Abstract
The “real story” of Fountain begins with a discussion of the first element in “The Creative Act”: the artist. According to Duchamp, the artist’s struggle to create “art” is, in fundamental human terms, a struggle to realize his identity as “artist,” to be recognized as a genius. This subjective process takes place at the basic level of language as an effort to declaratively mark one’s position in the aesthetic field. What Duchamp terms the “art coefficient” is thus the gap or distortion in the artist’s statement that draws attention to its broader formal conditions. Aware that the logic of the creative act cannot be stopped, Duchamp attempted to expose these conditions by rendering the art coefficient explicit in his own statements of which Fountain is the purest form.
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Notes
- 1.
Duchamp offers here a clear articulation of what Žižek sees as the fundamental condition of ideology , a “constitutive blindness” (2008, p. 14) operating not at the level of ideas but in the unconscious dimension supporting the activity itself; a disavowed belief which cannot be taken into account without the given ideological field dissolving itself. In a radical Žižekian twist, Duchamp can be understood as referring not to the “false consciousness” of the artist—his illusory status as a “mediumistic being”—but this mediumistic being in so far as he is supported by “false consciousness.”
- 2.
We thus encounter the psychoanalytic foundations of Žižek’s notion of ideology ; namely, imaginary identification with what Lacan terms the “ideal-ego”: “the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves [...] the image representing ‘what we would like to be’” (Žižek, 2008, p. 116).
- 3.
In this statement, the difference between imaginary and symbolic identification becomes clear: if imaginary identification is identification with an ideal self-image (“genius”), symbolic identification (“artist ”) is “identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable ” (Žižek, 2008, p. 116).
- 4.
Duchamp’s notion of the “art coefficient ” provides an exact description of Lacan’s concept of “The Real”: “the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech” (Žižek, 2006a, p. 18).
- 5.
This is the result of the two-fold logic of symbolic identification , the fact that the “realization” of one’s identity always involves a performative appeal, a reflexive attempt to register one’s actions and mark one’s position from an external point. Because the subject’s actions contain a fundamental subjective twist there is always an anxiety-provoking difference or gap between the way one sees oneself and the way one appears to others.
- 6.
By reducing symbolic identification to the level of language , Duchamp offers a precise description of the declarative dimension in question, the dimension of performativity always indicated by the “persistence of a gap between utterance and its enunciation” (Žižek, 2006b, p. 123).
- 7.
This purely formal conception of the word “art” reduces the term to the level of what Lacan calls the “master signifier:” a “non-sensical signifier devoid of meaning,” a “signifier-without-the-signified” (Žižek, 2008, p. 75 ). Duchamp thus makes clear one of Lacan’s fundamental points : it is the external appeal to this empty master signifier which constitutes the performative dimension of language and symbolic identification . In Duchamp’s text, we thus recognize a distinct overlap with Žižek’s notion of ideology , the difference between what the subject thinks he is doing and what, in the “social effectivity” of his actions, he is actually doing (Žižek, 2008, p. 14).
- 8.
In psychoanalytic terms, Duchamp ultimately achieves what Lacan terms “subjective destitution”: full and direct identification with an external symbolic identity through the evacuation of all investment in one’s ideal-ego. This state, the final stage of analysis, is attained when an explicitly performative gesture grounds the master signifier, the point to which one reflexively refers in one’s activity, as fundamentally empty.
- 9.
The word “but” is important here since it indicates an opposing idea to that which has just been expressed. It is then followed by a grammatical shift in tenses: first, the future simple denotes a decision made at the moment of speaking with regard to a future event—the fact that he is about to be misunderstood (“It will be understood”). In the preliminary draft of the seminar he is even more definitive: “it is to be understood” (Fig. 5.3). Next, the present continuous indicates an ongoing action in the present—what he is doing at the moment of speaking, what he is trying to describe as opposed to what has been understood (“I am trying to describe”). Again, this is clear to see from the draft: “I never refer to ‘great art’ only, but am trying to describe….”
References
Duchamp, Marcel. 1973. “The Creative Act.” Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957. In The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1979. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated by Ron Padgett. London: Da Capo Press.
Tomkins, Calvin. 1996. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Tomkins, Calvin. 2013. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. New York: Badlands Unlimited.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. Interrogating the Real. Edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
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Kilroy, R. (2018). The Artist. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_6
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