Zurich Dada presents us with a series of strategic visual interventions that are critical to our reading of the inaugural formation, though the formation itself is not marked primarily for its visual residue. We are given to understand historically the way in which artworks have exercised resistance to closure (as both inclusive and exclusive) in the familiar distinction of ‘the separation between plastic representation (which implies resemblance) and linguistic reference (which excludes it)’, and though it will be conceded that the linguistic references of the Dada activities in 1916 are never absent, they are in specific instances not always the most immediately visible. What remains as visual residue from the brief years of Zurich Dada is varied, uneven and inconsistent, but might wholly be redeemed by the remarkable works that two individuals, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, produced during this phase. This chapter will document the visual output of Arp specifically in Zurich – his textiles, woodcuts, automatic drawings, reliefs and collages, culminating with the so-called arrangements according to the ‘laws’ of chance – in terms of visual strategies of cultural resistance. Though a reading of Taeuber is critically prerequisite to a reading of Arp's work, the emphasis in what follows will be on Arp's almost uniquely passive, non-aggressive role within Dada, to be reviewed against the challenge posed by his visual works (contradictorily lauded some decades later by Clement Greenberg and assimilated into twentieth-century modernist critique) – detouring via Herman Melville's short story ‘Bartleby’ and the devastating impact of the fictional copyist's passive resistance, which I will provocatively introduce as characterising Arp's Dadaist engagement with his audiences. And, introducing Peter Hallward's particular reading of Deleuze, a commentary through schizoanalysis will be applied to re-present the Zurich works, pursuing a line of inquiry that culminates in Arp's chance squares as correlates for creation itself. In the process, the artworks are thoroughly revised in their historical context.