Reading The Dada Cyborg

I am loving this book to pieces, partly because it deals so well with Hannah Hoch, a terrific Dada artist. It is giving me good ideas about how to negotiate between the early cyborg meanings in Norbert Wiener's style of cybernetics, and later more "pomo" meanings in the work of Donna Haraway and others. I'm also interested in ways the cyborg can allow artists and activists to begin intervening to challenge reactionary and militarist political trends. Weimar feels so often like a too-contradictory republic/Statist cyborg, one that "resolved" into fascism. And the United States post Reagan feels that way as well.

For now I want to simply post Matthew Biro's answer to the question, "In a nutshell, what is the Dada cyborg?"

The Dada cyborg is a motif or image type that I kept identifying in Dada art and, in particular, the work of the Berlin Dada artists. As I investigated Dada cyborgs and, simultaneously, the concept of the cyborg as it was developed in cybernetics and cultural theory after World War II, I came to the conclusion that the cyborg frequently appeared in Berlin Dada art because it could represent a new conception of hybrid or “networked” identity. By analyzing various appearances of the Dada cyborg between 1919 and the early 1930s, my book thus traces an emerging pattern of cultural activity that links Dada art with the rise of mass media as well as the (roughly) contemporaneous cultural theory of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, and others. It is a concept of identity that appears across multiple media and shows us the roots of our own media- and conflict-saturated consciousnesses today.

http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/01/dada-cyborg.html

Hannah Hoch's photomontages are amazing. Here is one form 1919-20 that Biro discussed in great detail, analyzing (among other things) the human/machine hybrids of the Kaiser and of her lover, the Dada artist Raoul Haussman. It is called "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany."