Dada Manifesto by Tristan Tzara, March 23 1918

The magic of a word - DADA - which for journalists has opened the door to an
unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance.

To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, &
3,

work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper
case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is
absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that
novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot
proves the essence of God. His existence had already been proved by the
accordion, the landscape and soft words. * To impose one's A.B.C. is only
natural - and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a
crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a
naked leg being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring. The love of
novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it's evidence of a naive don't-give-a-damn
attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is
out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity - novelty - we
are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and
vibrant in order to crucify boredom. At the lighted crossroads, alert,
attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest. * I am writing a manifesto
and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle
I am against manifestos, as I am against principles (quantifying measures of the
moral value of every phrase - too easy; approximation was invested by the
impressionists). *

I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the
same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual
contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I
won't explain myself because I hate common sense.

DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every
bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who,
instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence,
like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to
whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a
talking and self-defining story. *

Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his
padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be
manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.

To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.

image of a hand pointing to the right DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING

If we consider it futile, and if we don't waste our time over a word that
doesn't mean anything... The first thought that comes to these minds is of a
bacteriological order: at least to discover its etymological, historical or
psychological meaning. We read in the papers that the negroes of the Kroo race
call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. A cube, and a mother, in a certain region
of Italy, are called: DADA. The word for a hobby horse, a children's nurse, a
double affirmative in Russian and Romanian, is also: DADA. Some learned
journalists see it as an art for babies, other
Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim saints see it as a return to an unemotional
and noisy primitivism - noise and monotonous. A sensitivity cannot be built on
the basis of a word; every sort of construction converges into a boring sort of
perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp, a relative human product. A work
of art shouldn't be beauty per se, because it is dead; neither gay nor sad,
neither light nor dark; it is to rejoice or maltreat individualities to serve
them up the cakes of sainted haloes or the sweat of a meandering chase through
the atmosphere. A work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for
everyone. Criticism is, therefore, useless; it only exists subjectively, for
every individual, and without the slightest general characteristic. Do people
imagine they have found the psychic basis common to all humanity? The attempt of
Jesus, and the Bible, conceal, under their ample, benevolent wings: shit,
animals and days. How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that
infinite, formless variation: man? The principle: "Love thy neighbour" is
hypocrisy. "Know thyself" is utopian, but more acceptable because it includes
malice. No pity. After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified
humanity. I always speak about myself because I don't want to convince, and I
have no right to drag others in my wake, I'm not compelling anyone to follow me,
because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he knows anything about the
joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral strata, or that which descends
into the mines stewn with the flowers of corpses and fertile spasms.
Stalactites: look everywhere for them, in creches magnified by pain, eyes as
white as angels' hares. Thus DADA was born* , out of a need for independence,
out of mistrust for the community. People who join us keep their freedom. We
don't accept any theories. We've had enough of the cubist and futurist
academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Do we make art in order to earn money
and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? Rhymes have the smack of money, and
inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile. Every group of
artists has ended up at this bank, straddling various comets. Leaving the door
open to the possibility of wallowing in comfort and food.

Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.

Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the
trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the
trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance
of vertiginous

a line image of a squiggle consisting of overlapping curves and zigazags

vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our
blood is strength.

Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne painted a
cup twenty centimetres lower than his eyes, the cubists look at it from above,
others complicate it appearance by cutting a vertical section through it and
soberly placing it to one side (I'm not forgetting the creators, nor the seminal
reasons of unformed matter that they rendered definitive). * The futurist sees
the same cup in movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously
embellished by a few guide-lines. This doesn't stop the canvas being either a
good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual capital.
The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means, a sober,
definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer paints
(symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood,
iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all
directions by the limpid wind of the momentary sensation. * Every pictorial or
plastic work is unnecessary , even if it is a monster which terrifies servile
minds, and not a sickly-sweet object to adorn the refectories of animals in
human garb, those illustrations of the sad fable of humanity. - A painting is
the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed to be
parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that has
been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is
neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable
variations, to the spectator. For its creator it has neither case nor theory.
Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation - negation: the supreme radiations
of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos,
eternal in that globule that is a second which has no duration, no breath, no
light and no control. * I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only
contrast that links us to the past. * Writers who like to moralise and discuss
or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a
ridiculous knowledge of life, which they may have classified, parcelled out,
canalised; they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time.
Their readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?

