Dadaism: Using the Absurd to Reclaim Rationality

By Mohammad Yahya Di Palma, BA Politics, Philosophy, Economics 28/10/2024

Modernity has reduced humanity to a series of meaningless categories, devoid of heroism, adventure, or love. This loss of individuality and richness was resisted by the Dadaists, a group of artists who rejected rationalist values and sought to expose the absurdity of modern existence.

Modernity has arguably constrained individuals and forced them to conform to societal expectations and the pursuit of wealth. While these issues were present in previous eras, they became more prevalent in the bourgeois world beginning with the French Revolution with its emphasis on material success and social status. The aristocratic and peasant classes of the past lived by different values, but modernity forced a universal conformity to bourgeois norms. In pre-war Europe, modernity eroded the continent's romantic past. The rise of science, psychoanalysis, and political revolutions signalled that change was inevitable - not only in politics, but in the arts as well.

As Europe industrialised and embraced empirical categorization, movements like Dadaism arose as a direct response. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara sought to mock and dismantle the bourgeois values that defined this new mechanised world. Duchamp famously created The Fountain, a toilet bowl turned into art, symbolising the Dadaist attack on rationalist cultural values. The movement began in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I. The name Dadaism, also known simply as Dada, is itself shrouded in mystery; some claim it came from Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words “da, da” meaning “yes, yes” in Romanian, while others argue it was meant to signify the nonsense of baby talk. Regardless, the essence of Dada was rooted in absurdity and a rejection of societal norms.Dadaism stood for the infancy of man; it appealed to the absurd and creative world that opposed the seriousness of bourgeois society. Dadaists wanted to mock the dullness of modern life, which they believed was fermenting in a lack of uniqueness. Beauty, for them, was illogical and irrational. The greatest good was to challenge the values of normative society. Dada embraced artistic freedom, expressing emotional theatre that bore no logic to reality, often using humour to reverse conventional ideas of beauty and seriousness.

The contradictions within Dada were what made it a unique movement. Dadaists sought to create meaningless art through mockery, such as Hannah Höch's photomontages, which represented the structures of society. Tristan Tzara’s poetry summarised the movement’s ideals:

“We are in search of

the force that is direct, pure, sober

UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING

we affirm the VITALITY of every INSTANT.”

Marcel Duchamp, in later interviews, expressed a desire to rid the world of art, much like he had rejected religion. He explained that the word ‘art’ etymologically means ‘to do’, and thus all human activity is art. However, Duchamp saw modern society as creating purely artificial standards. Dada, for him, was born out of boredom - a challenge to the established norms of art and culture.Despite its radical beginnings, Dada eventually failed in its mission. As Jean Baudrillard notes, ‘media carr[ies] meaning and counter-meaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process.’ In other words, reality became an imposed falsehood, stripped of characteristics and reduced to mere aesthetics. Dada sought to confront this very problem, but stiffened by academic conventions. Like all avant-garde movements, it lost its ground and connection to its roots. Eventually, many Dadaists turned to Surrealism, which represented an escape from the objective failures of Dada. While Dada was a chaotic response to the absurdity of modernity, Surrealism became an escape from it. Both movements tried to find a cure for the emptiness of modern life, but Dada was ahead of its time and was thus misunderstood. The desire to change bourgeois society shared by many Dadaists, poets, playwrights, and artists stems from a fundamental resentment. The Dadaists failed to destroy what they once hated - themselves. It eventually became an ideology, and in doing so, it lost its originality and rebellious nature. Like many countercultural movements, from Futurism to punk and hippie culture, Dada’s anti-conformism became a new conformity.

The fanatical devotion to avant-garde art, whether in the form of Duchamp’s urinal or in today’s pop culture, reveals a collective mindset shaped by trends rather than individuality. People flock to counterculture, seeking to distinguish themselves, only to fall into the same categorizations they sought to escape. Modernity has already categorised people into cliques, defined by their idols, their tastes, and their fleeting rebellions. This desire is connected to a sense of loss or incompleteness. It is the desire for the objet petit A (the "object little A"), a concept Jacques Lacan developed to signify the unattainable object that we unconsciously seek. The Desire, in Lacanian terms, is not about the satisfaction of biological needs (like hunger), but about something much deeper, connected to our very being.As these movements pass, the same rebellious youths eventually adapt to bourgeois life, settling into the routines of career, family, and society. As adults, they merely switch from one form of nothingness to another. In the end, there is no real problem, no true change - just a perpetual cycle of individuals seeking to escape modernity, only to return to its grasp. The challenge lies in recognizing that these inclinations toward rebellion and escape are arguably biologically conditioned - connected to age and youthful enthusiasm. To transcend this cycle, we must learn to assimilate these impulses, transforming them into permanent qualities that can guide us through adulthood. Rather than clinging to the past or wishing to be young again, we should embrace maturity with grace, understanding our inherent traditions and rationalising them with the new. Only by integrating these traditions can we find balance, avoiding the material self-interest of bourgeois life, and a tantamount rejection of it. We all ought to seek quality understanding, while embracing adulthood with renewed purpose.