Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance took its initial form in response to the interrogation of Dada in undergraduate seminars at Cardiff School of Art where, for a brief period in the noughties, I was allowed to ramp up the Dada content for art history modules. It was out of deliberate resistance to the idea that Dada amounted to anything significant as given that the documentary residue from the early twentieth century began to yield some sense from the mire of non-sense, where so many had abandoned all hope of finding any. I well remember the students who, at my behest, read and re-read the 1918 manifesto, struggling to find sense, until one day the words peeled away. Reading the manifesto of continuous contradiction on that day were Owen Gower and Beth Greenhalgh – both most suitably engaged students, I firmly believe, to realise that what was left once the words were gone was something that offered a radically new orientation within Dada, happily conceding that all conventional routes to meaning were spent. Chapter 4 of this book is (via two conferences) the direct result of that afternoon's seminar and, for allowing me the indulgences of Dada in the noughties and for entertaining a supportive art historical community, I will always be indebted to my teaching colleagues at Cardiff – Clive Cazeaux, Jonathan Clarkson and Christopher Short.

The startling presence and immediacy of Dada is rarely too far away. During the early drafting of chapter 1, for instance, Talking Heads’ 1979 ‘I Zimbra’ rapidly reconfigured into instant composing and a performance of ‘Gadji Beri Bimba’ by legendary bandleader Sig Hansen in 2010, at Cardiff's bar and live music house Gwdihw – in the excellent company of Elis Bowen, the man with the world's biggest knees – and that, by satisfying coincidence, on the same evening of the same month as the first Dada blast rang out and up the Spiegelgasse cobbles to break down Lenin's door in 1916. Eighteen months later, drafting chapter 7, the resonance of Dada ‘lautgedichte’ burst through again in Captain Haddock's speech bubbles, reaffirming the continuity of primeval strata, ‘untouched and untroubled by logic and by the social apparatus’…