In The Beginnings of Thought: The Fundamental Experience in Derrida and Deleuze(1) Leonard Lawler posits that the point of diffraction between Derrida and Deleuze is thin to a point at which diffraction disappears in that both are philosophers of “immanence”.(2) Simulacrum in Deleuze is a ‘becoming’, and in Derrida it is “doubled between presence and non-presence”.(3) Marcel Duchamp’s play on simulacra in his art, moving well beyond Walter Benjamin, refines and retards time as that indefinite poetic which in Deleuze and Derrida Lawler describes as ‘nonsense’:

“for Deleuze, nonsense is immediately sense, and yet is divided from sense; for Derrida, nonsense is mediately sense and yet is united with sense”.(4)

Temporality expressed as division and unification defines Duchamp’s notes to the Glass and from his Glass to other works explored in his Boîte en valise: many new exegetes on Deleuze’s notion ‘immanence’ accommodate proliferating flexibilities between readers’ inventive states and art, and privilege language as thought-in-movement and change as Duchamp, Joyce and Derrida do and in which simulacrum has come to suggest a pure and ‘poetic’ resolution of time as non-transcendental presence and non-presence:

“For Derrida, that Husserl calls retention ‘non-perception’ implies that Husserl recognises that ‘the eye closes’, that is, that retention consists in a non-presence. For Derrida, re-tenti on has always already re-peated something that is no longer present. As Derrida says, ‘...the ideality of form (Form) of presence itself implies that it can be infinitely re-peatable, that its re-turn, as a return of the same is necessary to infinity and is inscribed in presence itself”.(5)

The obliteration of hierarchy between image and original is that internalisation of difference in the simulacrum itself; thus as Duchamp - tongue-in-cheek - queries:

“Sameness / similarity /The same (mass.prod.)/practical approximation of similarity. In Time the same object is not the / same after a 1 second interval - what / Relations with the identity principle?”.(6)

The tactility of this disingenuous question arises from Duchamp’s accumulative treatment of his manuscripts that are “illuminated” by Duchamp’s visual works; also, as Anne d’Harnoncourt has suggested: “one might as well say: the possibility of two scrawled words becoming a Duchamp ...” follows from Duchamp’s initial note:

“The possible is / an infra-thin - / The possibility of several/tubes of colour / becoming a Seurat is / the concrete ‘explanation’ / of the possible as infra/thin / The poss ible implying / the becoming – the passage from / one to the other takes place / in the infra thin. allegory on ‘forgetting’”.(7)

Duchamp’s infrathins and infra-thicknesses operate at the level of Derrida’s undecidables or nonconcepts like gram, blanc and simulacrum from which no third term arises, and aesthetically are in tune generically with Derrida and Joyce’s texts, forming images of circularity and return:

“Painting on glass / seen from the unpainted side / gives an infra / thin” –
“allegory of oblivion”
“Hollow paper (infra-thin space / and yet without there being / 2 sheets”).(8)

Binary oppositions are blanked in favour of a Derridian-type “’trigger’ that can set other signifying chains (and signifying chains of the text’s Other) in motion”(9); and Deleuzian immanence and singularities become appropriate.

Lawler, in reference to Difference & Repetition(10) notes that for Deleuze:

“the Platonic decision is one that subordinates difference in itself to the same. This ‘in itself’ means that difference is conceived without any mediation whatsoever. This unmediated difference is why Deleuze insists on a ‘difference in nature’ between the simulacrum and the copy”.(11)

Duchamp’s Glass accommodates Deleuze’s exercises on the simulacrum and singularities as does Joyce’s Wake in the sense that their protagonists affirm through non-language existences which, though partly mechanical, are based on what is singular yet impersonal - suspended in a state of becoming that complicates individualism. A textuality of pre-sexual developmental puns in Duchamp’s scrawled notes that play on the “painting of precision and beauty of indifference ” actually comprise a complex set of musings on the virtuality of creativity also felt more powerfully in Joyce’s Ulysses but most emphatically in the Wake. The concept of defining imperceptible moments of existence in these works unfold according to a far more complex logic than that of any other works of art in their types of nonsense which, if we read Deleuze, is not an absence of sense, but rather as Lawler suggests is, for Deleuze, nonsense that is both “positivity” and “presence”(12):

