SOURCE: "Dada's Temper, Our Text: Knights of the Double Self," in The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1981, pp. 133-140.

In the following excerpt, Caws examines the emphasis that Tzara and other Dadaists placed on the reactions of their readers and argues that the audience is "a passenger in Dada's rite of passage."

This text takes its starting point in the Dada temperament and in what it perceives, as well as the way in which it perceives it, moving from the double and two-way images of Duchamp and Tzara to an apparently closed door, in reality open.¹ The Dada temperament is opposed to closure of all sorts.

From "M. Antipyrine" to "M. AA I'Antiphilosophe," from "M. Anti-psychologue" to "M. Antitête" the antis have it: anti-aspirin, but also anti-head and anti-the-workings-of-the-head, philosophical and psychological: Tzara's approximate man, savage...