Reflections on Duchamp Bergson Readymade

Federico LuisettiDavid Sharp

diacritics, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 77-93 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Reflections on DuchampBeRgson ReaDymaDe

Federico Luisetti

[i]nside the person we must distinctly perceive, as through a glass, a set-up mechanism. —henri Bergson, Laughter: An essay on the Meaning of the comic (1901)

in spite of the enormous critical attention paid to marcel Duchamp’s art and theoretical background, the dialogue with Bergsonism is mostly confined to scattered references and erudite observations.1 paradoxically, the major obstacle to this encounter has been the immense popularity of henri Bergson’s philosophy since the initial decade of the twen-tieth century. such success has come with a price, however, for the proliferation of neu-tralizing schematizations has progressively suffocated the specificity of his thought and subsequently impeded the understanding of his epistemological radicalism, so cherished by Duchamp and the historical avant-garde.2 consider, for example, how the specter of Bergson constantly hovers over linda Dal-rymple Henderson’s authoritative discussion of Duchamp’s scientific sources. Although henderson recognizes the diffuse presence in Duchamp of various Bergsonian motives, because she regards Bergson as the antiscientific philosopher of the “inner self” and of “profound self-expression,”3 Bergsonian notions seem to her incompatible with the artis-tic revolution prompted by Duchamp. a historiographical exorcism is therefore needed in order to heal the consequences of the traumatic Bergson-Duchamp incest. herein lies henderson’s solution: since Duchamp rejects the aesthetic principles of the puteaux cub-ists, he also abandons Bergsonism, which represents their philosophical matrix. thus, the Bergsonian ideas “undoubtedly” present in Duchamp’s artistic lexicon are nothing but debris accumulated in the course of his battle with the cubist disciples of Bergson.4

to counter these approaches, in the following pages i will map Duchamp’s absorp-tion and creative distortion of Bergsonism,5 concentrating on key terms of both Berg-son’s philosophy and Duchamp’s speculations on art: space, “readymade,” delay, body, virtual, circuit, machine.6 i will then discuss the theoretical implications of Duchamp’s Bergsonism and place the readymade7 within its proper context: the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of reflection.

1.OntheinfluenceofBergson,seeBeier;Davies;Henderson,Duchamp in context;Antliff.Duchamp’sbiographershavenotfailedtouncoverBergson’sinfluence:seeTomkins68. 2.Myaimis toprovide furtherevidence toIvorDavies’scritical intuition:“YetBergson’sviews are eminently applicable to his large glass, and even seem relevant to his attitude to aesthet-icsingeneral”[“NewReflectionsonthelarge glass”88]. 3.SeeHenderson,Duchamp in context 120. 4.InthewakeofDavies,invariouspassagesofherstudyHendersonrecognizesDuchamp’sBergsonism;seeHenderson,Duchamp in context 35,84,96,97. 5.SeeinparticularDeleuze,Bergsonism. 6.OnBergsonismandthedigitalimage,seeHansen. 7.“AccordingtoBergson,suchintellectualideas,‘whichwereceiveready-made [tout fait],’ mustremainexternaltotheinnerselfofartisticcreation.Bergson’suseofthetermtout fait in this context and in le Rire, to signify the very state of being external or mechanical that duchamp was

diacritics 38.4: 77–93

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space

Beginning with time and Free Will (1889), Bergson distinguishes between two types of multiplicities: on the one hand, “duration” (durée), “an internal multiplicity of suc-cession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination . . . a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers,” and on the other, “a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation . . . a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual.”8 this opposition is generally understood as a clear-cut differentiation between the inner experience of time and the objective consistence of space. in time and Free Will and Matter and Memory (1896), there are several passages that can be read accordingly, since duration is often described as a continuous, indivisible temporal experience, and space as that which “by definition, is outside us.”9

yet for Bergson space and time are mixed terms, and their internal complexity does not coincide with the semantic distinction between the two multiplicities. Deleuze has clearly formulated the central difficulty that a reductionist theory of space and time would imply, a problem of which Bergson is fully aware. since the concept of duration has an ontological span, space must find a place within time and vice versa: “If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new foundations. for space will no longer simply be a form of exteriority. . . . space itself will need to be based in things . . . to have its own ‘purity’” [Deleuze, Bergsonism49]. hidden behind the motif of the “spatialization of time,” Bergson has devised a stratified theory of space, whose origins we can trace back to his philosophical apprenticeship [see Heidesick 29–42]. Departing from Kant, Bergson introduces a boundary between the “perception of extension” and the “conception of space,” between qualitative space, which he calls “extensity” (étendue), and “abstract,” “homogeneous” space: “We must thus distinguish between the perception of extensity and the conception of space. . . . [S]pace is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us . . . determinations of space, or directions, do not assume for it a purely geometrical form” [Bergson, time and Free Will 96]. our habitual reference to space alludes to a mere “symbol of fixity and of infinite divisibility.” On the contrary, “concrete extensity, that is to say, the diversity of sensible qualities, is not within space; rather it is space that we thrust into extensity” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 216]. furthermore, in several texts Bergson provides accounts of the metaphysical genesis of spatiality, describing the ontological dimension genetically prior to both empirical space and lived time.10 in this conceptual constellation we can detect Bergson’s most original

