Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011
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Biro, Matthew, The Dada Cyborg: visions of the new human in Weimar Berlin, Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 318 pages, Paperback, ISBN 978-0-8166-3620-4, £?
Reviewed by
Aberystwyth University
With the advent of Professor Kevin Warwick’s cyborgian actuality and the dawning age of the posthuman, The Dada Cyborg is a timely and authoritative journey through what is effectively an important aspect of posthuman prehistory and theory. Biro successfully navigates the complexities of the Berlin avant-garde’s reaction to the mechanized trauma of the First World War through a rigorous examination of Berlin Dada and their multifaceted creative outputs. This book is a detailed history of the formation of the Berlin Dada group and their work whilst stressing the significance of “human and technological interface.” (p.31) For example, in an appraisal of the photomontage work of Hannah Hoch, Biro suggests that the work demonstrates that, “human identity is a product of the interaction between subjective and objective elements, aspects of the personality both private and unique as well as general or intersubjective.” (p.67) In Biro’s discussion of Hoch’s photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, the central image of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, is interpreted as being a monstrous cyborg. The work embodies the advances of science and knowledge with a contrary collection of political and artistic cutouts pasted like growths onto his body along with machine parts and textual exclamations – thus a visual embodiment of the chaos of the Weimar period in Germany.
Biros’s text proposes that the Dada movement recognised and attempted to understand the cultural shifts of the era using the cyborgian trope. He argues that the image of the cyborg represented the increasing complexity of life and the tumultuous effects on the individual. He explores select facets of the movement in a series of chapters that clearly demarcate the subject scope and which effectively present his argument for the centrality and significance of the image of the cyborg. Beginning with a discussion on what constitutes the cyborg and its link with emergent understandings of human identity, he goes on to argue that there was amongst the Berlin Dadaists a growing understanding that notions of race and gender for example, were unimportant in the coming ‘new man’; that there was an acknowledgment of a much broader inextricable connectivity between not only humankind and nature in general, but also the products of humanity such as machines and groundbreaking science. Subsequent chapters explore specific aspects of the movement’s output to further validate the significance of the central concept of the cyborg to the Dada movement. Under chapter headings such as ‘The Militarized Cyborg’ and ‘The New Woman as Cyborg’, Biro forcefully and convincingly constructs this argument. As evidenced by his comprehensive notes, Biro draws upon an impressive range of sources (both primary and secondary, contemporary and historical) to advance his hypothesis. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of the shifting sands of theory, Biro demonstrates a clear and consistent theoretical interpretation of the movement that is both fresh and persuasive.
This book deals not only with art history but much more broadly the development of a cultural hypothesis that attempted to envisage the emergence of a hybridized human resulting from, amongst other things, the speed and confusion of mass media, mechanization, urbanisation, the environment and, ultimately, the loss of individual identity in modern life. Although the focus is on the notion of the cyborg (asserting the significance of this neglected aspect of the Dada output), and how one small group of German intellectuals attempted to negotiate and understand their era, this book has a strong interdisciplinary appeal that is as relevant to the sciences as it is to the humanities. Biro’s book is an authoritative and compelling read and a significant contribution to understanding the emergence of the Dada movement and its products, as well as the image (and actuality) of the posthuman cyborg.