Tanya Clement, "Remixing Dada Poetry in MySpace"

Remixing Dada Poetry in MySpace: an electronic edition of poetry by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in n-dimensional space

Described by The Little Review editor Margaret Anderson as “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary,” [1] the Dadaist poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven published, between 1918 and 1929, approximately forty of her poems in little magazines such as The Little Review, transatlantic review, and transition, and the single issue of New York Dada. Yet, since 1929 the Baroness’s work has rarely appeared in print and until the 1980s, scholarship on her work was not published at all. What ultimately denudes the Baroness’s poetry of its meaning-making possibilities is a failure to interrogate the textual conditions in which her poetry was read and appreciated. Within The Little Review culture of the late 1910s and early 1920s, this textual condition included the collaborative audience so important to a Dadaist performance.

This talk introduces a theory of text—textual performance—that is meant to encourage new kinds of access to and thus new readings of the Baroness’s poetry based on the incorporation of an audience. Simply reproducing a textual performance is not the means by which we can access the textual event of a Baroness poem; rather, a digital edition created within a social online network such as MySpace comprises the collaborative audience needed to bring the texts into play. Jerome McGann asserts that all features of the text, whether they be perceptual, semantic, syntactic, or rhetorical signify meaning and not each by itself, but in accordance or discordance with the other. The interplay is “recursive” and appears “topological rather than hierarchic,” such that he likens the poetic field of meaning to “a mobile with a shifting set of poles and hinge points carrying a variety of objects.” [2] This field, occupied by the moving mobile, may be conceived as the fourth dimension in which three dimensional shapes move—a dimension that represents time and space. In other words, the electronic environment constitutes an n-dimensional space in which the Dada performance—the gallery and the cabaret—of a textual event may be played.

An online social network site such as MySpace provides for an example of the ways in which text-based embodiment and real-time performance is already engaged in n-dimensional space. MySpace enacts an element of authenticity that is the result of an interactive and collaborative audience, an element that is also essential to Dada culture. To make text available in such an environment, I have created In Transition: Selected poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which includes multiple, annotated versions of twelve poems by Freytag-Loringhoven [3] encoded in TEI XML and represented in an open-source, JavaScript environment called the Versioning Machine. The next step to providing access to a textual performance of the Baroness’s creative work is incorporating this edition into an n-dimensional space such as that provided by the Baroness’s more than seven hundred “friends” in MySpace [4]. In Transition provides for a selection of texts and a representation of knowledge—a textual performance—of the Baroness’s poetry that has not been staged in quite this way for quite some time. In short, this talk will show that the future of digital scholarly publishing is a remix of the material forms of such mediated communication as it exists today.

1 Anderson, Margaret C. My Thirty Years’ War; the Autobiography: Beginnings and Battles to 1930. New York: Horizon Press, 1970. 177.

2 McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 297.

3 Please see http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/transition/.

4 Please see the Baroness’s page at http://www.myspace.com/dadaqueen.