seeking,suggeststhatthephilosopher’sterminologyliesbehindDuchamp’sadoptionofitsEnglishtranslation,‘ready-made’,oncehewasinNewYork”[Henderson,Duchamp in context 63].HereHendersontakesupasuggestionofDavies,“NewReflectionsonthelarge glass”87–89. 8.Deleuze,Bergsonism 38.AsDeleuzehasdemonstrated, thedistinctionbetween the twotypesofmultiplicitiesisindebtedtothemathematicaltheoriesofRiemann[39–40],who,inturn,isa primary sources of the conceptual architecture of the large glass. Bergson’sapproachisshapedmainly by his interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and by the debate on the metaphys-icsofthecontinuum;seeBergson,Quid aristoteles de loco senserit. 9.Bergson,matter and memory 206.AccordingtoBergson,thefallaciousspatializationofduration encouraged by common sense and language—“which always translates movement and duration in terms of space”—is at the origin of Zeno of elea’s paradoxes. if we reconstruct move-ment with points and lines, we miss the inner nature of mobility, and, with Zeno, we end up negating the reality of movement: since “it is impossible to construct, a priori, movement with immobilities,” Achilleswillneveroutrunatortoiseand,ateverymoment,aflyingarrowwillbemotionless;seeBergson,matter and memory 191–92,andBergson,creative evolution 308–14. 10.SeeBergson’sdescriptionofthe“simultaneousgenesisofmatterandintelligence”[cre-ative evolution 199–208].

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contribution to philosophy as well as the theoretical sources of Duchamp. Borrowing from Bergson’s terminology, the distinction between “space” (espace) and “extensity” (étendue)11 is the premise that sustains the aerial saga of Duchamp’s most complex work, the Large Glass. going back to aristotle’s naturalism, Bergson considers bodies, movements, and boundaries as the basic elements of reality: “Thus, the space of our geometry and the spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the reciprocal action and reaction of two terms which are essentially the same, but which move each in the direction inverse of the other. . . . all that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity.”12 Beginning with the doctoral dissertation on the aristotelian conception of movement, Bergson constructs a vocabulary of boundary-functions that, beyond the better-known formulations of duration, undergirds the building of his philosophy: “Extension, we said, appears only as a tension which is interrupted” [creative evolution 267]. time-space multiplicities are intersected by mechanisms of interruption, inversion, and delay similar to those that govern Duchamp’s practice of the “mirrorical” (miroirique).13 neither actual nor virtual, the mirrorical operations generate the topological structure of an extended present, the multiple and deferred location of Duchamp’s readymades.

readymade

“Speculations. Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” [Writings of Marcel duchamp 74]. Duchamp’s answer is the readymade: “In 1913 I had the happy idea to fas-ten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. . . . it was around that time that the word ‘readymade’ came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation” [Writings 141]. the readymade is a nonartistic work, a postponement of the aesthetic delectation of the work of art. We are familiar with Duchamp’s exemplary readymades: wheels, combs, snow shov-els, bottle and coat racks, birdcages, and the famous porcelain urinal entitled Fountain and signed “R. MUTT, 1917” [fig. 1]. These programmatic works illustrate the basic function performed by Duchamp’s objects. as a parody of the phenomenological return to the perceptual consistency of the “things themselves,” they appear to be merely exist-ing objects, pieces of the external world without symbolic connotations. yet, because of their provocative “thingness,” they refuse to be assimilated to the mechanisms of repre-sentation and stand as something in between, occupying the interval between everyday objects and artworks. at this level of perception, the readymades’ enigmatic presence is nothing but a form of existence that has abandoned the heavy machinery of representation: logical and linguistic definitions, conceptual schemes, analogical connections, iconographic references—in Duchampian words, “visual memory.” The exhibition of the thing “in-itself” simply shows that the work is more—or less—than a representation. Since the

11. Marcel duchamp, Duchamp du signe: Écrits 134–35.IntheEnglishtranslationsof thenotes, étendue isoftenrenderedas“space,”therebyneutralizingDuchamp’sdistinctionbetweenétendue and espace;seeWritings of marcel Duchamp 94–95. 12.Bergson,creative evolution 202,208.Bergson’stheoryofnonrepresentationalspaceistheaspectofhisphilosophythathasmoreprofoundlyinfluencedthedevelopmentofearlytwenti-eth-century visual art, in particular italian Futurism. 13. the élan vital is creative only to the degree to which it delays the unfolding of inert mat-ter: “incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it” [creative evolution 268].

