The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (review)

In appearance, this book seems to be a belated dada hoax. It is a slender paper object, measuring four by eight inches, looking more like a train schedule than a book. However, there is much more to it then meets the casual eye; it contains a solid, if unstructured text that is witty, informative, scholarly, and eminently worthwhile.

Who are the "posthumans" it addresses? Codrescu explains that we have become posthumans because the mechanical and electronic devices essential to modern life smother our individuality by enabling us to communicate with each other instantaneously and irresponsibly, and have by-passed nature, so that we have "e-bodies" as well as "meat bodies." Although the guide opens by saying that it will show us posthumans how to lead a dada life, it immediately acknowledges that it would not be wise to do so, because such a life is a tissue of absurdities. In fact, it does not offer any guidance at all (except to a number of defunct Continental cafés), but entertainingly tells its readers about the nature of dada, its history, and its major personalities, and offers a good deal of tangential speculation about the internet, virtual reality and the future, which dada does not believe in.

The guide begins with a general discussion of the relation of dada to the threatening situation in our electronic culture. The ironies and self-contradictions of this text harbor consequential insights, buttressing its dada inconsistencies by quoting Whitman's "I am human, I contradict myself" as a "dada line." Dada has no aims, but there is the hope that its "creative negation" will show communities of artists how to overcome the boredom described in Baudelaire's address to his readers by finding its productions interesting and amusing. Contending that the virtual reality offered by contemporary media may not be sufficient to escape the present, the guide offers the Dada alternative, imaginative units of the "nongooglable," empty forms, free of the onerous factual material the media transmit.

Codrescu implies that dada has ancient roots by asserting that modern Bohemianism was anticipated by the carnivals, festivals, and impromptu entertainments of earlier ages. Another source was the art of poverty, for in their efforts to emulate the perfection of art commissioned by the rich or the Church, the poor stumbled upon such values as originality, imagination and personal expression. Codrescu reminds us that Dada also extended its influence into the future, for it generated a lasting spirit of creative revolt, and was the inspiration for the counterculture in politics, social life, and the arts that burst out in the mid-century. After dada, art was expected to be new and shocking. Codrescu maintains that while such dada-inspired phenomena as existentialism, surrealism, and pop art have expired into respectability, dada's incorrigible negativity, its "antianything" position, is a spirit that remains vital. Tristan Tzara, dada's leader, was a Jew of Romanian origin, and Jews and Romanians are prominent in Codrescu's account of the movement.

The introductory discussion is followed by a series of entries in non-dada alphabetical order on such topics as "Americanization," "nonsense," and "language, crystal" with brief biographies of the major dada personalities. These entries, which form the main body of the book, range over wide areas of 20th-century culture, from Teillhard de Chardin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They are consistently entertaining and informative, and are supported (scandalously) with endnotes conscentiously providing sources and further information. Codrescu says that he has followed normal printing and grammatical conventions because this may be the last book.

He often reverts to the significance of the chess game mentioned in his subtitle, which actually took place at a Zurich café in October, 1916. Codrescu sees this game as a contest between Tzara as the apostle of creative chaos and anarchy, and Lenin as the future "mass-murdering ideologue," who, in preparing the chessboard, is planning a revolution that will produce many corpses in order to...