Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde by Kurt Beals (review)

Kurt Beals has a knack for miscommunicating. But make no mistake, Beals does not lack the ability to communicate well. Rather, miscommunicating in this instance is born of technologies of communication—their successes as well as their failures. And Beals deftly explores and celebrates this miscommunication in his Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde, eloquently showing in this study of crossed conversations, information relays, and mixed messaging, that the reduction of communication to information as part of modernity's technological armature also gave rise to miscommunication—to the opportunity to use miscommunication as a critical practice. Miscommunication is an opportunity, Beals telegraphically argues, that Dada explored with aplomb.

Wireless Dada examines the ways in which the electric telegraph, which replaced the optical telegraph in the mid-1800s, gave way by the nineteenth-century fin de siecle, to a "fundamentally new paradigm for understanding language" (7). This change did not result in a reductive embrace of modern technology for avant-garde artists. Rather, and this is a key and important aspect of Beals's argument, the midcentury eruption of telegraphy gave rise decades later—some seventy years later, in the case of the birth of Dada in 1916—to a "telegraphic transformation of society" (21). Beals shows how spiritualism and Gustav W. Gessman's "psychographic communication" also relay with the sonic and semantic reverberations of this new telegraphic paradigm.

Wireless Dada does several important things with respect to studies of the avant-garde—important things, in addition to making clear and clever connections to telegraphy's impact on social practices in general and artistic practices in particular. First, Wireless Dada contributes to the expanding scholarship—something of a return, as it were—to more materialist histories of the avant-garde. Several figures are noted in Beals's study to these ends, but these references themselves also serve as exemplars for other figures who also abstract avant-garde practice too far afield from material circumstances. In showing how certain elements of Dada poetry are informed by the telegraphic transformation of society, Beals also clearly shows that material history matters, that material circumstances are fundamental to understanding the avant-garde in general and Dada in particular. Neither theoretical ideas about a supposed failed avant-garde nor psychoanalytic proclamations concerning the effects of war and trauma can explain by themselves Dada's initial emergence, its myriad forms, and its vibrant afterlives.

Second, Wireless Dada is, at heart, a dialectical project. Subjectivity and, perhaps more specifically, subjective agency are not lost, never resigned in the face of new (communication) technologies. Criticizing such "deterministic positions sometimes advanced by media theorists" (23), Beals makes clear that "even as new media give rise to new models of subjectivity, the significant of these new media are determined at least in part by the way that they are subjectively experienced" (25). It is clear here and elsewhere in the study that the transformation of subjectivity generated by new media has broad, very contemporary implications. To these ends, Wireless Dada is not exclusively a historical study; it is also a guidebook for how we might critically engage new media forms today.

Third, Wireless Dada—specifically its chapter focusing on Hugo Ball's performance of "Karawane" as well as the Dadaist's other sound poems—makes clear that Dada's relationship to the discourse of primitivism and, relatedly, to European colonialism, deserves reconsideration. The chapter "Wireless Waves: Channeling 'Karawane'" is a fascinating examination of the ways in which the German (and European) effort to use telegraphs in service of colonial efforts at "homogenization and universal legibility" (108) were critical targets of Dada. Ball's "Karawane" performance as well as his other poetic pieces demonstrate the (inconsistent) efforts of Dadaists like Ball to mock the German (and European) fascination with primitivism and to subvert the related colonialist hierarchies as well.

Finally, Wireless Dada also contributes to an important, mostly recent body of work...