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readymades have lost their connection with the instruments of representation, they don’t criticize or negate artistic representation and its mighty institutions, such as museums and art-historical scholarship: weakly and humbly, they have found a collocation in the incommensurable intervals of a new method of appearance. the puzzling consistency of the readymades has been repeatedly singled out by Du-champ: “Ultimately, it should not be looked at. . . . It’s not the visual aspect of the ready-made that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists. . . . Visuality is no longer a question: the readymade is no longer visible, so to speak” [“Marcel Duchamp Talking” 37–40]. although the readymade is primarily a common object, selected and displayed according to certain instructions and accompanying titles and comments, its aporetic nature and visual indifference, in between the inherited categories of art discourse, has triggered the dislocation of traditional oppositions such as original and reproduction, the art world and the external world, the visual and the textual, form and the formless, aesthetic judgment and sensory recognition. for instance, george Dickie has tenaciously explored the ready-made’s destabilizing effect on the institutional location of art, and thierry de Duve the “nominalist” turn prompted by Duchamp`s “intellectual expression” [see Duve, Pictorial Nominalism and Kant after duchamp; Dickie]. Yet what can we say about the “simple existence” of the readymade, its immanent yet enigmatic nature? Gilles Deleuze has called attention to the Bergsonian distinction between the “virtual” and the “possible.” While the possible is a retrospective duplica-tion of the real, an abstract copy of the real, marked by a ghostly likeness, the virtual is endowed with a full reality: “The possible is the mirage of the present in the past. . . . It is as though one were to fancy, in seeing his reflection in the mirror in front of him, that he could have touched it had he stayed behind it. . . . But the possible so understood is in no degree virtual, something ideally pre-existent” [Bergson, the Possible and the real 119]. The virtual, as “something ideally pre-existent,” is real, but it is not actual. Instead of being opposed to the real—as in the case of the possible—the virtual stands against the actual. In the formulation of Marcel Proust, often recalled by Deleuze, the virtual is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Given this definition of the real and the possible, Deleuze draws the following conclusion: “when someone asks what more is found in the real, there is nothing to point out except ‘the same’ thing as posited outside representation” [“Method of Dramatization” 101]. The position of this “more” outside representation is precisely the gesture performed by Duchamp’s readymades. their objectuality acts as a cut, a caesura between the merely existent “real” and the ghostly lawful possible. Through this deconstructing movement, Duchamp achieves a new nudity for art, a new naiveté. since it has renounced the laws, habits, and processes of representation, the readymade’s “visuality is no longer a ques-tion.” From the point of view of the identifying power of cultural vision, the readymade “is no longer visible.” Our attempt to reach an appropriate concept of the object is des-tined to fail. if we thought that Fountain was what we know a urinal is supposed to be, its deceit-ful title and signature force us to reconsider this assumption. since we can’t rely on a straightforward relationship between the abstract scheme of the thing and the thing itself, the readymade’s presence becomes unstable, and the object’s identity is distorted by the lack of visual and conceptual memory. our efforts of interpretation are blocked, and we are left with the existence of a thing standing enigmatically in front of us, outside repre-sentation. The readymade has become an impossible object: “To lose the possibility of recognizing 2 similar objects—2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever to reach the impossibility of sufficient visual memory” [Writings 31].

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delay

TheBrideStrippedBarebyHerBachelors,Even(1915–23), also known as the Large Glass [fig. 2], is Duchamp’s most intricate readymade. At The Philadelphia Museum of art since 1954, the Large Glass is executed on two panels of glass, one of top of the other, with materials such as varnish, lead foil, fuse wire, and dust “crystallized” on the surfaces. after eight years of work on the piece, in 1923 Duchamp abandoned the project and declared it “definitively unfinished.” Severely damaged in 1927, the Large Glass was repaired by Duchamp in 1936. in 1934, Duchamp published a voluminous set of preparatory notes (TheGreenBox), followed in 1966 by another set of notes and draw-ings (TheWhiteBox,or Àl’Infinitif); in 1980 a posthumous collection of notes (Marcel duchamp: Notes) was edited by paul matisse.

Forthe“Box”of1913–1914, it’sdifferent.Ididn’thavetheideaofaboxasmuchasjustnotes.IthoughtIcouldcollect,inanalbumliketheSaint-Étiennecatalogue, some calculations, some reflections,without relating them. Some-times they’re on torn pieces of paper. . . . i wanted that album to go with the “Glass,” and to be consulted when seeing the “Glass” because, as i see it, it mustnotbe“lookedat”intheaestheticsenseoftheword.Onemustconsultthebook,andseethetwotogether.TheconjunctionofthetwothingsentirelyremovestheretinalaspectthatIdon’tlike.Itwasverylogical.[Duchamp, qtd. in cabanne 42–43]

placed in this infrarepresentational space, the Large Glass stages a paradoxical event: a “blossoming” (épanouissement) of the desire of the “bride” in the upper panel, and a “dazzling” (éblouissement) of the gas, metamorphosed into liquid and light, of her nine “bachelors” (the “malic moulds”) gathered below in the lower panel, amidst a bizarre me-chanical apparatus: a “chocolate grinder,” a “water mill” mounted on a “sliding chariot,” “scissors” and “capillary tubes,” “sieves,” and “oculist charts” engraved on the glass by Duchamp using a scalpel. Stripped by the short-circuit generated by the contact of her desire and the gas flow of the bachelors, the bride drops her dress on the “garment line”—the upper one of three strips of glass that separate the two panels—and explodes into the aerial forms of the upper part: “hanging female,” “wasp,” “milky way,” a “meteorological extension.”14 in his scribbled notes, Duchamp defines as “virtual” the images on the Large Glass: “The reflection (virtual images) in a mirror” [Writings 48]. Why are these images virtual and not mimetically specular, as in the case of the art-historical images that sustain the repre-sentational possibility of traditional artworks? At a thematic level, the work is organized according to a rigid dualism which clearly reproduces the Bergsonian distinction between the actual and virtual: the upper and lower halves are exchanged with one another like the actual (the actions of the bachelors, subject to the laws of causality) and the virtual (the “body without organs” of the bride). the three transparent stripes of glass that separate the two panels are a further indica-tion that Duchamp, following Bergson, considers the actual and the virtual as incongru-ent, different in kind, nonsynthesizable polarities:

Let me repeat, then, an explanation i suggested in Matter and Memory. the memoryseemstobetotheperceptionwhattheimagereflectedinthemirroristotheobjectinfrontofit.Theobjectcanbetouchedaswellasseen;actson

14. the most comprehensive description of the large glass is provided by suquet.

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Fig. 1: M. duchamp, fountain. signed “r. MUTT,1917.”OriginalphotographedbyAlfredStieglitzafter the1917Societyof IndependentArtists exhibit.

