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Dadaist Codebreaking: The Assault on the Order of Signs

Schaffner, Anna Katharina (2006) Dadaist Codebreaking: The Assault on the Order of Signs. In: Jones, Dafydd, ed. Dada Culture:Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde. Avant-Garde-Critical-Studies (Volume). Editions Rodopi, B.V., Amsterdam; Atlanta, pp. 117-133. ISBN 90-420-1869-0. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:3464)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
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Abstract

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance.

The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture.

Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

Item Type: Book section
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PD Germanic philology and languages
P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Anna Schaffner
Date Deposited: 17 Jun 2008 14:19 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:42 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/3464 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Schaffner, Anna Katharina.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7097-2145
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