The Poetry of (Anti-) Logical Ideas: Meaninglessness, Nominalism, and the Logic of Abstraction in Begriffliche Mathematik and Dadaism

Abstract: This article reconsiders Dadaism’s vexed relationship to logic as a means to embed modern mathematical developments within a more diverse modernist collective. In essence, I isolate in the formalist mathematics of the early 1900s a new form of functional logic that, despite appearances, finds operational parity in Dada ‘Antilogik’. With a nominalist approach to meaning and referentiality active in both domains, the formal procedures of mathematical modernism, exemplified by Emmy Noether’s begriffliche Mathematik , begin to align with the functional workings of Dada. In this light, a more mathematically inclusive understanding of modernism begins to take shape.