Intervention into Cyberspace: Techno-Poetry and Politics

• In Event: The Media Politics of Russian Digital Poetry

Abstract

As Aleksandr Skidan lamented in 2007, "poetry in the age of total communication" to a great extent produces not only texts, but rather visual market objects in a technological environment that serves a synthetic perception of mass media and a regime of immediate temporality, established by the cultural industry. As a matter of fact, in the years 2000-2010, a number of new aesthetic techniques and devices emerged in leftist, politically engaged Russian poetry, which use "medial amplification" (McLuhan) of lyrical texts in order to thwart the new neoliberal cultural conservatism in Russia. They draw on the current boom of video poetry in Russia (and the genre's subsequent institutionalization, for example, in festivals such as "Piataia noga" and new literary prizes), but also on the upswing of techno-poetry inspired by the Internet.
In my presentation, I will look at the recent cyber poetics in Russian poetry and explore how the methods of electronic literature, as they have been developed by theoreticians like Nancy Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Marie-Laure Ryan, in fact stimulated the emergence of a new platform for societal participation and left-wing political dissent. Moreover, I am interested in the recent politicization of particular literary theories, keeping in mind that left-wing poets are often theoreticians themselves and that they, for example, regard the Russian Formalist School as the forerunner of techno-texts. What impacts do the "intervention" in digital spaces and procedures such as "vreading," "wreading," and "treading" have on real political spaces?

Author

• Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)