Duchamp and Joyce

'Metaphor' and 'concept' in Joyce and Duchamp are virtually non-existent but especially so, paradoxically perhaps, within the category we conventionally recognise as a 'poetics' of their art. Just as the Large Glass would not have been the work it is at all without the Green Box Notes and Duchamp's curious aporias in its text and nominalisation of 'indecidable' "events" in its 'parts', so too Finnegans Wake would not be the work it is at all without Joyce's notebooks and their harbouring of genetically modified terms, 'marques', and signs in progress, in dispersed process, we call portmanteaux. Deconstruction has given us much pause for thought on Différance - Derrida's paradox of deference, 'indecidables', and time in language against Husserl and the thrust of metaphoric displacement; and one image I want to convey in my current work of image/text is one in which Duchamp's and Joyce's works are dissolvable into the Notes from which they arose and vice versa. My work in progress needs to be read against it's (bearable!) failings. The problem of 'getting around' metaphor for Derrida seems to have been a lifetime pursuit while Joyce and Duchamp seem to have gotten there through the exposure and the examination of defect and 'failure' in the 'writing machine'.

Danis Rose in his book The Textual Diaries of James Joyce writes on p.8.
"Had none of [Joyce's diaries] survived, as indeed was almost the case (were it not for the courage, tenacity and wit of Paul Léon, and inexorable fate), it is improbable that the true nature of Finnegans Wake would ever have been inferred by even the boldest and most astute of critics; it is, moreover, absolutely certain that the book would, in the fullness of its detail, have been closed forever to exegesis. This loss would have been both ours and Joyce's; that he wished his work to be known in all its parts and its full labyrinthine complexity of assemblage is clear from his fastidious preservation of the documents of its composition - the rough drafts, the fair copies, the marked-up proofs, the printed versions of parts of the text with their new auxesis, the written-on-with-dried ink galley and page proofs, and so on - behind these - the textual diaries". The same is true of Duchamp's notes and Boxes that were 'published' immaculately/offhandedly (bearably no doubt) suggesting, in their cryptic manner, pictorial work in progress. After philosophy and especially deconstruction, 'Conceptual Art' as we have known it in all its diverse forms, attuned as it seemed to be to Duchamp's textual/visual art, now appears antiquated and passé. This may largely be due to a deep misunderstanding of Duchamp's actual achievment based, as I have noted above, on a refusal of the 'concept' and the generation of nominalisation against which the works of 'conceptualists' appear far less radical than at first they might have seemed. His achievement is fundamentally textual and innovative, pointing out separations of idenity and separations in time - terms that one is used to in Finnegans Wake analysis and criticism.

James Atherton suggests that: "[Finnegans Wake] stands as a symbol for all the attempts at written communication, including all the letters, all the world's literature, the Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred books of the world, also Finnegans Wake itself". Joyce's scribbled notes for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake may be equated with Duchamp's even down to coloured pencils for further annotations.
ALP's 'letter' in the Wake is found in a midden heap, and Duchamp's Notes have a chequered history that cannot be fully or gratifyingly accounted for: handwritten in most part in fragmented form, his ideas in and as scribbled thoughts found on scraps of paper, envelopes or gas bills, and 'discovered' by exegetes at different times, seem both to be casual and fastidiously careless.

Finnegans Wake is a book about the processes of writing and dreaming and refers repeatedly to its own genesis just as Duchamp's Notes and pictures refer to and elaborate upon the genesis of the Large Glass as a consequence of which we encounter his Notes for Projects and the Infrathin. Duchamp's and Joyce's work demonstrates how logocentric texts undercut their own apparent assumptions, their own systems of 'logic'. In Finnegans Wake, Chapter 5, we find many allusions to the art of writing and to the Book of Kells. This chapter is mainly about the 'letter' noted above, unearthed by a hen, and this document and its attendant circumstances give rise to parodic academic, scientific and artistic investigations and speculations; terms that equally summon forth the spirit of Duchamp's explorations of language and image, physics, science and technology. Their writing and their art is consistently under erasure - that is to say that the traces of other signifiers in any signifier in Duchamp's oeuvre and Joyce's Wake means that they must always be read under erasure.

In order to begin to broach the subject of the note-making artist and to attempt to span the similarities and differences between Duchamp and Joyce within this subject, Coventry University Library will be holding my work in progress in case(s) and filing cabinet(s) that will be open to those interested in this work. In this way the on-going project of my practice that was initially aimed towards the fulfillment of a Ph.D. can be scanned by anyone as the work continues to grow. Additions of 'careless' writing (is there really any other kind one asks after reading Derrida and Heidegger in conjunction with Joycean exegetes?) entices one to join the scribbling club and display, as it were, thought 'in action' but at a snail's pace, or better, a worm's pace, (or is not deconstruction and the Wake, like the Glass, full of holes and wholes!).

To begin with then the work to be viewed in the library will be modest, but the hope is that the project will begin to reach out to other regions of the library to include as many relevant books as possible through a referencing system I have already begun to map-out on a pictorial work currently underway. Duchamp was a librarian when he first began working out his material for the Glass project, while Joyce, as we may note above, is referring his reader to the notion of the World Library as the real centre of his artistic practice.

