logic. What becomes clear in de Duve’s account is that the readymade is not an “object” but an action, a statement in a discourse, modeling how to author in electracy (it anticipates Lacan’s object @). De Duve foregrounds an aspect of readymades of special relevance to our context: judgment as event rather than choice.
The Bottle Dryer of 1914 was Duchamp’s first pure Ready-made. Alternately entitled a Bottle Drainer, Bottle Rack, and Hedge-Hog, this piece was selected by Duchamp without the addition of other items or alterations. Essentially this object appears to be a work of “open” abstract sculpture, a symmetrical form that could have been made by some artist anywhere from the 1920s to the late 1960s. But in titling it by its literal designation Bottle Dryer, Duchamp was simply reinforcing an internal contradiction already established in many viewers’ minds. These facts simply define its claim to be called art. But Duchamp’s appellation of “hedgehog” for this restaurant appliance runs somewhat deeper. In an essay by Isaiah Berlin there is a comment on a line written by the Greek poet Archilochus, “mark one of the deepest differences which divides writers and thinkers, and, it may be human beings in general. The one type, ‘the fox,’ consists of men who live by ideas scattered and often unrelated to one another. But the man of the other type, the ‘hedgehog,’ relates ‘everything to a central vision, one system more or less coherent or articulate . . . a single, universal, organizing principle.’ ” Not only does this appliance resemble a hedgehog, apparently it suggests a unified vision. (Burnham 83)
Burnham read Bottle Dryer as emblem expressing aura (evoking “hedgehog” as a type of thinker). The readymade is a relay for the new judgment, for operant-idiots of anticipation. Readymades are a part of a larger context in which painters responded to the industrial revolution (the beginning of electracy) including the impact on their medium of the invention of photography and also of commercial tubes of paint. Duchamp’s solution to the crisis of painting was more extreme than that of his colleagues, in that, while they were willing to strip away nearly every attribute of their practice, to reduce it to some essential property (e.g. flatness), Duchamp took the final step and abandoned painting altogether. The point that de Duve stresses, is that the readymade is an act of pure judgment . It is an act of reflective judgment (in Kant’s terms) that puts the maker in the position of spectator, whose reception produces art. In contrast with literacy, this act of selection is empty of intention, the opposite of identity as self-presence.
This act of randomized selection and remotivation of the received or given is the point of departure for electrate decision. The device is neither mimetic nor expressive, but conative: the aim is to receive event (in the manner of consulting an oracle). That most of the Readymades are commodities, commercial objects, is an important part of the invention, demonstrating that electrate authoring shifts to a meta-level, taking as the material of its discourse the commodity-information sphere. Again, a crucial point is that this judgment is distinct from both understanding and reason (conceptual knowledge and moral belief) and represents a distinct region of valuation (the life feeling of “little sensations”—the infra-thin—what Lacan called lichettes). The equivalent of the natural written language from which the Greeks crafted the working concepts of philosophy is the discourse of popular culture, including Commerce, in all its forms and genres, the manipulation of which generates an ad hoc semantics (second nature).
De Duve’s detailed review of the R. Mutt case recognizes that the readymade is an utterance in a discourse and not an object, and hence to appreciate its status as a relay for electrate judgment. In our context we recognize it also as a move in a language game. What it means to position oneself temporally in the hinge of Now (as Lyotard described Duchamp’s stance, showing its relevance for flash reason), becomes clear in the cunning manifested in the process that resulted, eventually, in the recognition of a urinal, entitled Fountain, signed by one R. Mutt, as a work of art. A further Kantian element of de Duve’s history of this delay is his use of the formal ratio of hypotyposis, or the “algebraic comparison” as Duchamp called it, to articulate the steps Duchamp undertook to create his invention. As the story goes, Duchamp learned from his experience with Nude Descending a Staircase about the power of scandal to create publicity and status. He submitted Fountain anonymously, to test his colleagues’ declaration that any work by any person would be admitted to the exhibition of independent artists, for which Duchamp himself was one of the organizers. The submission was a provocation, an experiment, a joke, a gambit, a wager on the future of art, a wager that Duchamp won. Ingenium.
The significant point for our purposes is that Duchamp did not simply submit the assisted readymade and leave it at that. He manipulated the situation as a mediated image, to get not the object, but the picture of the object as provocation, into public circulation. Following the logic of a bachelor machine, Duchamp was able to attach or link his statement to other statements, and then to let the ratios of information circulation do their work as transformers. Duchamp’s strategy meets the requirements of an operator in the dromosphere, to manage expectation and anticipation, the belated temporality of prudence.
Making avant-garde art of true significance means anticipating a verdict that can only be retrospective. It means delivering the unexpected in lieu of the expected in such a way that betrayed and disappointed expectations show themselves, in the end, to have been fulfilled. Because it is in the nature of expectations not to depend on factual verification for their truth as expectations—that is, as projected scenarios—the scenario that I have described as the chain of fulfilled expectations proves to be the right one. Indeed, let’s reestablish the facts: instead of the Chessplayers, the Paris Independents were presented with the Nude Descending a Staircase, and they rejected it; instead of going directly to Stieglitz in order to gain avant-garde legitimacy for Fountain, Richard Mutt went to the Independents, and they rejected it. The last formula, the one that happily linked the two chains of algebraic comparisons, translates back into one that is familiar: Nude/Paris Indeps = (Nude)/(Armory Show) = Fountain/N.Y.Indeps. (de Duve 141)
Duchamp put an emblem (an image, an idea, a label) into the temporal loop of time, the after-effect or retrospective emergence of meaning, the future anterior, in order to influence the values and practices of his institution. Duchamp raised “joke” to its highest power, confirming Koestler’s claim about the shared features of wit and creativity. The adjustment to be made for our rehearsal is to shift the setting away from art proper, to follow Duchamp’s creation of the possibility of making art in general, rather than working in any specific medium. His answer to the question of the ontology of art (what is painting?) becomes the analogy for an art of ontology, that is, using the readymade as a unit of discourse, to articulate an image category for electrate metaphysics. The readymade opens the possibility not just of art in general, but of general electracy. Duchamp occupies temporarily the position of conceptual persona, along with the vital anecdote of the R. Mutt joke. Concept avatar does not rely on any one persona, however, but facilitates a practice of adopting tutor anecdotes.
Target: Judgment
How is judgment as bachelor machine applied in flash reason? How does one take a stand or make a turn away from or towards a position by means of avatar? Paolo Virno provides a source for Target (specifying the need or lack to be supplied by our concept). Conceptual thinking continues to be relevant in electracy to the extent that a democratic public sphere is still possible in an Internet civilization. Our concept must support judgment in decision making. Judgment (practical reason) means drawing upon the lessons of the past to make a decision in the present situation promising the best outcome for the future well-being of the community. Good judgment requires the virtue of phronesis. Prudence is a virtue, meaning that it is a matter of disposition, a quality of character. The practice of deliberative rhetoric in the civic sphere follows the paths of inference, beginning with abduction from the particular conditions to the rules (an archive of maxims and proverbs representing the wisdom of experience or tradition and its associated respected authorities). Commonsense rules supplied the premises for deductions formulating hypothetical cases, which in turn inductively were applied to the situation. The problem with practical reason today, Virno observes, is that there is not now, and never has been, a rule for applying the rule to a case. The application requires a decision, arbitrary