Fig. 2: M. duchamp, the Bride stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even (the large glass),1915–23.Oil,var-nish,leadfoil,leadwire,anddustontwoglasspanels.9feet1¼inchesx69¼inches(277.5x175.9cm).ThePhiladelphia Museum of Art.

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usaswellasweonit;ispregnantwithpossibleactions;itisactual.Theimageis virtual, and though it resembles the object, it is incapable of doing what the object does. [Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition” 165]

however, again following Bergson, Duchamp maintains that the actual and the virtual coexist simultaneously; they belong to the tense, impure existence of things. like this paradoxical life, the Large Glass is an impossible object, a nonrepresentational marriage between the mechanical power of the bachelors and the ultradimensional powerlessness of the bride. given this Bergsonian topology, Duchamp’s readymades are conceived as mechanisms for escaping the laws of representation and interweaving the virtual and the actual while at the same time preserving their heterogeneous natures. In order to distinguish this apparatus from the “mirage” of possibility, Duchamp introduces the neologism “mirrorical reflection” (renvoi miroirique) [Writings 63, 65]. a “mirrorical reflection” is a disjunctive operation: “the separation [écart] is an operation” [qtd. in Cabanne 49]. The bride and the bachelors reflect each other mirrorically, through a system of multiple operations—optical, geometrical, metaphysical, and pataphysical—that produce both the communication and the autonomy of the two dimensions. All the operations that belong to the grammar of the mirrorical reflection, accumulat-ed by Duchamp on the glass and in his notes, can be reduced to a fundamental mechanism which contains the genetic matrix of the Large Glass: delay. the Large Glass is a “delay in glass”: “use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass—but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass—” [Writings 26]. Delay is the temporal dimension of the readymade. the constructive practice of delay is the hidden logic of the readymades, which ac-counts for their positive relationship with virtuality and points toward the overcoming of their enigmatic existence outside the boundaries of art-historical representation. “By planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute), ‘to inscribe a Readymade’—the Readymade can later be looked for—(with all kinds of delays). the important thing is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendez-vous” [Writings 32]. the instructions that integrate the visual appearance of the readymades and the careful planning of the works are not universal schemes. their performance is activated exclusively by a postponement in which the object enters the logic of a conjunc-tive separation, becoming a “kind of rendezvous,” a work that is readymade only under certain unpredictable conditions: “delay itself is the pure form of time in which before and after coexist” [Deleuze, difference and repetition 124]. this timing, which depends on chance and subjective dispositions inscribed in the structural fabric of the work—for instance the unfinished nature of the readymades—deconceptualize the retinal consistency of the work, dislocating art in the indeterminate unfolding of the tension between waiting and resolution, expectation and fulfillment, vir-tuality and actuality. the Duchampian logic of deferment, which transforms each work into a puzzling object, simultaneously present and retarded, and multiplied into a vertiginous number of operations, is understandable exclusively against the background of the Bergsonian conception of duration. according to Bergson, duration is what replaces the illusory non-dimensionality of the present with an “elastic” bloc of segments that coexist within an operational dynamism. these segments comprise a temporal span; they last, because they are tensed up between the immanent polarities of the powerless past and the active pres-ent. like the readymade, a bloc of duration continuously frustrates the instantaneity of the present. We don’t need to speculate about Duchamp’s awareness of this vocabulary. in his most explicit confession of his debt to Bergsonism, the posthumous notes to the Large

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Glass, Duchamp cites duration—although with a question mark—describing it as the coexistence of past and future fractions of temporality: “—in each fraction of duration (?) all / future and antecedent fractions are reproduced—All these past and future frac-tions / thus coexist in a present which is / really no longer what one usually calls / the instant present, but a sort of / present of multiple extensions—” [Marcel duchamp: Notes 135n]. here lies the secret of Duchamp’s rejection of works of art in the name of readymade works. if the images of traditional art are inextricably linked to the myth of an instant present—the present of production and reception, of interpretation and communication, of marketing and taste—Duchamp’s conversion to the Bergsonian logic of delay trans-forms artworks into nonrepresentational works of multiple extensions. Because of the inscription of the operations of deferral, the readymade enters the territory of the Bergso-nian durée, becoming a continuous multiplicity; a perceptible object and yet something which is no longer what we assume an artwork to be. It is an answer to the question: “Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” Duplicated into diverging series of sensations and information, opticality and textual instructions, the works-delay of Duchamp are accompanied by a suspended visuality. the Large Glass is exposed to the law of impossibility. if memory consists of a freestanding presence of the past—in a subject as memory, in an artwork as iconographic stratifica-tion—the readymade prescribes amnesia. the cognitive dislocation triggered by Duch-amp’s postponements is contrasted to the “stupidity” of the eye, generating an unstable field of perception. The readymade eviscerates the eye’s power of assimilation. in order to elude the immediacy of vision, Bataille deprives the eye of its optical capacities and makes it a “pineal eye” [see Bataille]. Duchamp selects a Bergsonian ap-proach and inserts a mirror into the objects. the specularity of the Large Glass carries out the same function that Bergson assigns to mirrors each and every time he makes refer-ence to them in his texts: it subdivides the instant into two incongruent series, the virtual and the actual.15 the intellectual expression of Duchamp’s art corresponds to the pecu-liar impure texture assigned to images by Bergson, more than a representation but less than a thing, “an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 9]. the readymade stands in between, at the intersection of pure memory and perception, it is neither empirical nor abstract, neither objective nor subjective. Duchamp’s works are suspended images, a mix of virtuality and actuality. consequently the Large Glass is not a painting but a mirror-machine in which the virtual and the actual communicate at their limits. Based upon an elaborate apparatus of non-representational operations, the Large Glass becomes a labyrinth of mirroring functions that suspend the work’s presence and the instantaneity of its fruition, delaying immediacy without introducing symbolic mediations. the virtual is a postponement of the appoint-ment with sense, it empties time of all interiority and spaces temporality.