“Deleuze is careful to distinguish nonsense from what he calls ‘a-sense’ or ‘sub-sen se’. With a-sense, the body, passion, has absorbed all activity, all sense, all formality. While a-sense demolishes sense, nonsense grants sense, activity, what Deleuze calls ‘superior forms’.(13)

The only acceptable and thus superior forms for Duchamp - ideologically, if not actually - need to comply with his position as an ‘anartist’(14) defined best by his phrase ‘beauty of indifference’, bringing the play of simulacra into force by way of an a-aesthetic that indicates veiled differences that are possible in the Derridean sense of imitation, mimesis on the ‘inside’, and in the Deleuzian sense of difference as simulacrum on the visible surface. Reversing both Platonism and Euclidean Geometry, Duchamp (according to Carol James) “engages all that is invested in the written word” (like Joyce) and by making citations of the then current avant-garde strategies like Cubism through what Duchamp called “elementary parallelism”,(15) increased his hold on avant-gardism and its intellectual visual and literary/poetic productions which the artworld has yet to rediscover and subsequently recover from. “It hardly needs to be noted”, writes James:

“that recent art criticism has made of Duchamp a pre-text of the end of art (history) so that all art, following him knowingly or not, cannot but work out his theories. There is no reason not to include in this elaboration of his thought all écriture since 1913 as well as all art; after all, Duchamp’s readymades, by exceeding the context of a frame of reference, prove that art defines itself by calling into question those very contexts”.(16)

This “ironism d’affirmation” is philosophy produced by an increase in good humour and politeness which when aligned with Joyce comes out looking like the work of John Cage and an increase in the materials for presenting silence.

Silence in Joyce is, among other things, full of Wagner and Mallarmé (as I and many others have said elsewhere) and is thus a commodious and thinking silence: the blanks or whites between letters, words and portmanteaus suggest the “unpresentable”, the “verbivocovisual”(17), an aporia enveloped within innumerable other textual relationships. Joyce’s words, on another level, are thus also tactile in the way that Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism” proposes in his posthumous notes, i.e. that words be ‘independent of interpretation’, a practice of the “possible” in note-form that must not be confused with Lettrism or any other literary phenomenon of the 20th Century. As Thierry de Duve suggests in a passage worth quoting in full:

“The nominalism that Duchamp is referring to – and here we are not far from Kandinsky – has a great deal to do with the essential metaphor by which the word reaches ‘plastic being’ or, conversely, with the metaphoric essence of this ‘form of plastic significance’ that the word has achieved. But this nominalism is literal: it turns back on metaphor and takes things literally. It is not, as with Kandinsky, a question of forms and colours that are destined to become the morphemes of a future plastic language, morphemes that one can metaphorically call a language, since words exist, with their ‘inner sound’, nam ing such things as ‘triangle’ or ‘red’. Duchamp’s words are words, real words of language as such, which gain a ‘plastic being’ that ‘differs from the plastic being of any form whatever’ since, obviously, these words remain words. ‘This does not say anything except that it is a word’. I have called on this formula of Lacan to ‘explain’ the emergence of the signifier as such. Obviously, it does not really explain this emergence; at most, it illustrates it, because the question undergoes a displacement here: what does it mean to say that a word does not say anything except that it is a word? That jumps by itself to the realm of metalanguage? That it becomes entirely reflexive? I can think only of the word word to fulfil these conditions.

