ABSTRACT
The popular notion Dada was driven by an anarchic and overwhelmingly negative urge from which surrealism salvaged a positive but dogmatic ethos, does serious disservice to both parties. Dada's drastic promotion of absurdity, together with its disdain for rational systems behind the ideologies of power, makes it tempting to see it as a model for an antithetical and ungraspable refusal of philosophy. Raoul Hausmann's identity as self-appointed 'Dadasoph' is an only half-mocking indication that the category of knowledge itself is part of this attitude: that Dada constituted a 'state of mind' rather than a movement. The issue is not the philosophy of Dada but to identify those aspects of Dada relevant to the thought of surrealism. Of the key Paris Dadaists, only Picabia and the writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes rejected the new movement. Surrealism also learned a particular attitude towards an audience from the experience of Paris Dada. Dada's heterogeneity of action and thought is fundamentally irrational, resisting attempts at structure.
