Imagine taking a newspaper, the supposed bastion of objective fact, and methodically cutting out every single word. Imagine tossing those words into a bag, shaking them like dice, and pulling them out one by one to form a poem. The result is nonsensical, chaotic, and utterly random. It is also the very heart of Dada, an art movement born from the trenches and trauma of World War I that waged its most radical war not on the battlefield, but on the terrain of language itself.
While we often associate Dada with the jarring collages of Hannah Höch or the absurdist sculptures of Marcel Duchamp, its core rebellion was profoundly linguistic. The Dadaists—a volatile group of artists, poets, and provocateurs huddled in neutral Zurich—saw the Great War as the ultimate failure of Western logic, reason, and enlightenment. And what was the primary vehicle for that failed logic? Language. The patriotic slogans, the political jargon, the journalistic euphemisms that marched millions to their deaths—it was all built from the same grammatical blocks. To the Dadaists, language wasn’t just a tool of communication; it was a corrupted system, and the only sane response was to dismantle it.
The Logic of Madness: Why Attack Grammar?
In the aftermath of industrial-scale slaughter, the rigid, orderly structures of grammar and syntax seemed like a grotesque joke. Hugo Ball, a key founder of the movement at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, wrote in his diary that the “idealistic” language of the past was now hollow. The words used by politicians and generals had been “debased”, rendered meaningless by their association with propaganda and violence. How could one use words like “honor”, “fatherland”, or “progress” with a straight face?
The Dadaist conclusion was radical: if rational language upholds a murderous social order, then the antidote is irrational language. Their goal was to create an “anti-grammar”, a mode of expression that rejected conventional syntax, semantics, and authorial intent. By breaking the rules of language, they sought to break the spell of the society that had created it. This wasn’t just nihilistic destruction; it was a desperate search for a more authentic, pre-rational form of communication, one untainted by the hypocrisy of “civilization.”
Tristan Tzara and the Poetry of Pure Chance
Perhaps no single act embodies this linguistic rebellion more famously than Tristan Tzara’s recipe, “To Make a Dadaist Poem.” The instructions are a direct assault on the tradition of the poet as a thoughtful, inspired creator:
- Take a newspaper.
- Take some scissors.
- Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
- Cut out the article.
- Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
- Shake gently.
- Next take out each cutting one after the other.
- Copy down conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem, Tzara promises, “will resemble you.” But what does it mean to create a poem that resembles the author through pure chance? Linguistically, this “cut-up” technique is a wrecking ball. It obliterates syntax, the logical glue that holds sentences together. It severs the relationship between the signifier (the word) and its original signified (its meaning in the article) by scrambling context. A word like “river” might land next to “tomorrow”, creating a new, jarring association devoid of logical cause and effect. By replacing authorial intention with randomness, Tzara attacks the very notion of a controlling, rational consciousness behind the text. The “author” becomes a mere conduit for chaos.
Beyond Sense: The Primal Scream of Sound Poetry
While Tzara dismantled syntax, others sought to erase meaning entirely. At the Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball performed what would become one of Dada’s most iconic linguistic experiments: sound poetry (Lautgedichte). Dressed in a bizarre, geometric costume made of shimmering blue cardboard that made him look like a “magical bishop”, Ball chanted poems made of entirely invented words.
His most famous piece, “Karawane”, begins:
jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
…
This is language stripped down to its phonetic bones. Devoid of semantic content, these are pure sounds, textures, and rhythms. Ball described it as an attempt to “withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word” and even “leave the word behind.” He was rejecting the national languages of Europe—German, French, English—which he saw as stained with the blood of war. Sound poetry was a search for a primal, universal tongue, a “language of the birds” that could express the raw emotion and spiritual crisis that conventional words could no longer touch. It was a regression to a pre-linguistic state, a vocal scream against a world gone mad.
The Visual Grammar of the Word
The Dadaist assault wasn’t confined to spoken or written text; it also targeted the visual conventions of the printed page. Artists like Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, and the Berlin Dadaists weaponized typography and collage. For centuries, the printed page had been a model of order: straight lines of uniform text, read from left to right, top to bottom. Dada shattered this visual grammar.
In their posters, manifestos, and journals, letters were exploded across the page. Words ran vertically, diagonally, or upside down. Different fonts, sizes, and weights were mashed together in a single sentence. They treated letters not just as symbols for sounds, but as concrete visual objects in their own right. This forced the viewer to stop *reading through* the words and instead *look at* them. By disrupting the transparent, orderly flow of text, they made the reader conscious of the very medium of communication and its artificial rules. The page was no longer a clear window onto a message; it was a chaotic battlefield of forms.
The Echoes of Linguistic Anarchy
Dada was a short-lived, incendiary flare, but its linguistic rebellion sent shockwaves through the 20th century and beyond. The Surrealists inherited its interest in the subconscious and automatic writing. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin revived and systemized Tzara’s cut-up technique in the 1950s, believing it could deprogram consciousness from the “virus” of language. The playful typography of Dada echoes today in graphic design and digital art.
More than a century later, Dada’s anti-grammar remains a powerful reminder that language is not a neutral tool. It is a system of order, and like any system, it can be questioned, subverted, and even torn apart. In a world still saturated with political spin, corporate jargon, and social media noise, the Dadaist impulse to take a pair of scissors to a newspaper feels, at times, as relevant and revolutionary as ever.