There is something counterintuitive in thinking too long and hard about Dada. In a cultural formation of immediacy and directness, the philosopher's words ought to provide us with the pertinent reminder that there is no being behind doing – the deed is everything. Yet the eternal return of Dada's history makes it repeatedly necessary to consider the parts that make the sum, and what issued from its extraordinary eruption in Zurich in 1916. The laughter, the linguistic dislocation and the aggressive posturing that routinely characterise Dada all force their way out of art-historical anecdote determinedly to rise to the expectations of cultural production that configure the political. Better than their invocation as radical gestures, so espoused in a worn fantasy of the ultimate counterculture, is their critical interrogation against any assumption of radicality. Dada does disorient and confuse, with the consequence that its bearing on present interests and practice will frequently enough appear diffuse. But when Dada disorients, it does so strategically as dissent precipitates political engagement and questions the production and value of subjectivity – and specifically the production of collective subjectivity ‘by which a perception is expressed within the subject, that is, how the subject actively prehends a datum, whether an emotion or consciousness in general’. Case by case in its fragmentary residue are rendered affirmations of Dada's conception in counterintuition and, one might argue, it is in dogged pursuit of counterintuition that Dada will begin productively to yield its real radicality.

I will state at the outset that what we encounter in 1916 is not a movement. It is a formation; more precisely a constellation, between whose objects (the subsequently named ‘Dadaists’) we observe the relations that make them and the greater object (that is, the constellation ‘Dada’) visible. The observed relations, however, are not engendered by the Dadaists themselves – objects don't engender relations – but the relations are in some sense a phenomenological effect or emission of the contingencies and emergencies of 1916, the ‘environment’ of early twentieth-century avant-gardism.