Dadaism and the Social World

I hope I don't sound like a hack, because this quote seems to be particularly popular amongst the rest of the class, but I feel this is by far the most significant quote out of all of the manifestos we've read of Tzara, from page 76:  "I write a manifesto, and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, also I am against principles..."

There's a lot of be explored here. A manifesto, by definition, is a declaration of intentions or principles, and Tzara directly contradicts himself by declaring that he wants nothing, and does so again when he said he's against writing them, and wrote one anyway, and did it in principle, even being against principles. That's a bit of a mouthful, so let's dig deeper into what exactly it is he's doing. Dadaism, like existentialist philosophy, was born out of the dreary, desolate chaos that was World War I. Just as World War I was seen as the ultimate rejection of an ordered world, with the chaos of total war and chemical weapons, Dada was born out of that, rejection of not only art standards, but was an attack on art itself. Artists constantly competed for dominance of the Dada scene, contradicting and rejecting one another with this point and that point. What Tzara is doing with the contradiction he here presents is doing away with sense, with structure. It's a rejection of anything and everything, a big middle finger to the world he lived in, its art, his fellow artists, all of it. With this statement, he's drawing attention to himself, something that gave Dada its performative characteristic: he's very loudly moving away from any and all manifesto structure. The entirety of these paradoxes and contradictions are the manifesto itself, and it is best exemplified within this statement.