But Duchamp intends any word, the word in general, cheek, amyl, phaedra, for example, or tables or eat. He thus intends to specify those conditions that in his eyes allow the work to remain in its zero degree, force it into the realm of nonlanguage and, since it is a question here of plastic language, into nonart, and reduce to nothingness its speaking intentions”.(18)

It is clear that Duchamp’s notes as described here posit the idea that nomenclature for his Glass must be specific and that the realized and non-realized elements of the Glass that are being relayed by ‘naming’ are simulacra that have “internalized their own dissimilarity”, a key idea of the simulacrum for Deleuze;(19) i.e. that each singularity of what one would under normal circumstances simply call a repetition is here really an “in-formality”(20); a “duration” that is a “psychological experience” as posited, for instance(21) by Bergson in his Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution. In his Bergsonism Deleuze refers to virtual instead of actual repetition with a precision analogous to that of science which is aligned to intuition and thus invention as described by Bergson. Duchamp’s nominalism looks suspiciously like a pun on the way planetary or microbiological nomenclature for example nominates new or previously unseen and unknown phenomena; thus De Duve and Marjorie Perloff, writing on Duchamp’s nominalism, overshoot Duchamp’s texts intended to open up a discussion on nominalism – a virtuality unconnected, for example, with “the history of the avant-gardes” (de Duve)(22), or “reproduction and uniqueness” (Perloff)(23).

By ‘singularity’ in the simulacrum Deleuze means ‘event’, and nominalism in its materiality allows Duchamp’s terms, like Joyce’s portmanteaus, to be “subject to events”(24):

“Thus, the Deleuzian simulacrum is always based in the abyss, in the formless, in chaos. As Deleuze says ‘everything begins with the abyss’. Yet, since the simulacrum is an image, it is formal and repeatable. Thus […] the Deleuzian simulacrum – singularity – is defined by the ‘in-formal’. ‘In-formality’ means that since the simulacrum begins from the formless (chaos), its repetition is always unformable (different), subject to events”.(25)

Bergsonian ‘duration’, writes Deleuze, is: “a case of a ‘transition’, of a ‘change’, a becoming, but it is a becoming that endures, a change that is substance itself”.(26) Duchamp’s various notes are simulations of a writing-in-progress intended to attest to such a practice of formlessness and of key ‘changes-of-mind’ that come up against the hardness of metallic and glacial ‘precision’: there is no separation here between the ‘feigned’ and the ‘simulated’ however, since there is no point at which the spectator can take any part of his project factually. How, for instance, at its most basic, can we determine from Duchamp’s handwritten scrawl in his manuscripts, his crossings-out, doodles and diagrams, that we are not falling victims to and at the same time discovering a particular perceptual fraud that merely ‘looks-like’ scribble, or ideas ‘on the hoof’? Indeed the painstaking efforts Duchamp took in his neologized description of his writing style as “Scribisme illuminatoresque” is telling.

It is impossible, for instance, to become fascinated with Duchamp’s Bride of the Glass unless one reads properly about her “apparition”/“appearance” + AntiGravity linked to her Air-Current Pistons or Nets: Husserl’s noema here in Duchamp’s note becomes the “floating signifier” Lawler recruits to describe the relation of sense and nonsense as analysed both by Deleuze and Derrida where too much sense and not enough sense (nonsense) is a “relation out of joint”, or “disjointed”, “out of correspondence”.(27) Very clearly Duchamp wants his words to become different materials and their differences; différance: so the Bride is created in the form of an arbre type, Wasp, automaton and an agricultural machine with boughs/branches frosted in nickel and platinum. The differences coalesce in real and non-real phases at once transcendent and immanent, so that cinematic blossoming and self-blossoming are pivot- points hinged to the Bride’s own centre of distraction; a Reservoir of love gasoline and a Motor with quite feeble cylinders are terms and visual indicators playing against sexual or Bride-Virgin-Mother identity as we also acquire her as: incandescent lightbulb in the infinity of a four-dimensional space: as an isolated cage coupled to a halo of hygiene. Pseudo geometrical demonstrations in Joyce’s nonsense likewise create an ineffable ALP whose terms are “somewome” of a “feminine logos or Logos”(28); “someone, some woman, some womb […] of the ‘eternal geomater’”.(29)

