The Making of a Manifesto: Historiography, Transcription, and the Beginnings of Dada

Hugo Ball's famous “Dadaist Manifesto,” from July 14, 1916, has often been regarded as one of the founding documents of the Dada movement. This essay considers the text from the perspective of its complex publication and reception history, in order to reconstruct the way in which it became the early Dadaist centerpiece it is commonly seen as today. The case of Ball's manifesto, I argue, affords insight into a broader logic of historiographical narrativization that has shaped the scholarly understanding of Dada and its initial development in Zurich 1916: the privileged role ascribed to this particular text testifies, on my analysis, to a more general project of retroactive anchoring, which seeks to locate the official beginning of the movement in an “opening” gesture that can be dated, located, and named. Such a critical reassessment of the manifesto's editorial and historiographical treatment, from the 1960s onward, helps to focus attention, in turn, on a crucial, yet heretofore largely unexplored, dimension within the text itself. Ball's manifesto demands to be read, I suggest, less as the proclamation of a new avant-garde movement than as the performative staging of a programmatic linguistic practice, in which “Dada” appears as a process of dynamic (dis)articulation.