Body

“Suppose there are so many kinds of possible action for my body: there must be an equal number of systems of reflection for other bodies; each of these systems will be just what

15. “our actual existence then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited. or rather, it consists in this very splitting, for the present moment, always going forward,fleetinglimitbetweentheimmediatepastwhichisnownomoreandtheimmediatefuturewhich is not yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually re-flectsperceptionasamemory”[Bergson,“MemoryofthePresentandFalseRecognition”165].

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is perceived by one of my senses. My body, then, acts like an image which reflects others, and which, in so doing, analyzes them along lines corresponding to the different actions which it can exercise upon them” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 49]. as in Bergson, im-ages in the Large Glass are not modeled on the reflexive logics of representation. They are movements: the mechanical automatism and material “spontaneity” of the lower re-gion, the “pulsation” and meteorological “vibrations” of the bride. Images are the site of the object’s implosion, of its vivisection in nonoverlapping parts. the Large Glass is an impossible body, like the bride’s nongeometric shape: “In the bride, the principal forms are more or less large or small, have no longer, in relation to their destination, a mensura-bility” [Duchamp, Writings 44]. in Bergson images escape binary logics, since they release their effects only by being captured by the central machinery of the biological body.16 as in spinoza, images are af-fections of the body, imagines vel corporis affectiones. in the Large Glass, the bride—a temporalized body delayed in the fourth dimension—is selected as the “life center” of the work. Given the movemental consistency of images, according to Bergson “the in-determination of the movements . . . will express itself in a reflection upon themselves or, better, in a division, of the images that surround our body” [Matter and Memory 64]. accordingly, the Large Glass is conceived by Duchamp as a “dizziness” [Writings 50], an apparatus of dissimilation of the body of the bride. The bride is a “thermic machine” activated by the onanistic actions of the bachelors; the warm rejection that she opposes against the desire of the bachelors triggers a short circuit from which arises a spark that ignites the gas of the bachelors. the bride undresses herself, sets down her dress on the upper transversal, and explodes into “freed forms”: pendue femelle, wasp, milky way, garment, top inscription. in the lower region

...agas(whoseoriginisunknown)iscastintheMalicMouldsintotheshapesofnine bachelors. the Gas escapes from the Moulds through the capillary tubes, whereitisfrozenandcutintospanglesandthenconvertedintoasemi-solidfog.TheCapillaryTubesleadtheSpanglestotheopeningofthefirstSieve.SuckedbytheButterflyPump,theSpanglespassthroughtheSevenSieves,andintheprocess they condense into a liquid suspension. the liquid suspension falls into the toboggan and “crashes” at its base. [Schwarz 37]

lucia Beier has called the attention to the surprising resemblance that Bergson’s thermo-dynamic description of the élan vital17 carries to the tortuous energetic trajectory of the bachelors’ gas in the Large Glass. like the élan vital’s evolutionary differentiation, the flowing energy of the bachelors undergoes a differentiation in order to pass into the upper region; in Duchamp’s terminology, the “illuminating gas” of the bachelors, transformed into liquid spangles and splashes, is “dazzled” by the oculist charts. The continuity of the élan is fragmented by a system of feedbacks: “The mirrorical drops not the drops them-selves but their image pass between these 2 states of the same figure” [Writings 65].

16.“Here,inthemidstofalltheimages,thereisacertainimagewhichItermmybodyandofwhichthevirtualactionrevealsitselfbyanapparentreflectionofthesurroundingimagesuponthemselves” [Writings 48]. 17.“steamescapingathighpressurethroughcracksinacontainer...‘thesteamthrownintotheairisnearlyallcondensedintolittledropswhichfallbackandthisfallrepresentssimplythelossofsomething,aninterruption,adeficit’”[Beier198].