The geometry of Duchamp’s Bride is carried-over to Etant donnes whose language or vocabulary is expanded from the notes Duchamp wrote for the Glass as M. Rosenberg writes:

“In this work, the naked, partially dismembered female form displays the entrance to the womb, while it is surrounded by other icons depicting the irreversible flow of contingent duration, as represented by the entropic processes of the gas lamp, the irreversible flow of the fountain and the vagina as portal to the site of gestation, where local organs develop autonomously and yet coordinate spontaneously into a global ‘body’- all arranged on a chessboard field’.(30)

The linguistic character of Duchamp’s puns follow strong analyses of his plastic works that return us to language and the manner of construction of the work as opposed to the work as a ‘retinal’ exhibit. Nominalism in Duchamp is indispensable for an analysis of his practice on a poetic level where word/image are constructed to interconnect as they also separate and disperse: the language lingers, it leaves traces, becomes the means of transport as well as the extension of what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body Without Organs. Geometric superimpositions coagulate with Joyce’s creation of ALP in her transportation from Molly Bloom in Ulysses to ALP of Finnegans Wake, and as Lucia Boldrini puts it:

“Stephen’s theory of filiation, patterned both on the French triangle of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s biography and on the triangle of the Trinity to which the female is only instrumental, is finally transformed in Finnegans Wake and refocused on to a female Word Goddess endowed with attributes that appear to be the same as those of an ever-expanding divinity whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is infinite:

to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) shrinks from schurtiness to scherts.

The ‘umdescribability’, unmeasurability, ineffability of the divinity is mixed, as always, with the unmentionable, the sexual, here the shrinking of the shirt/skirt (which will be lifted by Dolph to show the mother’s sex to Kev) as well as the shortness of the words to tell about it”.(31)

One thinks of that readymade Underwood by Duchamp knitted to the Bride’s sexuality: a typewriter cover presented on a long metal pedestal at the height of a mini-skirt under which one is jokingly enticed to peek: the suggestion of letters, lettering, alphabetic units in the [Blossoming] ABC of the Bride’s Veil in the Glass stretch from Underwood to what Duchamp proposes might be a “Moving inscription. i.e. in which the group of alphabetic units:

Should no longer have a strict order from left to right.– each alphabetic unit will be present only once in the group ABC. And will be displaced from A to C and back again.- Since, from A towards C, the inscription should, according to the need for equilibrium of the plate D, displace a [stabilizer] (a ball or anything). On this plate D. At A. there will be [a sort of letter box] (alphabet) which will go towards B and C. (to develop and study). Representation of this inscription: Photographic method - Determine the alphabetic units. (their number, form, significance..). represent sculpturally this inscription in movement. and take a snap-shot. have it enlarged to the final dimensions.-With the negative of the enlargement: have prepared with silver bromide – the large plate glass and make a print. directly. on the back. (ask a photographer for information-)”.(32)

Duchamp’s goddess of the 4th D. is no less writing than Joyce’s ‘eternal geomater’ and in Duchamp like Joyce her written form calls attention to her visual configuration.

In order to highlight this in Duchamp we see from the beginning in his 3 Stoppages etalon how the new ‘law’ of space is created by the dropping of three meter-long strings dropped from a meter’s height and glued to canvas exactly as they had fallen.(33) As Carol James suggests:

“Each of these new standards of measurement, determined ‘en se déformant a son gré’, becomes the component of a new writing whose letters would, then, be distortions of the straight line, ideograms composed of formerly arbitrary elements”.(34)

“[…] distorting as it pleases”, as William Anastasi has I think sufficiently shown with regard to the shapes of the 3 Standard Stoppages 1913-14, is not entirely authentic anymore than Duchamp’s ‘ hand-scribbled notes’ necessarily are: imitation is present; yet as Duchamp claims, the:

“-3 patterns obtained in more or less similar conditions: considered in their relation to one another they are an approximate reconstitution of the measure of length”. “The 3 standard stoppages are the meter diminished”.(35) [Duchamp’s own stress]