There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The
work of creative writers, written out of the author's real necessity, and for
his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become
significant. * Every page should explode, either because of its profound
gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its staggering
absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. On the one hand
there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the
infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping,
riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary
medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.

I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't
sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and
prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and
decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning, and to replace tears by
sirens spreading from one continent to another. Clarions of intense joy, bereft
of that poisonous sadness. * DADA is the mark of abstraction; publicity and
business are also poetic elements.

I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation: to sow
demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven's hand into hell, hell's eyes into
heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of
reality, and the fantasy of every individual.

A philosophical questions: from which angle to start looking at life, god,
ideas, or anything else. Everything we look at is false. I don't think the
relative result is any more important than the choice of patisserie or cherries
for dessert. The way people have of looking hurriedly at things from the
opposite point of view, so as to impose their opinions indirectly, is called
dialectic, in other words, heads I win and tails you lose, dressed up to look
scholarly.

If I shout:

Ideal, Ideal, Ideal

Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge

Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom

I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other
magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so
many books in order, finally, to say that even so everyone has danced according
to his own personal boomboom, and that he's right about his boomboom: the
satisfaction of unhealthy curiosity; private bell-ringing for inexplicable
needs; bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions on to life;
the authority of the mystical baton formulated as the grand finale of a phantom
orchestra with mute bows, lubricated by philtres with a basis of animal ammonia.
With the blue monocle of an angel they have dug out its interior for twenty sous
worth of unanimous gratitude. * If all of them are right, and if all pills are
only Pink, let's try for once not to be right. * People think they can explain
rationally, by means of thought, what they write. But it's very relative.
Thought is a fine thing for philosophy, but it's relative. Psychoanalysis is a
dangerous disease, it deadens man's anti-real inclinations and systematises the
bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. Dialectics is an amusing machine that
leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any
case. Do people really think that, by the meticulous subtlety of logic, they
have demonstrated the truth and established the accuracy of their opinions? Even
if logic were confined by the senses it would still be an organic disease. To
this element, philosophers like to add: The power of observation. But this
magnificent quality of the mind is precisely the proof of its impotence. People
observe, they look at things from one or several points of view, they choose
them from amongst the millions that exist. Experience too is the result of
chance and of individual abilities. * Science revolts me when it becomes a
speculative system and loses its utilitarian character - which is so useless -
but is at least individual. I hate slimy objectivity, and harmony, the science
that considers that everything is always in order. Carry on, children, humanity
... Science says that we are nature's servants: everything is in order, make
both love and war. Carry on, children, humanity, nice kind bourgeois and virgin
journalists... * I am against systems; the most acceptable system is that of
have none on no principle. * To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's
own pettiness to the point of filling the little vase of oneself with oneself,
even the courage to fight for and against thought, all this can suddenly
infernally propel us into the mystery of daily bread and the lilies of the
economic field.

DADAIST SPONTANEITY

What I call the I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone minds his
own business, at the same time as he knows how to respect other individualities,
and even how to stand up for himself, the two-step becoming a national anthem, a
junk shop, the wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach fugues,
illuminated advertisements for placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting
carnations for God, all this at the same time, and in real terms, replacing
photography and unilateral catechism.

Active simplicity.

The incapacity to distinguish between degrees of light: licking the twilight and
floating in the huge mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured against the
scale of Eternity, every action is vain - (if we allow thought to have an
adventure whose result would be infinitely grotesque - an important factor in
the awareness of human incapacity). But if life is a bad joke, with neither goal
nor initial accouchement, and because we believe we ought, like clean
chrysanthemums, to make the best of a bad bargain, we have declared that the
only basis of understanding is: art. It hasn't the importance that we, old hands
at the spiritual, have been lavishing on it for centuries. Art does nobody any
harm, and those who are capable of taking an interest in it will not only
receive caresses, but also a marvellous chance to people the country of their
conversation. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a
comprehensible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment I
enjoy mixing this monster in oil paints: a paper tube imitating the metal that
you press and automatically squeeze out hatred, cowardice and villainy. The
artist, or the poet, rejoices in the venom of this mass condensed into one
shopwalker of this trade, he is glad to be insulted, it proves his immutability.
The author or the artist praised by the papers observes that his work has been
understood: a miserable lining to a collaborating with the heat of an animal
incubating the baser instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh multiplying itself with
the aid of typographical microbes.

