The Metrologist: On Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages

Cabanne:

How did you come to choose a mass-produced object, a “readymade,” to make a work of art?

Duchamp:

Please note that I did not want to make a work of art out of it. The word “readymade” did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a “readymade,” or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. … The word “readymade” thrust itself on me then. It seemed perfect for these things that weren’t works of art, that weren’t sketches, and to which no art terms applied. That’s why I was tempted to make them.

Cabanne:

What determined your choice of readymades?

Duchamp:

That depended on the object. In general I had to be aware of its “look.” It’s very difficult to choose an object, because at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or hate it. You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good and bad taste.¹

Even if the object is destined to become a work of art (and this is indubitable and in every way decisive), Duchamp insists that the encounter is one of indifference. By this, the play of the faculties, as Kant would put it, that serves to orient all thought is reduced to a zero degree, a null point; to borrow a formula from Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s “Bartleby,” “a negativism beyond all negation.”² This indifference is the result of an encounter in which the object is not what it is, and in so being, it is what it is not: as such, it is not not-art. It becomes art only at the cost of reducing art to the emptiness of a name that signifies a mere relation to that which it is not. And yet it is this relation that founds a radically new practice of art as a generic practice. As such, it is the event that conditions what we call contemporary art.

The operation of the readymade which situates art within the nullity of its own occurrence—the vertigo of its own immanence—and that is indexed to the problem of making an artwork that is not an artwork—obviously strictly impossible, but whose impossibility is charged with producing a new practice of art—depends upon an encounter in which one is not an artist, that is, not the fabricator of the object, but becomes an artist as an effect of the encounter with the object. It is an encounter that separates the “artist” from his or her taste (goût)—the perceptual and cognitive habits that enable one to “recognize” art; to become an artistic subject—to practice art in the generic sense—one’s eye and mind have to be separated. A separation that has its locus in Duchamp’s insistence on his disgust with the “hand.” As Thierry de Duve writes, “Disgusted, and angry, and ‘vengeful’ toward the hand: we cannot keep track of all the instances when Duchamp declared, as he did to Otto Hahn, that he wanted to ‘demonetize the idea of the hand.’”³ “My hand became my enemy in 1912,” Duchamp writes to Francis Roberts, “I wanted to get away from the palette.”⁴ And the first of Duchamp’s pure readymades, Bottlerack (Égouttoir), is a play on the French goût (taste). It is not technique as such that Duchamp finds so repugnant but “touch”: the touch of the artist. The very notion of the readymade, as Linda Henderson suggests, may have its basis in the transvaluation of the notion of the already made (tout fait) that one finds in the writing of Bergson, where the latter opposes the cold, external, objective gaze of scientific intellect that judges according to “ready-made” ideas to the sensitivity of the artistic act that expresses the “fundamental self.”⁵ When transposed from science to art, rejecting “ready-made” ideas rejects the notions of the sensitive artist and the expressive self.⁶

Duchamp’s readymade is comical insofar as it makes literal his acceptance of the objective, cold, external gaze characteristic of the scientific intellect. By taking an object already made, industrially produced, and not the result of the artist’s craft or an artistic sensibility, Duchamp not only accepts as a starting point the radical externality of the self to itself (its alienation), but makes the very problem of art’s objectivity into a problem of and for the subject of art and of the subject guided by “ready-made” notions, such as the idea of a métier. Paradoxically the readymade requires that one jettison subjectivity in order then to jettison objectivity in art. Addressing a ready-made object rather than a ready-made idea, the artist does not make the art object but the art idea, which assigns a measureless measure to art. The paradoxical solution of the readymade is that it makes the immeasurable into the very measure of art. What is to be made is not the object but the subject of art, that is, the subject that apprehends and thereby decides upon it. Yet this subject cannot be given “ready-made,” so to speak. It does not precede but proceeds from the decision it makes. If the readymade marks Duchamp’s definitive break with the “hand” (the subjective in art)—separating the artist from what he or she can do (the artist is not a painter, a sculptor, etc., but an artist, a generic vocation)—and likewise separates art from an essence (the objective in art)—lacking a definition, art becomes an operation that produces a subject that recognizes something as art—it poses the problem of art as one of measurement or lack thereof. The problem of measurement lies at the heart of Duchamp’s “artistic” concern and assumes a sense not dissimilar to the one that Protagoras gives it: “the human being is the measure [metron] of all things [panton chremeton].” By this I do not intend merely the banality that Duchamp makes the artist into the measure of all things artistic. Rather, the artist shoulders the difficult task of internalizing a measureless measure. Measure in this sense concerns the proper limit, the criterion through which something can be said to be or not be.⁷ Through the problem of measure, Duchamp problematizes the very idea of art. What he does is show not only that there is not an intrinsic measure to art, that nothing is proper to art (and he pursues this in the direction that leads him to question the very notion of intrinsic measures as such), but that art exhausts measurement.