Additional to the Bachelors of the Glass in the format of 3x3 the Stopp ages are references and extensions to self-reflexivity: textual and textural experimentations with visual and written signs and how they play and fracture together. Joyceans are aware that the Wake’s radicalised incorporation of the machinic and the natural is a self- conscious design in which, as Jean-Michel Rabaté notes on Joyce’s method: “The reincorporation of outlawed elements is a basic feature of Joyce’s plea for linguistic and biological productivity”(36) going on to state that:

“Writing is one of the central concerns of Finnegans Wake, not just because this is an extremely self-reflexive book, but also because Joyce attempts the creation of a universal history that would both encompass a history of writing, of printing, of the book, and present itself as a natural history of signs. Which is why letters come closer to nature, and for instance become insects that bite: “Huntler and Pumar’s animal alphabites, the first in the world from aab to zoo” (263 F1). The text is forever elaborating on its own ‘inkbottle authority’ (263.24) and describes its printed lines as rows of ants, earwigs or lice moving on the page. “But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for ever busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell” (20.20-23). It is probably enough to note that if the animals vary their forms and species (we have in the same passage: ‘See the snake wurrums everyside’ [19.12] and also simply ‘owlet’s eggs’ [19.9]), we can never lose sight of the original midden heap or turf or garbage mound in which letters, litters, and vermin are found to proliferate suddenly as so many ‘wigworms’ 9282.13). This is a constant creation ex nihilo retelling the origin of language and letters: ‘We are once amore as babes awondering in a world made fresh where the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch’ (336.15-17)”.(37)

In a real world of affectation and counterfeit-simulated sham, cultural toys and dumb childish consumerist art, it is unrecognised that the Wake and the Glass undermine and monstrously complicate even more profoundly that earlier Modernism as depicted for instance by exegetes of Cubism disinterested in becoming, Time and strangeness. As Clive Hart in his Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake writes:

“More than a working model of the cosmos […] Finnegans Wake is the most ambitious attempt in our literature at a thoroughgoing application of 'imitative form'. Fallacy or not, imitative form was the one great literary theory which Joyce applied throughout his career with varying degrees of consistency and artistic success, but never more consistently nor perhaps more brilliantly than in Finnegans Wake, in which the verbal simulation of all kinds of forms, acts, and even abstractions is carried to extraordinary lengths”.(38)

The recording of Time within their own processes, linking elements that belong to the “Tip”(39) and ‘old hat’, with infinitesimals of phonemes and sounds between letters and nomenclatures has about it the marvel of the deliberately blundered counterfeit of Art Joyce and Duchamp promoted as fluids and excrement, but openly in space and in the air.(40) A preponderance of the inimitable in Duchamp sharply presented the Boîte en valise as one end of the spectrum of imitation, and as a strategic break with the gallery and the history of art as a convention of static ‘masterpieces’, a gesture creating a conundrum within and of Benjamin’s proposals on “mechanical reproduction”, and simultaneously critiquing and ironising the merits of the illustrated Art Book. Duchamp’s notes and the Glass make recognition of his subject invisible, recruiting instead an intuitive, poetic approach. As Carol James writes:

“Duchamp’s own writing corpus figures as marginalia in its insistence on remaining in manuscript form. It confronts past art with his invention of the readymade, acknowledging the latter’s destructive tendencies and the former’s continuing mastery over the readymade by being its indispensable quotation”.(41)

Mimesis in this sense is of a negative character intended never to be ‘satisfactory’ but open to changes. Duchamp’s readymades also frustrate the process of signification by not letting things, words or colours be themselves.(42) Equally Joyce’s words and the surface art of Finnegans Wake moves closer to the eye and mind and “ear and eye” than to the conventions of typically ‘literary’ reading. Only partially does this suggest that Joyce moved toward the material as Duchamp moved closer to Mallarmé. We find ourselves wavering in reading on Duchamp because his art begins and ends in contradictions where we become victims when writing about him - spectator and author become the embodied mediating points in Duchamp’s divided unions of Glass and notes. In the subtlest writings on Duchamp many insights are too delightfully faint to be possible for the inexperienced spectator; for instance in Carol James’ idea that the “beer professor” of Duchamp’s note for his Glass is ‘quoted’ visually in Etant donnes:

