Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles a Tous les Etages. Volume 1. Text. Glyn Thompson. Submitted in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Ph. D. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. September 2008. The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own work and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. Acknowledgements. I should like to thank the following individuals and organisations who have assisted me in the production of this submission. My supervisors at the University of Leeds, Dr.Alexandra Parigoris and Christopher Taylor. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies, for waiving my course fees, and providing me with the opportunity to test my thesis on the students I have been honoured to teach, on a variety of modules, including ARTF 3157: Duchamp and After, and for financial support for attendance at conferences in Helsinki in 2006 (LA.P.L.) and Gothenburg (Leeds-Helsinki­ Gothenburg Fine Art Research as Practice group), 2008. Doctor Will Rae, for the sympathetic reception of my preliminary submission. Professor M McQuillan for his constant encouragement. Professor V Green and Dr B Eng for their valuable observations. The staff in the Documents Provision section of the Boddington Library. Nigel Walsh of the Leeds City Art Gallery, for offering me the opportunity to mount the exhibition Jemandem ein R Mutt's zeugnis ausstellen, Spring/Summer 2008. Christopher Taylor, of The Wild Pansy Press, for publishing Jemanden ein R Mutt's zeugnis ausstellen, Monsieur Goldfinch, April 2008. Mr J Spalding, late director of the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, Dr. G Hearn of the Leeds College of Music and Mr D and Mrs D Claiden. Mrs Monique Fong-Wust, for generously sharing her personal knowledge of Duchamp, the man, and his milieu, including Andre Breton, John Cage and Octavio Paz. My daughters, Lucy and Flora Thompson. Abstract. Practice is defined as the exercise of a method or profession, and a treatise. Practise is defined as to practise tricks or artifices upon; to act upon by artifice so as to induce to do or believe something: to impose upon, delude: to make trial of, practically. The practise that my practice reconstitutes was characterised by its executor, Duchamp, not as irony, ironie, but ironisme, the deployment of irony in debate. Socratic irony is defined as feigning ignorance in order to confute an enemy in debate. Irony is saying the opposite of what you mean. Duchamp's practice of the practise of ironisme did not then manifest itself in an art questioning its own conditions, by dissemblance, as is popularly believed, although it appeared to. The 'ironic' art which has been taken as the product of Duchamp's practice was then merely an allegorical appearance, since allegory, saying one thing and meaning something else, is cousin-germane to irony. Duchamp criticism has been informed by such misconceptions to the extent that, as late as 1989, David Hopkins, in his review of Kuenzli and Naumann's Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century could still point to the need for "a full length study of Duchamp which convincingly contextualises his de-essentializing project, rather than blithely using it as a pretext for exercising contemporary critical strategies." 1 Table of Contents. Text. Page Preface: A and B. 01 1. Epistemology: Research as Practice. 10 2. Ekphrastics and Forensics: Hermeneutics. 22 3. Pragmatics: Duchamp's Milieu. 26 4. Linguistics and Philology: Roussel's Method. 53 5. Allegorical Emblematics: Laforgue. 84 6. Metaphysics: Occult Munich. 110 7. Semeiological signatures: Semiotics. 151 8. End-game: Terminal considerations. 167 Illustrations. 170 References. 173 Bibliography. 186 Key to the Pronunciation. 198 1 Preface A. Guide-tine: Instruction manual. [ = Content.] Traces by means of which a donkey is lead. [= Allegorical appearance.] 1. The structure of the text The following text is not a description of the practice, but participates in it, as an expression of the fonn of the practice. The structure of that text is predicated on the necessity to inscribe the indetenninate status of its subject, Duchamp's subject and practice, in the fonn of a practice which consequently assumes that indetenninate status. Duchamp's subject matter was the Occult, whose indetenninate status, in 1912, rested on the question of the legitimacy of competing claims to its epistemological grounding, from science, pyschology, popular occultism, state religion, etc. This indetenninacy was an attribute of the antinomy inscribed in the shift in the grounding of Duchamp's practice, post-Munich 1912, which constituted a transfer in the site of truth from the sovereign authorship of the divine 'Orphic' artist to the higher authority deferred to in enunciation by a mere 'media-mystic' being. This antinomian indetenninacy was itself rhetorically inscribed in the shift in the grounding of my fonner practice as a consequence of its submission to the academic protocols of a Doctorate in Research as Fine Art Practice. This fonner practice was prompted by an art historical enquiry taking for its pretext an observation - of the fact of a radical change in fonn of Duchamp's post­ Munich 1912 enunciation. This observation required no special art historical or 'artistic' training, expertise or intuition. Thus it is the process of the inscription of one antinomy within another which my practice seeks to elucidate. The epistemological antinomy arising from Duchamp's post-Munich practice appears to have been noticed by one person other than myself, Jean Claire. 