Dada's Subject and Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly

ISBN-13: 9783031266096 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 248 str.

Brandon Pelcher

Opis

Dada’s Subject and Structure argues that Dadaist praxis was far more theoretically incisive than previous scholarship has indicated. The book combines theoretical frameworks surrounding ideological subject formation with critical media and genre histories in order to more closely read Dadaist techniques (e.g. montage, irony, nonsense, etc.) across multiple works. These readings reveal both Dada’s preternatural focus on the discursive aspects of subject formation—linguistic sign, literary manifesto, photographic image, commodity form/aesthetics, which comprise the project’s chapters—and on Dada’s performative sabotage and subversion of them. In addition to highlighting commonalities between Dadaist works, artists, and chapters previously imagined disparate, the book shows how Dada simultaneously prefigured structuralist theories of subject formation and pre-performed post-structuralist critiques of those theories.

Spis treści

Introduction: Taking Dada and Ideology Seriously

Under the Banner of Dada

Ideology: More than Mere Ideas

Forming Subjects in/under Ideology

Less What Dada Is Than What It Does

Organizing Dada

 

Chapter 1. “A Constant Problem and Preoccupation”: Dada and/as Sign

Ideology and Simple Impassivity

i, i, I, and /i/

Fraktur-Antiqua, Kurrent-Sütterlin

From /i/ to i

i = dada

The Word dada

dada = /i/

Hey, Dadaist Over There!

 

Chapter 2. “A Spectre is Haunting Dada”: Dada and/as Manifesto

Manifesting Theatrical Authority

Founding and Manifesting the Future

Dada’s First Engagements with Founding Itself

Dramatis Personae: Antipyrine, Aa, “Tristan Tzara,” Tristan Tzara, Samuel Rostock

From Theatricality to Performativity, Playing to Wanting

“The unconquerable power of irony!”

The Most “Dada Manifesto 1918”

 

Chapter 3. “We Need Only Take Scissors”: Dada and/as Photographic Image

Self-Generated, Indexicality

Photographic Images, Mass Produced

Illustrated Media, Illustrated War, Illustrated Politics

Photographic Images, Montaged

Dressing Down the Bourgeois Political Subject

From Subject to Society to Subject(s)

Höch’s Magnum Opera

Dada Rundschau

Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser

                       

Chapter 4. “So Its Useful Significance Disappeared”: Dada and/as Commodity

Taylor and Ford

The Commodity Form

Commodity Aesthetics

Choice at the Shop Window

Inscription

Commodity Speech

Dada Market(s) and Journals

Advertisement and/as Commodity

 

Conclusion

This is a Sign is a Manifesto is a Photo is a Commodity

This is Dadaist Praxis

O autorze

J. Brandon Pelcher is Lecturer of German at Tufts University in Boston (USA). 

Blurb

Dada’s Subject and Structure argues that Dadaist praxis was far more theoretically incisive than previous scholarship has indicated. The book combines theoretical frameworks surrounding ideological subject formation with critical media and genre histories in order to more closely read Dadaist techniques (e.g. montage, irony, nonsense, etc.) across multiple works. These readings reveal both Dada’s preternatural focus on the discursive aspects of subject formation—linguistic sign, literary manifesto, photographic image, commodity form/aesthetics, which comprise the project’s chapters—and on Dada’s performative sabotage and subversion of them. In addition to highlighting commonalities between Dadaist works, artists, and chapters previously imagined disparate, the book shows how Dada simultaneously prefigured structuralist theories of subject formation and pre-performed post-structuralist critiques of those theories. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in literary theory, philosophy, and art history.