“Duchamp’s ‘falls’, his ‘Chute d’eau’ and ‘Trappe’, are two readymades which, like the Glider, were programmed for the Large Glass but never found representation there. A mechanical device in Etant donnes objectifies the waterfall as the kind of light play seen in beer signs, and the fall is actuated by the protruding hooks of Trébuchet, a coat rack nailed to the floor”.(43) [my stress]

Continuing to imagine what is not present in the Glass or elsewhere in Duchamp as the promotion of ideas or images that still loiter and satisfy, breaks with protocols of traditional academic art historical analysis of painting forced by his écriture and his neologistic disposition. There are no analogies that can be made between depiction and description or the kinds of understanding required of painting and conceptual knowledge of either figurative or abstract art that enable analysis and recognition here; rather, demarcation of difference necessary in sustaining recognition is dispersed in the Glass over a vast field.

As Linda Henderson(44) and others have shown, the Glass and its notes are spread across scientific inventions and themes, and also technological ideas that were connected with contemporary physics and also chemistry drawing away from the presence of art and its vocabulary. Hender son’s work in her Duchamp in Context ranges across these areas of knowledge, naturally, in a literary act markedly more discharged than Duchamp’s own that nevertheless feed our thoughts with ineffable linguistic/visual possibilities that are defined, multifaceted-poetic, and investigative. This occurs in most works on Joyce too, but as has always been the case and as Armand, for instance, in his Techne shows, the field of literature and particularly hypertext forefronts the philosophic avant-garde in ways unknown in the visual arts (excluding Duchamp) as we have known it. Unwittingly, but clearly, Armand invokes the source of Duchampian thematics in his Techne in analyses of Cage, Senn, and Baudrillard on “origin, simulacrum, virtuality, and genetics” and effects created by puns and by complex reasoning on mechanical and machine aesthetics(45) that forefront scholarship and creativity in the field(s) of a poetic technology. A Hypertext as Rhizome “’designed as a matrix of independent but cross-referential discourses which the reader is invited to enter more or less at random’” read in any order,(46) though perhaps clichéd, fits the mechanics of Duchamp’s Glass and Joyce’s Wake.

It is well known that Joyce’s Wake registers itself as a whole through metonymy, not merely as a strategy from new word to new word but as fragments that make a whole, and a whole that makes fragments deep enough to drown in, and in which his previous oeuvre is allusively scattered as a form of hyper(under)text. It is not well known, however, that Duchamp in 1916 in his first and only typographical production, made his “Rendez-vous du dimanche 6 Fevrier 1916 a lh. 3/4 aprés–midi” which connects, by the term “colles” an early written equivalent to what later became the Boîte en valise, envisioning immanence as writing and a conspiracy of hidden coding over an extended duration:

“On four penny postcards [Joyce would have approved!], Duchamp closely typed textual fragments, trying to avoid all conventional sense. The word in question comes in a sentence near the end of the last card:

...toutefois, étant don-
-nées quelques cages, c’eut une
profonde emotion qu’exécutent t-
-outes colles alités...

The solecism “c’eut” is one of several which reveal the convoluted grammar of the cards. The moignons of Rendez-vous, graphic readymades, are displaced all across Duchamp’s textual and plastic oeuvre. The Duchamp reader will recognize here the ‘étant donnés’ of the note in the Boite verte and in the title of his last work. The ‘cages’ recall the readymade Why Not Sneeze? of 1921. ‘Colles alités’ names the functioning by attraction of this text and the rest of Duchamp’s work. Being ‘in bed’ or sick, the glues evoke the disfunction and risks of the ‘readymade malade’ (Duchamp du Signe, 49). ‘Colles alitées’ puns on causalité, a defunct generator as far as Rendez-vous is concerned. Duchamp’s late plastic pun (1959), Cols alités, puts on a drawing of the Large Glass a line of hills and a telephone pole near the ‘horizon’ or ‘Bride’s dress’. The Bachelors’ passes at the Bride now have to be read through their stuffy collars, and back to and through the textual renditions”.(47)

