Journal of Psychiatry

Dada, War and Psychiatry – ‘Active dynamics of trauma’

Euro Global Summit and Medicare Expo on Psychiatry

July 20-22, 2015 Barcelona, Spain

Gabriele Dietze

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

The lecture relates stage performances of dada artists to war neurosis and shell shock as sociocultural phenomena. The leitmotif of this investigation is the notion of simulation, as dada artists were referred to as malingerers (simulators) of madness by the press at the time. I hypothesize that the performers imitate/simulate with drums, shouting and ?bruitist? sound poems, the noises of war, staging themselves as war neurotics in a kind of shocking clinical demonstration. Both discourses intersect in the fact that many dadaists try to dodge the draft by simulating madness. The scandalizing anti-art of dada will be understood as contagious anti-pedagogy, trying to vaccinate against the madness of the era.

Biography :

Gabriele Dietze is a professor at the Department of European Ethnology Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. She did her fellowship in the DFG Research Unit ?cultures of madness? during summer of 2009 and in 2012 she participated in a part-project ?Affective masculinities?. She has studied German, philosophy, political science in Frankfurt (Main) and American studies and Cultural Studies at the Free University Berlin. She completed her PhD at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, FU (?Hard-Boiled Women Sex Wars in American Mystery Novels?); 2004 Habilitation at the Humboldt University Berlin (?justice negotiate. Competition of Race and Gender in US American emancipation discourse?). She was among others Harris Professor of Gender Studies at Dartmouth; Visiting Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, NYU and Columbia University; Robert Bosch Guest Professor at the University of Chicago; Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at the HU and Aigner-Rollett guest professor of gender studies and cultural studies at the University of Graz.