Content area
Full text
[I]nside the person we must distinctly perceive, as through a glass, a set-up mechanism.
-Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1901)
In spite of the enormous critical attention paid to Marcel Duchamp's art and theoretical background, the dialogue with Bergsonism is mostly confined to scattered references and erudite observations.1 Paradoxically, the major obstacle to this encounter has been the immense popularity of Henri Bergson's philosophy since the initial decade of the twentieth century. Such success has come with a price, however, for the proliferation of neutralizing schematizations has progressively suffocated the specificity of his thought and subsequently impeded the understanding of his epistemological radicalism, so cherished by Duchamp and the historical avant-garde.2
C onsider, for example, how the specter of Bergson constantly hovers over Linda Dalrymple Henderson's authoritative discussion of Duchamp's scientific sources. Although Henderson recognizes the diffuse presence in Duchamp of various Bergsonian motives, because she regards Bergson as the antiscientific philosopher of the "inner self" and of "profound self-expression,"3 Bergsonian notions seem to her incompatible with the artistic revolution prompted by Duchamp. A historiographical exorcism is therefore needed in order to heal the consequences of the traumatic Bergson-Duchamp incest. Herein lies Henderson's solution: since Duchamp rejects the aesthetic principles of the Puteaux Cubists, he also abandons Bergsonism, which represents their philosophical matrix. Thus, the Bergsonian ideas "undoubtedly" present in Duchamp's artistic lexicon are nothing but debris accumulated in the course of his battle with the Cubist disciples of Bergson.4
T o counter these approaches, in the following pages I will map Duchamp's absorption and creative distortion of Bergsonism,5 concentrating on key terms of both Bergson's philosophy and Duchamp's speculations on art: space, "readymade," delay, body, virtual, circuit, machine.6 I will then discuss the theoretical implications of Duchamp's Bergsonism and place the readymade7 within its proper context: the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of reflection.
Space
Beginning with Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson distinguishes between two types of multiplicities: on the one hand, "duration" (durée), "an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination . . . a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers," and on the other, "a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of...