Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914-1924 (review)

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada is a crisp, engaging, and smartly written introduction both to the political world of Paris dada and to the art-historical context in which multi-decade debates about the movement have unfolded. Even if the specific arguments that Papanikolas makes are not always fully convincing, readers will find much to recommend in this book. But this is, nevertheless, a book that promises more than it delivers. By the time we reach its conclusion we are likely to have doubts about the point of the whole exercise. How does it really help us to understand both Paris dada and Breton's early surrealism as specifically anarcho-individualist? Might not insisting upon this connection overstate the continuing relevance of old intellectual and political paradigms in a cultural world groping in every direction for new models, new understandings, new inspirations—indeed a "new spirit"? These were, after all, the years of the so-called époque floue (the "vague years"). Moreover, while the aesthetic and political machinations of someone like Tristan Tzara seem relatively one-dimensional (even if we might disagree on exactly how to characterize that dimension) and thus reducible to a single intellectual impulse like "anarcho-individualism," it is hard to see someone as protean, multifaceted, and deeply conflicted as André Breton in the light of any single intellectual or political tradition. And indeed, Papanikolas herself contributes to this uncertainty when she concedes, on the book's final page, that Breton's debt to anarchism "was obscured critically by the Surrealists' alignment with Marxism in the mid 1920s."

Papanikolas has set herself two clear goals in the book, and she succeeds far more in one than in the other. One goal is to overturn the image of Paris dada as an "apolitical moment in the prehistory of Surrealism" and to insist upon its "real anarchist underpinnings" (1). Here she is only partly successful, in this reviewer's judgment. One problem is that, pace Papanikolas, the strength of anarchism did diminish during the First World War as Marxism gained increasing hegemony on the left. Another is that the connections between dada anti-art and the anarcho-individualism that the author claims to find underpinning it are more often asserted than demonstrated. Unfortunately, the truly concrete connections that Papanikolas's argument would seem to demand—between Tzara and Breton's study of (or commitment to) anarcho-individualism and their avant-garde outlooks—never emerge in the book. Still another problem is how we should sort out the meanings of "political" and "apolitical" in the context of a movement like dada. If we take "political" to mean that it sought to ally with or to contribute to contemporary political parties and movements, or even, more loosely, to participate in expressly political debates and their electoral outcomes, then certainly Paris dada was not political. Clearly someone like Tzara was "disdainful of practical politics" (11), even if he did undoubtedly seek to "undermine the cultural codes perpetuating nationalist hegemony" (112). And, as the author herself notes, postwar anarcho-individualists (including the dadaists) "steered clear" of actually existing political processes (40) and purposefully ignored "party politics" (153). On the other hand, if by political one means something more general, like mindfulness regarding the proper mode of organizing and conducting political, social, and cultural life, awareness of the political implications of one's work, and other considerations of this sort, then yes, we must concede that Paris dada was political art, although we might be hard-pressed to find art that is not political in this sense.

Papanikolas's other aim is to argue that critical opinion regarding the nature of the cultural-political context in postwar France has overemphasized its conservative, return-to-order side. Here, I believe, she is far more successful. Clearly "nationalist power structures" (4) and "bellicose nationalism" (5) were the object of intense critique both by dadaism (whether we locate the source of...