Heidegger's use of the terms "hear-say", and "gossip" may be tackled through the aegis of the Library facility: whisperings, grapevine, rumor-mill and scuttlebut. The debate of whether or not Heidegger and Wittgenstein were closer to poetry than either of them fully declared is a fascinating one in the light of Joyce's and Duchamp's own writing strategies. We are informed that the 'letter' in Finnegans Wake is not merely "a riot of blots & blurs & bars & balls & hoops & wriggles": it is an 'avenue' to reveal the "minds of the anticollaborators" and also a revelation in terms of interrogating the Alphabet, Joyce's Sigla and acrostics - especially the activities of Here Comes Everybody and his wife.

With regard to artistry and natural and symbolic craftsmanship, the similarities between Duchamp and Joyce are so close that the timely unity of their act of thinking outside of the modernist tradition, and in terms of the technology of their day, places them as pre-postmodernists. From certain perspectives (that of a Wittgensteinian 'martian' say [cf. Tractatus, On Culture & Value, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty]) the activities of both Joyce and Duchamp ostensibly look the same in presenting a radical questioning and a radical self-interrogation of art in the quest for its own complex and subtle priviledges, showing how such complexities are necessary for subtleties to emerge in the work of art and the work of writing and envisioning - in a similar fasion to the way Wittgenstein wrote his way through problems of language.

Giuseppe Stellardi calls Derrida's 'indecidables' a 'marque' within a territory of writing in deconstruction, that is related to what he calls Derrida's 'machine': "whose movements appears to be similar and different to that of metaphor" and which one can see reaches into aspects of Duchampian and Joycean subtlety that eschews 'poetic' metaphor and concept for other less flexible forms of displacement, and condensation. "Derrida's writing is a practice of philosophy as linguistic alchemy", Stellardi writes, "much more than as adhesion to a tradition or participation in a linguistic game according to the rules of an instituted grammar; hence. for some. a radical doubt concerning its authenticity and its philosophical legitimacy". Nothing new here then in the history of art and writing in the 20th Century (!). What is interesting here, however, is that Duchamp's 'infrathin's' and Joyce's Portmanteaux are independent of any point of view (exactly\indecidably), as Duchamp's notes affirm and as Joyce's neologisms confirm. On Derrida, metaphor, writing, and deconstruction Stellardi writes: "First of all, an indecidable (marge, differance, supplément, and so on) is negatively defined by its inability to tolerate any definition. It could, however, be described as a nonfinite bundle of 'signifieds', disposed within the space of an opposition (within/without, more/less/, before/after, or signifier/signified, for instance) that has been . This space of meaning, which the indecidable ought to (but structurally cannot) cover, is not, in effect, directly approachable. Hence a resemblance (explicitly and firmly denied by Derrida) with the ways of negative theology. [...] Deconstruction chooses indecidability as its own space, in defiance of rationality, but not without reason. Actually, to say that 'deconstruction chooses indecidability as its own space' is incorrect, at least in part. In fact, deconstruction in a sense generates it, taking advantage of clefts in the 'text of the epoch'. where amounts of 'indecidable energy' can be liberated'". Duchamp's notes on Infrathin suddenly become available against this reading. The graph or marque in Joyce's portmanteaux affirm their allegence to nominalism. As Stellardi writes:

"Concept (from a Derridian viewpoint) is no longer philosophy's element, for this would assume the 'stricture' of a system of relations, dominated by a thinking and reflecting subject. To encourage the proliferation of metaphors means not so much reestablishing truth, but redistributing meaning: relax the stricture, allow language to distil and reassemble itself in figures of sense as yet unthought, or forgotten. This philosophical (deconstructive) metaphor will always and in each case be living, that is, active, since it will never be allowed to sediment into a concept."

Nominalism and the 'indecidable' are accountable in Joyce and Duchamp if one: "considers that the 'foundation' of metaphor, according to the tradition that [...] has dominated Western philosophy is analogy. What does that mean, if not that the gap of sense [in metaphor] is immediately stopped, and the metaphorical energy distributed along the axis of a finite analogy that restores the order disturbed by metaphor itself. All tropic displacements rest on this basis and, thanks to analogical chains, they partake of the solidity of language's native soil. Even more recent theories of metaphor end up by converging towards the idea of a "reduction of the gap", of a "reabsorption of the shock", of a "reestablishment of the order if signification".

Clearly, Duchamp, Joyce and Derrida agree that there are already enough concepts and 'things' in the world to keep the rest of us going forever (though this too is of course a structuralist notion). Underming the conventions of language as metaphor, the indecidable: "resists the reestablishment of order. It immediately belies the analogical ghost that it seems to evoke, and it fulfills a role that is opposed to that of metaphor: to keep meaning's gaps open and visible, leaking and seeping. It is, therefore, precisely for this reason, a deconstructive agent". It is hardly any wonder then that Joyce and Duchamp appeal to the imagination of notemaking artists whose metamorphising chains remain still unresolved from the 'published' work back to the notes, and where those notes become the subject for scholarly research by professors of literature and especially Joycean Genetics.

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