 1921; Concrete poetry, especially its Swiss and German variants in the 1950s and ’60s; and finally, digital or electronic poetry, a genre that is still developing all around the world, but has roots in Germany dating back to the late 1950s. For each of these movements, the increasing dominance of new media technologies contributes to an understanding of language as something material, quantifiable, and external to its human users, and casts doubt on the function of language as a means of subjective expression, particularly in the context of poetry. However, this poetic engagement with a materialized, quantified language does not only pose a challenge to older conceptions of the lyric subject; rather, a new sort of subjectivity may emerge through the interaction of human authors and technological media. Thus by engaging with new media technologies, the experimental movements considered here have raised fundamental questions about the nature of subjectivity in a media-dominated age. This argument is developed here in the form of critical surveys of all three movements, together with case studies of works that have received relatively little scholarly attention to date. The introduction to the Dadaists’ media poetics in Chapter One is followed, in Chapter Two, by a closer look at how print media and advertising fit into the Berlin Dadaists’ political program, focusing on the collaboration between George Grosz and John Heartfield in the June 1917 issue of Neue Jugend. Following the survey of Concrete poetry in Chapter Three, Chapter Four focuses on the role of information theory in the works of Max Bense, particularly in his 1963 book Vielleicht zunächst wirklich nur: Monolog der Terry Jo im Mercey Hospital, as well as the 1968 radio-play adaptation, Der Monolog der Terry Jo. The final chapter pursues this trajectory further, tracing the development of digital poetry in the German-speaking world from its earliest experimental phase in 1959 up to the present day. 1 Acknowledgements In writing this dissertation, I have benefited greatly both from the financial support of institutional sponsors and from the personal support and encouragement of my professors, friends, and colleagues. My research was supported by a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which allowed me to spend the 2011-12 academic year in Berlin, and by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year, which enabled me to complete my research on schedule. I am grateful to those two institutions for their financial support. I have also benefited from the support and feedback of my advisor, Tony Kaes, and the other members of my dissertation committee, Elaine Tennant, Rob Kaufman, and Niklaus Largier, who have offered insight and encouragement throughout my time at Berkeley, and particularly in the development of this project. My years at Berkeley were enriched by friendships both within my department – with Paul, Ashwin, Emina, and Kevin in my first-year cohort, Sabrina and Robin from Oberlin, and many others – and beyond. I am grateful to my parents, who have offered continuous encouragement as I moved around two continents and gradually approached the start of a real career, and to Rhiannon, who now knows as much about German experimental poetry as I do about the bodies of the Hebrew prophets. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my grandfather, Paul K. Whitaker, whose study of German literature first gave me the idea that such a thing was possible. i Contents Introduction 1 Changing the Subject: The Lyric “I” in the Age of Modern Media Chapter One 11 Dada: The Poetics of Advertising and Mass Media Chapter Two: Case Study 44 Text and the City: George Grosz, Neue Jugend, and the Political Power of Popular Media Chapter Three 57 From Dada to Concrete: Poetry in the Information Age Chapter Four: Case Study 85 Statistics and Subjectivity: Max Bense, Terry Jo, and the Aesthetics of Information Chapter Five 99 “Denken die neuen Dichter? Schon möglich”: Re-Thinking the Subject in Digital Poetry Conclusions 131 Re-Mediating Experimental Poetry Illustrations 133 Notes 174 Works Cited 200 ii Introduction Changing the Subject: The Lyric “I” in the Age of Modern Media At least since Mallarmé, if not before, poets in the Western tradition have responded to changes in media technologies by reflecting on their own relationship to language, and by reassessing the limits and possibilities of poetry. In the German- speaking world, this tendency has been pronounced in a number of experimental movements: Dada, particularly in Zurich and Berlin between 1916 and 1921; Concrete poetry, especially its Swiss and German variants in the 1950s and ’60s; and finally, digital or electronic poetry, a genre that is still developing all around the world, but has roots in Germany dating back to the late 1950s. For each of these movements, the increasing dominance of new media technologies contributes to an understanding of language as something material, quantifiable, and external to its human users, and casts doubt on the function of language as a means of subjective expression, particularly in the context of poetry.1 However, this poetic engagement with a materialized, quantified language does not only pose a challenge to older conceptions of the lyric subject; rather, a new sort of subjectivity may emerge through the interaction of human authors and technological media. Poetry’s importance as a locus of reflection on new media technologies was addressed nearly sixty years ago by Marshall McLuhan. In his 1954 essay “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,” McLuhan wrote that “real understanding of the changes in modern communication” had come “mainly from the resourceful technicians among modern poets and painters.”2 McLuhan’s emphasis in this essay, as in much of his work, is on the far-reaching effects that the dominance of one medium rather than another can have on human life. Here the distinction is between the reading practices associated with the printed book and those tied to the popular press. If the printed book had given rise to practices of silent reading and the association of language with interiority — preparing the ground for the lyric subject, the “I” of Romantic poetry — the popular press, in McLuhan’s view, overturned this paradigm, and poets such as Mallarmé soon drew the consequences: But it was Mallarmé who formulated the lessons of the press as a guide for the new impersonal poetry of suggestion and implication. He saw that the scale of modern reportage and of the mechanical multiplication of messages made personal rhetoric impossible. Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things.3 McLuhan’s description of this new poetry as “impersonal,” his argument that the poet’s task was “not self-expression,” is indicative of the dramatic shift that occurs when poets engage explicitly with new media technologies. This shift applies first and foremost to the status of language: rather than being seen as a transparent medium for the expression of internal states, language is treated as a physical (or virtual) material already present in the outside world. But the reconception of 1 language as a fundamentally external phenomenon requires a rethinking of subjectivity as well, because the lyric subject cannot be separated from this defining act of linguistic expression. Thus by engaging with new media technologies, the experimental movements considered here — Dada, Concrete poetry, and digital poetry — have raised fundamental questions about the nature of subjectivity in a media-dominated age. The Ins and Outs of Lyric Poetry The model of the lyric subject invoked here is firmly rooted in the German aesthetic tradition. In the nineteenth century, G.W.F. Hegel defined lyric poetry in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhethik as a genre intrinsically linked to subjectivity, writing: “Indem es endlich im Lyrischen das Subjekt ist, das sich ausdrückt, so kann demselben hierfür zunächst der an sich geringfügigste Inhalt genügen. […] so bildet hier das Individuum in seinem inneren Vorstellen und Empfinden den Mittelpunkt.”4 Hegel here constructs an image of an autonomous, self-contained lyric subject whose work issues forth from an internal source: “die innere Subjektivität” is “der eigentliche Quell der Lyrik.”5 Although Hegel allows that the subject matter of lyric poetry may have its origins in the outside world, he holds that the poet must internalize this subject matter and transform it before pouring it out again — the poetic act is frequently denoted in this passage by the term Erguß.