2 The engine of the multi-layered antinomy which the form of my practice subsumes is homophonic coincidence, the working tool which Duchamp acquired from Raymond Roussel; 'antinomy' is a homophonic inversion of Antimony - Stibium, Stibnite, the alchemist's 'Wolf in the Crucible', the powdered essence of kohl, Baudelaire's black eye-make-up, a veritable Powder of Projection, if ever there was one: the word 'kohl' derives from the Arabic, al-koh'l, (collyrium,) meaning 'distilled essence', from which, fortunately for Apollinaire, the word alcool derives. Alchemical transmutation, a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment via initiation and intuition, is the subject of Duchamp's work post-1910, and of Apollinaire's Alcools. The deferral of the epistemological grounding of Duchamp's practice to the higher authority of the Philo sophia Perennis, which his post-Munich change of enunciation represents, (confirmed in his abdication of the avant-garde,) was then the pretext for, and requirement of, the deferral of the grounding of my formerly exclusive 'art' practice to the higher authority of the institution of a university within which Fine Art and Art Historical practices cohabit. The indeterminate status ofDuchamp's new practice, inscribing that of his subject, subsequently mistakenly regarded by the critical community as remaining subject to avant-garde aesthetics, is then inscribed in a location of my practice at the interface between the critical practices of Art Historical and Fine Art made institutionally possible by the perpetuation of an epistemological antinomy whose origins, in the 17th century, (coinciding with that ofDuchamp's subject and practice,) resided in the conflicting epistemological claims of the Philosophy of Science and Occult Science on the meaning of experience of the world. Like Duchamp, the translocation of my practice submits the status of intuitively acquired experience and opinion to the rigours of its testing as socially constructed 'objective' knowledge grounded in the factual nature of the historical subject, the sine qua non of the epistemological claims of, in my case, academe, and Duchamp's, (which ever esoteric community whose needs he satisfied.) Thus the praxis, the imbrication of theory in practice, which this translocation affords me, thus legitimises and makes possible the evaluation of the rival claims made by authorial 3 identity and enunciation in Duchamp's own praxis - but only when inscribed rhetorically within my own. It is then apposite that a university, like a Masonic Lodge which, like its namesake, the artist's atelier, is both a meeting place and the company which meets in it, is variously defined as a corporation or community; a whole body, a guild of masters or scholars: a whole body of teachers and students pursuing the higher branches of learning: such persons associated together as a corporate body, having the power to confer degrees or other privileges: and the whole universe. 2. The form of the text. The rhetorical form of Duchamp's parabolic notes, being a model of his practice, is then a model of mine. The authorisation for my writing in different manners came from my supervisor, Alex Parigoris, who simultaneously stressed the character of my public utterances - the one imbricated in the other. Thus the epistemological antinomy expressed in the Fine Art/Art History dichotomy is inscribed in competing analytical, descriptive and discursive forms of expression, a result of which is the privileging of enunciation. For example, in order to inscribe the Rousellian origins ofDuchamp's hypertextual semantic structures, the form of my text must display a promiscuous, and, seemingly, at times, arbitrary, vacillation between different textual fields, through the use of the same architectonic parenthetical devices; it must, for example, assume the right to the" delirium of mutability" haunting the 'onion skins containing onion skins containing onion skins' noted by Hugill in Roussel's texts. It must then also emulate Stirner's method of "proceeding by assertion rather than argument, to insist on rather than demonstrate" noted by Leopold - as, for example, in the" Hegelian expression that property is selfhood (as revealed in the coincidence between) Eigentum and Eigenheidt".