The overriding address of this book in pursuit of the social production of that which we most desire to possess – the processing of a subjectivity – is, I think evidently, to the centrality of language in the Dada activities that radiated and continue to radiate from 1916 (but ‘radiate’ implies a point of origin; to resonate (to ursonate?) or to reverberate might be more useful verbs), and of the determined attempts to put language efficiently to work in some sort of lateral oppositionality. Now, what have been consistently read as oppositional strategies validated under late capitalism have notoriously effected their own undoing – pastiche, for instance, is dissolved by using the instruments of pastiche itself; alternatively, some genuine historical sense is reconquered by using the instruments of what have been called substitutes for history. Hal Foster has described one lateral move with the instructive proposition of a postmodernism of resistance, in terms of a ‘counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the “false normativity” of reactionary postmodernism’, operative through its resistance in the questioning rather than in the exploitation of cultural codes, desiring ‘to explore rather than to conceal social and political affiliations’. Indeed, as thought systems collapse in on themselves, they instigate their own dissolution through anti-logic or, in lamentable ignorance, invert and thereby reproduce the flawed logic that was ostensibly the object of critique at the outset. Even to talk about a postmodern text (as I am now talking about Dada), Fredric Jameson has suggested, is ‘to reify it, to turn it into the work of art that it no longer is, to endow it with a permanence and monumentality that is its vocation to dispel’ – precisely the counterintuition of thinking and talking too long and too hard about what happened in Zurich in 1916.