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Virtual

“More generally, in that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present mo-ment is constituted by a quasi-instantaneous section [coupe] effected by our perception in the flowing mass, and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our body occupies its center” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 139]. according to Bergson, everyday perception operates through functional cuts, interruptions of movements whose purpose is to act efficaciously on external matter. Because of their utilitarian simplicity, these quasi-instantaneous cuts are responsible for the illusion of the nondimensionality of the instant. given these presuppositions, Duchamp envisions a new art of cutting, a practice of interruptions that carries out the task assigned by Bergson to art: the extension of per-ception, the expansion of the human sensorial body, the construction of a new topology of the virtual. the observations contained in TheWhiteBox illustrate the geometry of virtual images of the Large Glass. the apparatus is based on a mirror-machine whose cuts generate, in accordance with the theories of Dedekind and poincaré, n-dimensional geometric spaces.18 To begin with, the bride is a projection of a four-dimensional reality: “and my bride for example would be a tri-dimensional projection of a quadri-dimensional bride. Very good. But as it’s on glass, it’s plane, and so my bride is the bi-dimensional representa-tion of a tri-dimensional bride who is herself the projection of the quadri-dimensional bride into the tri-dimensional world.”19 the virtuality that surrounds the two-dimensional elements of the Large Glass is the result of a progressive spatial demultiplication of the bride’s n-dimensional essence, sustained by the laws of geometric projection. fur-thermore, the Large Glass is marked by a transformative specularity. Duchamp is not interested, like Derrida, in crossing the mirror and rendering the bottom transparent to philosophical reflection. the Large Glass is not a “mirror of a mirror” [Derrida, dis-semination 317] but a mirror-machine, not a phenomenological mirror but a Bergsonian mirror. The two regions reflect one another disjunctively. “Perhaps make a hinge picture. (folding yardstick, book) develop the principle of the hinge in the displacements 1st in the plane 2nd in the space. Find an automatic description of the hinge” [Derrida, dissemina-tion 26]. an indivisible machination, the Large Glass functions as a hinge that articulates the separation-operation of the bride and the bachelors. together with delays and cuts, Duchamp exploits the principle of incongruence—symmetry and yet nonsuperimposibility of shapes onto the plane. for instance, the right and the left hands are incongruent since, in order to overlap, it is necessary to make them rotate in a three-dimensional space; merely transporting them onto a plane is in-sufficient.20 the Large Glass applies this principle to the bride. if, in order to remove incongruence in a two-dimensional space, it is necessary to introduce a rotation around a hinge that produces a higher dimension, the “incongruence between volumes would re-quire that you have at your disposal a fourth dimension, one that might be suggested by a tri-dimensional mirror, for instance, a mirror with three faces that all reflect one another” [Lyotard 60].

18.ForDuchamp’ssourcesonthefourthdimensionseeinparticularCraigAdcock,marcel Duchamp’s notes from the large glass: an n-Dimensional analysis. Dedekind’scutsaremen-tioned by duchamp in À l’Infinitif (the White Box);seeWritings of marcel Duchamp 94.OnDu-champandPoincaréseeAdcock,“ConventionalisminHenriPoincaréandMarcelDuchamp.” 19.DuchamptoGeorgeandRichardHamilton,quotedinLyotard,Duchamp’s TRANS/form-ers 88. 20.OntheKantianandBergsonianapproachtoincongruence,seeHeidesiek,henri Bergson et la notion d’espace 52.

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in accordance with this geometry, the two regions are connected by three strips of glass. The median bar acts as a hinge between the upper strip (the “garment” of the bride) and the lower strip (the “horizon” of the bachelors, the vanishing point of their geometric projection). a central body-hinge is added to the spaces of the bachelors and the bride; a mirror of three faces that sustains the incongruence between the two regions, triggering the virtuality of the work. Due to this purely operational function, the transversals are totally transparent and devoid of iconographic inscriptions.21

in addition to the principle of incongruence, the three transversals perform the func-tion of cut of the virtual volumes of the two spaces of the Large Glass. Duchamp con-ceives the transversals also as traces of the power of cut that, in the n-dimensional ge-ometry of Dedekind, creates dimensions of higher order.22 if a three-dimensional space is intersected by a two-dimensional surface, a three-dimensional boundary is needed for cutting a four-dimensional extension, the virtual region in which the bride’s saga takes place. the hinge of the Large Glass is at the same time a boundary of three faces that reduces spatial incongruences and a mirror-cut endowed with the power of connecting spaces of heterogeneous dimensionality. as a result of these operations, the Large Glass is placed in an aporetic spatiality, which corresponds to the topology of the Bergsonian “present of multiple extensions.” the event-delay of the Large Glass is not a representation but the construction of the paradoxical vitality of the bride.

circuit

“If our organs are natural instruments, our instruments must then be artificial organs” [Bergson, two sources 298]. Bergson moves away from empiricism and idealism and inaugurates an ontology of technical creativity: “The workman’s tool is the continua-tion of his arm, the tool-equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of its body” [298]. Duchamp renounces “splashing paint on the canvas” and devotes himself to a “dry conception of art” obtained with mechanical techniques: “I was beginning to appreciate the value of the exactness, of precision, and the importance of chance. . . . a mechanical drawing has no taste in it”23

Bergson’s artificial organs and Duchamp’s bride-engine occupy a hybrid space, an epistemological territory marked by the continuity of bodies and machines. What is relevant for both is the dysfunction of technology. the physical limitation of our body “maintains in a virtual state anything likely to hamper the action by becoming real” [two sources 303]. Hence, it is only when the body-machine falters that the confinement of our lived space is broken, opening up a broader virtual territory, expanding the “structural plan” of our species: “If these mechanisms get out of order, the door which they kept shut opens a little way: there enters in something of a ‘without’ which may be a ‘beyond’”

21.HereItakeupthesupportingelementsofLyotard’sinterpretation[Lyotard87–97].CraigAdcockconnectsDuchamp’scharnière (hinge)toGirardDesargues’sstudiesonperspective;seeAdcock,“TheIntersectionofArtandGeometry.” 22. “there were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-euclidean ge-ometry.Butmost viewswereamateurish.Metzingerwasparticularlyattracted.And forallourmisunderstandings through these new ideas we were helped to get away from the conventional way ofspeaking—fromourcaféandstudioplatitudes”[Writings 126]. 23. Writings 130,134.“LookingattheworksofallthreeDuchampbrothers...JamesJohn-sonSweeneynotedthatperhapstheonlyqualitycommonintheirworkswasthattheywere‘in-exact,butprecise’”[Marquis,MarcelDuchamp62].Theprecisionof intuition isa leitmotifofBergson’sphilosophy;seeinparticularBergson,“PhilosophicalIntuition.”

