Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the
refined public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a
manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
resignation from the Dada movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that Dada
is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I understood
the implications of *nothing.*
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because
I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada. Those who
acted as if Dada were important enough to resign from with a big noise have
been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that
counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the
purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist.
You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children
happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to
guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine reason. You
will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You
will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to
maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life
is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments,
all these things that require such an effort, in favor of a calm level state
of mind that makes everything equal and without importance. Dada is not at a
ll modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist
religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness,
a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is
immobility and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this a
paradox, since Dada is manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions
of individuals contaminated by *destruction* are rather violent, but when
these reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a
continuous and progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is
*indifference.* But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the
contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is
too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and
their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with
a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but
to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to
finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is
inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the
most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal
value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle,
perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In
art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more
relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the
barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal
minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the
individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend
themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for
from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.
Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate
acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of
words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point of
view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through
the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that these
renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of
history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as
the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Dada as we are. You
are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction
against the schools of today. Several of my statements have struck you as
old and natural, what better proof that you were a Dadaist without knowing
it, perhaps even before the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Dada. Without being literary, you can be
romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
transfigured, vain, amiable or Dada. This will happen later on in the course
of history when Dada has become a precise, habitual word, when popular
repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its necessary
content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in
representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a Dada
character is forming.
Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults,
with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views
with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this
word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom.
Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes
to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says things that
haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on some
subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for him
are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens
in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is
called Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust.
Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years have been
explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the pretensions of
these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with passion and with
real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother; disgust with
a false form of domination and restriction *en masse*, that accentuates
rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust with all the
catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a front
for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of
a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws, disgust
with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it
more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the
right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the Jesuitical dialectic
which can explain everything and fill people's minds with oblique and obtuse
ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of
blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that
it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Dadaist is his
own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races
and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is
the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly
in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners,
like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin
microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that
reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
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