We have done violence to the snivelling tendencies in our natures. Every
infiltration of this sort is macerated diarrhoea. To encourage this sort of art
is to digest it. What we need are strong straightforward, precise works which
will be forever misunderstood. Logic is a complication. Logic is always false.
It draws the superficial threads of concepts and words towards illusory
conclusions and centres. Its chains kill, an enormous myriapod that asphyxiates
independence. If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest,
engulfing, swallowing its own tail, which still belongs to its body, fornicating
in itself, and temperament would become a nightmare tarred and feathered with
protestantism, a monument, a mass of heavy, greyish intestines.

But suppleness, enthusiasm and even the joy of injustice, that little truth that
we practise as innocents and that makes us beautiful: we are cunning, and our
fingers are malleable and glide like the

line image of loops with a few "x"s along their length

branches of that insidious and almost liquid plant; this injustice is the
indication of our soul, say the cynics. This is also a point of view; but all
flowers aren't saints, luckily, and what is divine in us is the awakening of
anti-human action. What we are talking about here is a paper flower for the
buttonhole of gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of
grace, our white, lithe or fleshy girl cousins. They make a profit out of what
we have selected. The contradiction and unity of opposing poles at the same time
may be true. IF we are absolutely determined to utter this platitude, the
appendix of alibidinous, evil-smelling morality. Morals have an atrophying
effect, like every other pestilential product of the intelligence. Being
governed by morals and logic has made it impossible for us to be anything other
than impassive towards policemen - the cause of slavery - putrid rats with whom
the bourgeois are fed up to the teeth, and who have infected the only corridors
of clear and clean glass that remained open to artists.

Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done. To
sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materialises after we've gone
through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of a world left in the hands of
bandits who have demolished and destroyed the centuries. With neither aim nor
plan, without organisation: uncontrollable folly, decomposition. Those who are
strong in word or in strength will survive, because they are quick to defend
themselves; the agility of their limbs and feelings flames on their faceted
flanks.

Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have grown like
elephants, planets, which people call good. There is nothing good about them.
Goodness is lucid, clear and resolute, and ruthless towards compromise and
politics. Morality infuses chocolate into every man's veins. This task is not
ordained by a supernatural force, but by a trust of ideas-merchants and academic
monopolists. Sentimentality: seeing a group of bored and quarrelling men, they
invented the calendar and wisdom as a remedy. By sticking labels on to things,
the battle of the philosophers we let loose (money-grubbing, mean and meticulous
weights and measures) and one understood once again that pity is a feeling, like
diarrhoea in relation to disgust, that undermines health, the filthy carrion job
of jeopardising the sun. I proclaim the opposition of all the cosmic faculties
to that blennorrhoea of a putrid sun that issues from the factories of
philosophical thought, the fight to the death, with all the resources of

DADAIST DISGUST

Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is
dada; DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual
prudishness of easy compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, dance
of those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every hierarchy and social
equation established for values by our valets: DADA; every object, all objects,
feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel
lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the
abolition of archaeology: DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of
the future: DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every god that is an
immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant and unprejudiced leap from
on harmony to another sphere; the trajectory of a word, a cry, thrown into the
air like an acoustic disc; to respect all individualities in their folly of the
moment, whether serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, decided or
enthusiastic; to strip one's church of every useless and unwieldy accessory; to
spew out like a luminous cascade any offensive or loving thought, or to cherish
it - with the lively satisfaction that it's all precisely the same thing - with
the same intensity in the bush, which is free of insects for the blue-blooded,
and gilded with the bodies of archangels, with one's soul. Liberty: DADA DADA
DADA; - the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and all
contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE.