The aesthetics of Duchamp and Joyce’s total projects and time philosophies is an actualization process - Time is not merely the transcendental measurement of “event”, and the virtual is not form but force - a ‘meanwhile’ to be continued elsewhere through experimentation and exegesis that seems wild and ironically ingenious in Carol James. In language Duchamp actualises his creations as authentic deconstructions in ways that implicate Derridian and also Deleuzean strategies of thought that can be extended and warmly discussed within generic areas enunciated through Joyce’s processes too in which, in Finnegans Wake, if I might haveringly quote from Deleuze and Guattari:

"There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities [the property of self: the essential property that makes an individual unique], affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. […] We call th is plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development).(48)

Duchamp made poetry transparent and marked the linguistic facture of the object, while Joyce’s Wake like the Glass maintains an incompatibility between attention to surface and the shifting subjectivity of our own imagination; the mappable relativity of Joyce and Duchamp’s relations then is their work in language as a way of thinking difference through what Duchamp once described as “the unexpressed but intended” and the “unintentionally expressed”.(49)

These phrases face Duchampians with the paradox of comedy and penetrability of a perception that cannot divorce the writings of Duchamp from his art and remarks on painting. Michael Podro, making a key point about figurative works of art on opaque surfaces has noted that: “when we are aware of the subject we are forced to neglect the painted surface as such”, and “that we are unable to discern within our experience the border between the surface and the subject; we cannot observe where one turns into the other”.(50) Metaphor is so thoroughly imbued in the term “surface” that difference in itself as Deleuze posits it in which “it is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground”(51) presents a crisis of a pictorial and linguistic sort much more distinguished in the Wake and the Glass than in other artistic contexts. A blending of the forces of words and their liquid echoes in Finnegans Wake, for example, establish background and foreground juxtapositions that waver and play in all ways pertinent to its surface sounds and the way all of these symbols draw equal attention to themselves and narrative. As Podro notes recruiting Richard Wollheim’s words that are actually concerned with visual depiction:

“the artist...who exploits twofoldedness to build up analogies between medium and the object of representation cannot be thought content to leave the two visual experiences in such a way that one merely floats above the other. Indeed he constantly seeks an ever more intimate rapport between the two experiences”.(52)

And in Podro’s own words:

“we should not talk here of two experiences, each of a quite different set of properties, (for this would preclude their becoming related inside our perception of the painting); rather we should assume two different kinds of perceived aspect – of the materiality of the surface and of configurations of the subject – interacting and transforming each other within our experience”.(53) [My Stress]

There is little painterly illusion present in Duchamp’s oeuvre after 1912, and as such Podro’s words, as we can see, more easily fit the material layers of consciousness of Finnegans Wake pertinent to this essay, than they do, say, Duchamp’s Glass. By 1912 Duchamp had painted Nude Descending a Staircase, The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, The Passage from Virgin to Bride, and Bride. The notion of the transition of material qualities in his graphic and bricolage manner that followed these works is not definable as material qualities merging with subject, but rather as a separation of materials from the ordinary realms of artistic production and artistic expression in any traditional sense whatsoever. Lawrence Steefel is the major exponent still of the poetic resonances that drift through Duchamp’s images from his early work through 1912 and onto the Glass that pose the notion of aspect-seeing opposed to painted marks and subsequent related meaning. In his essay The Passage from the Virgin to Bride Steefel refers to Duchamp’s “velvety touch” and the works’:

“immaculate smoothness comparable to the frictionless constancy of flawless motion which pervades the work as a whole”.(54)