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[304]. The “conspicuous failure to function” of the Large Glass presupposes this dys-functional positivity: “the Large Glass is an elaborate trip to nowhere: not only is the erotic encounter between motorized bride and mechanical bachelor never consummated, the apparatuses themselves have no rational program” [Joselit 112]. Like Bergson’s marriage of “mechanics and mysticism” [two sources 255–306], Duchamp’s virtual machines have no connection with an ideological representation of industrial mechanization. on the contrary, they grow on the nonhumanistic soil of tech-nological vitalism. neither Bergson nor Duchamp celebrates the myth of progress and rationalization, or attacks reification from a critical perspective: the pathological behavior of society, like a broken machinery, offers them an unprecedented chance of emancipa-tion. In Bergson, capitalistic mechanization is an infirmity that reveals the power of our “tool-making intelligence”; in Duchamp, the destructuring force of the readymade is the logical conclusion that he draws “from the dehumanization of the work of art” [Writings 134]. in Matter and Memory, Bergson provides a description of the “electrical circuit” of perception: “reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the per-ceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit” [104]. Finding itself immersed in a circuit whose polarities are the actual and the virtual, each object belongs concurrently to the virtuality of memory and the actuality of percep-tion. the mirrorical return accomplishes this movement of perception, as the operation that couples every object in a circuit of reflective virtuality and readymade inertia. the Large Glass is a twofold object, a thing already made and virtualized, a piece of reality that has swallowed a mirror and splits itself up: high and low, bride and bachelors, desire and necessity, freed temporality and geometric spatiality. the fundamental property of the mirrorical return is the dissimilation of representation. “Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited” [Bergson, “Memory of the Present” 16]. The mirrorical weakens our principle of reality. the metaphysical machinery of Bergsonism bounces back in the anamorphic mir-ror of the Large Glass. the virtual images of the bride appear like a repercussion of the sudden arrest of the clumsy mechanical apparatus of the bachelors. the blocked-off machination of the bachelors releases the sparks that shatter the actuality of the object, the stripped virgin becomes a hung woman, the bride is abruptly undressed by the bachelors’ desire. “The bride basically is a motor. But before being a motor which transmits her timid-power.—she is this very timid power” [Writings 42]. immersed in the impotence of the virtual, the Large Glass is “powerless as long as it remains without utility” [Matter and Memory 140–41]. Being a machination and not a static mechanism, the (anti)artistic productivity of the Large Glass is activated by the collision between the timidity of the virtual and the cutting power of the actual. in between, the hinge is a caesura around which time is scat-tered, a cracking that transforms the experiential temporality of the present into a formal distribution of the unequal, resolving the dilemma faced by Duchamp upon his futurist debut: the static presentation of movement.

Machine

“Art—this is nothing more than a word to which nothing real any longer corresponds” [Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art” 17]. Heidegger’s radical verdict on Western art’s mission parallels Duchamp’s antiaesthetics. for both, the only legitimate function of art is self-reduction to its conditions of existence,24 a task that must be accomplished through

24. “reduce, reduce, reduce, was my thought” [Writings 124].

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a genealogical inquiry into the technological essence of art. thus, Duchamp conceives the readymade as a “dehumanization of the work of art” obtained through the use of mechanical techniques [Writings 134], and heidegger establishes an equation between technology and art, between art as the nontechnological ground of technology and tech-nology as the worldly destiny of art.25

Like Duchamp, Heidegger regards experience as “the element in which art dies” [“Origin of the Work of Art” 79]. Duchamp’s avant-gardism and Heidegger’s ontology converge in the sublation of the stability of art’s epistemological province: sensible ap-pearance. yet the heideggerian work of art, like a time machine, deploys a temporality oriented toward a future epoch, while Duchamp’s readymade rests in quietist passivity. heidegger’s art-work is an inaugural center, the beginning of a world always already instituted; Duchamp’s implosion of aesthetic norms overturns the exploding prophetism of auratic art. the readymade evicts the representational circuit of physicality and historicity and orients art toward the anaesthetic; heidegger’s work of art establishes a historical world, transports “a people into its appointed task” [“Origin of the Work of Art” 77]. However, both of these logics deprive the work of art of its schein. What may be said about art are “ironies of affirmation” [Writings 30] or prophetic enigmas. if art is an ontological conun-drum, the task of interpretation “is to see the riddle” [Writings 79]. Following Hölderlin, Heidegger elaborates an ontology of the “mirror-play” that re-formulates the speculative dialectic of self-reflection:26

Earthandsky,divinitiesandmortals—beingatonewithoneanotherof theirown accord—belong together by way of the simpleness of the united fourfold. each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. each there-withreflectsitselfinitsownwayintoitsown,withinthesimplenessofthefour.Thismirroringdoesnotportrayalikeness.Themirroring,lighteningeachofthefour, appropriates their own presencing into simple belonging to one another. Mirroring in this appropriating-lightening way, each of the four plays to each of the others. the appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another. [“The Thing” 179]

