BOOKS
619
It
therefore seems a bit too quick to hustle Duchamp back into the
arms of tradition. At certain points in his argument Paz does indicate a
postmodernist
vocation for Duchamp. But in
Appearance Stripped
Bare,
postmodernism remains a
terrain vague,
while the armatures of
tradition, the mythopoetic structures erected on the foundations of the
Green Box,
become ever more elaborate.
The first sentence of
Appearance Stripped Bare
reads, "Perhaps
the two painters who have had the greatest influence on our century are
Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp," and the implication is, since
the two men were contemporaries, that this influence was concurrent.
But Duchamp had no influence until the 1960s, at which point it
became immense. For Duchamp is the artist of postmodernism. And
postmodernism-a product of what Guy Debord has called "the society
of the spectacle" -is about the ascendancy of the photographic. The
photographic is entirely distinct from the iconic on the one hand and
the verbal on the other.
It
is a system of utter silence and of frozen
immobility ... to which a story is uncertainly attached. As I have
argued elsewhere (see
Partisan Review,
no. 3, 1977 ), the photographic
obeys special laws controlling the way images may be invested with
meaning. To confuse this relationship with that of the older allegorical
mode is
to
make a fatal error. This system has affected us already,
structuring our real and our imaginative lives, and will affect us more
and more. Duchamp can be shown to have been rather deeply engaged
in its exp loration.
In the preface to the notes for the
Large Glass
Duchamp speaks of
the necessi ty of finding an instantaneous state of rest (an isolated sign)
within a succession of facts. This state of rest has to do with extra-rapid
exposure. Paz's interpretation places this notion of exposure within the
context of both the
mise
a
nu~the
stripped or denuded bride-and the
moment of revelation. "Negative theology," he writes; "in order to see
we must close our eyes. In the darkness, Diana surprised in the bath:
ultra-rapid exposure.
A new concordance: all the Neoplatonic texts,
beginning with Plotinus, say that the vision never arrives slowly, it is a
sudden illumination. A
flash."
But the note sustains a more literal
reading. The instantaneously wrought state of rest, extracted from the
flow of succession by means of extra-rapid exposure, is the description
of photography, using some of its own language. And to maintain the
photograph
as an enigma, if that is what Duchamp is doing, is to think
something at once both shocking and profound.
ROSALIND KRAUSS