Steefel carefully describes the mechanomorphic forms that Duchamp was assembling as the product of a consciousness inscrutably “seduced by the elegance of his own taste and the facile cuisine of his technical means” whose image is facilitated by the “pigment having been kneaded by hand to a consistency of immaculate smoothness comparable to the frictionless constancy of flawless motion which pervades the work as a whole”:

“As an abstract pattern of rhythmic fluency, Le Passage resembles the anatomy of an exotic flower whose fleshy petals tremble in a stream of distilled sensuality, the product of a perfected alchemy which transmutes motion into a kind of visual perfume and canvas and paint into pure lubricity. The eye can delight in scanning the forms which bend over the picture plane without distraction, so that La Passage, in this aspect of its appearance, seems a paradigm of Duchamp’s formula of ‘peinture de precision; beauté d’indifference”.(55)

It is unnecessary to compare and contrast Steefel’s work on Le Passage with the critical comments made by Podro on which depiction depends: a battle for the mind and an art that would "carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions, more verbal ” in the hands of Duchamp contrasts with Cezanne’s conception of ‘passage’ that brings forms, ground, colour and medium into a direct problematic with optical and painterly effects which Duchamp eschewed all the more markedly the closer he came to transparency. By fusing written categories of reading to deterritorialized forms producing contexts of paradox, he created problems and ironic comedy for a spectator in a world he rejected, satirized, mechanized, eroticized, and fantasized.(56)

Joyce’s forefronting of words and sounds modelled into a field of shapes composed of all things hermetic, and thus alchemical in Finnegans Wake, draws us closer to Barbara DiBernar d’s musing on Joyce’s work which was: “to explode our preconceived, categorized ways of looking at things and to reconcile dualities”, calling on Thomas Connolly’s visualization of Joyce’s method of composition who notes that: “his method resembled that of an expert Japanese lacquerer who begins with a basic coat and then, layer upon layer, builds up his medium so that the final product is a highly polished surface that reveals a warm and rich depth down to the basic wood”.(57) Essentially a discrepancy overall concerning the metaphor of ‘surfaces’ of complexity and difference and in what these consist in reading Joyce and reading Duchamp can only turn our minds to the unexpected discoveries and depths of writing and understanding explicated by their commentators: Deleuze, after all, for instance, has himself suggested that the brain itself is nothing but a “surface”, and Joyce at so many and diverse points in the Wake evokes: “a poetic equivalent of sexual pleasure by the lubricity of mucous membrane”, evoking as does Duchamp in the viewer:

“those [suppressed] elements which tempt him to disrupt the surface of the work, but once they have come to mind, the suppression of them requires an increasing effort of indifference which, as an act of attention, subverts the passive contemplation of the work. What at first seems irrelevant will thus become a relevant aspect of the work and force us to question the quality of the pleasure the work at first seemed to symbolize.

As the eye begins to probe and scan the work, inadvertently in the beginning, but soon with an increasing tempo of attraction and rejection, the forms fluctuate and throb into depth and separateness and the image becomes disturbingly alive”.(58) [my stress]

The final alchemical transmutation in the present context would be the movement to both transform and variegate the surfaces of art and language through experimentations and multifaceted elaborations of Joyce and Duchamp’s projects opposed to those aesthetic connivances that over the past 60 years in commercial art have split themselves from language by means of a dumb assumption posited by its devotees that art is already a language. Though Joyce and Duchamp did not “believe” in alchemy(59) they believed in integrating the physical with what we call the spiritual, and the Fourth-Dimension. Deleuze avers that the language system “only exists in some reaction to a non-language-material that it transforms”(60), and time and change in the artistic processes deepened with Joyce and Duchamp’s Wake and Glass are rich presentiments in language and art of Deleuze and Derrida’s questioning of time’s forms of being known, of time appearing a s a simulacral force and as a transcendental entity that Bergson called dureé. An infinite refinement of conception and perception of time and the simulacrum provokes thought or forces us to think as we approach the surrounding complementary commentaries that can be the continuations of what they humorously and sophisticatedly created as an image of thought in action.