This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is
not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."-The Posthuman
Dada Guide
The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical
living in our posthuman world-all by way of examining the imagined 1916
chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin,
the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse-a
battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution-lasted
for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead
and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer
over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the
world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has
created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada-and to what it can
teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here
dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists
Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later
incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles
Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged
alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with
entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it
is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future
(which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it)
need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman
sources.