25.“Because the essenceof technology is nothing technological, essential reflectionupontechnologyanddecisiveconfrontationwithitmusthappeninarealmthatis,ontheonehand,akinto the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. such a realm is art” [Heidegger,“TheQuestionConcerningTechnology”35]. 26.JacquesDerridahasconnectedHeideggerianspecularitytothemethapysicalimplicationsofStephaneMallarmé’slexiconofthemirrorical;seeDerrida,“TheDoubleSession.”BecauseofMallarmé’sinfluenceonDuchamp,andalsothenumerousaffinitiesbetweenBergson’sthoughtandMallarmé’s poetics, derrida’s theory of specularity resonates with quasi-duchampian overtones: coupure,duplications,screenings,delays.Likethe large glass, derrida’s mirrors are “unusual,” “germinal,”and“deforming.”LongcitationsfromHeidegger’s“TheThing”and“BuildingDwell-ingThinking”are introducedbyDerrida inorder to capture thehesitationsof specularityandsketchoutanontologyofdivertedreflection[Derrida,Dissemination 316].YetloyaltytoMallarméiscounterbalancedbytheHusserlianmatrixthatleadsDerridatoaquasi-transcendentaltheoryofthespeculative.JustasinHusserlthecutoftranscendentalreductionopensuptherealmofcon-science, in derrida a rupture in the mirror sustains the deconstruction of representative mimetism. Derrida’smirror“takesplace”;aperturescrackitsneutralsurface.Theformallawsofreflectionandtheempiricaltainofthemirroraresimultaneouslyaccessibletoahyperphilosophicalreflexiv-ity:“Theworldcomprehendsthemirrorwhichcapturesitandviceversa”[316].ForDuchamp’scomments on Mallarmé’s poetics of “delay,” see cabanne, Dialogues with marcel Duchamp 40.

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Heidegger’s mirrors do not reflect things in symbols or symbols in concepts. The image multiplies itself in the mirror-play of the “fourfold.” Likewise, Duchamp’s readymades incorporate a mechanism that delays the self-constitution of the object without reflecting a transcendent reality. abandoning the work to the cuts and delays of the mirrorical, the readymade constructs its topology by dissociating from itself. the art of Duchamp does not disclose the “worldness of the world” (Heidegger) nor does it dissolve its presence into a quasi-transcendental logic of self-reflexivity (Derrida). By delaying the objectual-ity of the objects, Duchamp’s readymades conserve their impossibility and rest in their hesitation. Duchamp’s mirrorical needs neither an observer that compensates for the “stupidity” of the specular gap nor a dialectical link of incorporation between thing and image. it calls for the invention of an art of indifference that defeats the symbolic power of visual representations. the Large Glass is the manifesto of an aesthetics without art and of an ontology of the work as a movement of delay. hence its constructive appearance and its innocence: Duchamp does not need to excuse himself from the aesthetic tradition, as-saulting it with obstinate dialectical overcomings (hermeneutics) or interminable mises en abyme (deconstruction).27 since Duchampian mirrors are machines, they abandon all dialectics and embrace a constructivism of postponement: “The partition wall of a mirror is a machine fed by the objects that are presented to it and that produces other objects, the images that it reflects.”28 Given: 1° the Waterfall, 2° the illuminating Gas, Duchamp’s last major project, sums up his approach to art. neither painting nor sculpture, it is simultaneously a machine and delayed work. Delivered to posterity together with a sequence of notes in a manual of instructions, the work’s existence is provocatively exposed to the sinful gaze of its spectators, who must look through two peepholes in a weathered wooden door. like a seventeenth-century optical device, it is a “vision machine” [see Johnston], a receptacle of carefully studied perceptive illusions and conceptual tricks.29 Diseased with Berg-sonism, the art of Duchamp splits itself up. The fifty objects defined by Duchamp as readymade are two-headed entities: “unhappy,” “reciprocal,” “rectified,” “aided,” “sick” readymades. Together with “readymade,” the enigmatic term used by Duchamp in order to illus-trate his practice of art is inframince (infrathin).30 if the presence-to-itself of the work is obstructed by the tricky delays of the readymades; if the immediacy of the readymades is operated by separations that multiply their consistency, it is what happens in between perceptions and words, kinesis (the narrative dynamism of the Large Glass), and immo-bility (the crystallized images on the glass) that is selected by Duchamp as the elective territory for its art. the infrathin is precisely this intermomentaneous terrain, a Bergso-nian interval: “In the living mobility of things, the understanding is bent on marking real and virtual stations. it notes departures and arrivals. it is more than human to grasp what is happening in the interval” [Bergson, introduction to Metaphysics 77].

27.Thetransparenceofthe large glass gets around both the deconstructionist logic of tra-scendentalizationofpresenceandthespeculativedialecticattributedbyhermeneuticstospecta-torialsubjectivity:“FollowingausagethatwecanfindinHegel,wecallwhatiscommontothemetaphysical and the hermeneutical dialectic the ‘speculative element.’ Theword ‘speculative’herereferstothemirrorrelation.Beingreflectedinvolvesaconstantsubstitutionofonethingforanother. . . . the mirror image is essentially connected with the actual sight of the thing through the medium of the observer. it has no being of its own” [Gadamer, truth and method 465–66]. 28.Lyotard51.Inthe logic of sense, DeleuzehasdevelopedanovertlyBergsonianontologyof mirroring. 29.OntheBaroquegenealogyofmachineaestheticsseeCarrouges;andLuisetti. 30. on the inframince, see in particular duchamp’s last set of published notes, notes, notes 1–46.

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no longer an epiphany of meaning, Duchamp’s works are an experimental labora-tory for testing the paradoxes of immanence. since their existence depends primarily on operations of delay that penetrate the representational veil of everyday perception, they initiate an emancipative topology of objectuality, a “more than human” art of the in-between, immunized from the authority of the history of images. the readymades’ infrarepresentational intervals are the abyss that has altered all the categories, materials, techniques, and objectives of art.

translated by david sharp

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