To exhaust measurement is not a matter of transgressing the limit of the measurable, of asserting the importance or value of that which exceeds all measurement. To exhaust measure is rather to violate the rule of good or proper measurement that states that there are things that can be measured and others that cannot be. To exhaust measurement exhausts its possibility by exhausting that which is measurable in measurement itself. It measures, paradoxically, by means of the immeasurable.⁸ Art becomes a matter of making a measure and not simply taking a measurement, but what it makes into a measure is the not-measurable. Paradoxically, art becomes its own measure only insofar as it singularly lacks measurability. If the readymade is a consequence of this exhaustion, its precursor, Three Standard Stoppages (1913–1914), is a work that presents itself literally as a measure and in which Duchamp comically presents the artist as a metrologist, making use of the form of science to demystify art and art to demystify science.

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Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages treats art as an apparatus of measurement and measurement as an apparatus of art. Neither a painting nor a drawing nor sculpture, the medium of the Stoppages, as Duchamp claimed, is chance itself; chance being both the thing to be measured and the new standard of measurement. In a note from the 1914 Box, Duchamp describes “The Idea of the Fabrication” as follows: “If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter straight onto a horizontal plane, distorting itself as it pleases, and creates a new shape of the measure of length.”⁹ Duchamp would shortly thereafter execute this procedure, or at least claim to have executed it, by holding a meter-long piece of thread at the height of one meter, letting it drop onto pieces of canvas that he had painted Prussian blue. Repeating the procedure three times—to give the necessary semblance of order—Duchamp then fixed each of the distortions onto the canvas with drops of varnish. The next phase of the work was completed while working on Tu m’ (1918), his last painting on canvas. Using each stoppage as a model, he had wooden templates cut which could then be used as rulers. And Duchamp purportedly made use of these “rulers” in a number of works. He completed the Stoppages in 1936 while preparing it for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: cutting each stoppage into a thin strip and mounting them on glass panes and then housing all of the elements in the croquet box—a decision that drives home comically the allusion to the platinum standard meter kept in the International Bureau for Measure and Weights in Sèvres, France.

If the work’s medium is chance, the contingency of the swerve (to allude to the ancient wisdom of Lucretius) that gives rise to form, to shape, the function or role of the artist is simply to register it objectively, to be the servant or instrument of its pleasure, its mechanical will; the fall of the string produces form as it pleases. And the artist is reduced to drawing the consequences. This play on the sense of “drawing” certainly did not escape Duchamp. Aping the form of the metrologist, the task of the artist is to ground art in chance. The work then is nothing but the objectification of chance.

The Stoppages is Duchamp’s most profound foray into the pataphysical. Alfred Jarry defines pataphysics in four key ways: “the science of imaginary solutions”; “a science of the particular”; a science examining “the laws governing exceptions”; and “a science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics,” that “stands to metaphysics as metaphysics stands to physics.”¹⁰ As a pataphysical device, the Stoppages is an imaginary solution to a physical impossibility: the measurement of chance. One can produce the calculus of a chance occurrence’s probability, but the throw of the dice does not abolish chance as such. The event itself, the swerve, is contingent; it is an utterly singular occurrence bound up with its materiality. One can take its measure only by relating it. This relation suffices to abolish it, registering it as a nullity. To take the measure of chance demands the abolishment of the measure. To imagine the measure of chance is to take the measure of the immeasurable.

To ground art in the pataphysical science of imaginary measurement results in a contradictory object: a measure that produces a measure incommensurable with the concept of measurement (the measurement of the immeasurable). Pataphysics is not a science of contradiction but a contradictory science. Grounding art through such a science likewise induces a paradox. An art that is pataphysical will deploy a technique (intention) that is nontechnical (nonintentional). The Stoppages presents itself as a technical apparatus that has the effect of eliminating artistic technique (artistic intention). The pataphysical apparatus of the Stoppages produces a new theoretical object (inconsistent with science) and a new theoretical subject (inconsistent with art). The pataphysical grounds art in its singular occurrence (a science of true particularity): in the very gap between physical determination (that which can be conceptually determined, schematized in the Kantian sense) and the metaphysical (understood as the determination of beings as such and as a whole). If Deleuze can maintain, as he does, that Martin Heidegger is a pataphysical thinker and that Jarry is an unrecognized precursor to Heidegger, it is because pataphysics determines the ground of beings through the thought of being, understood as that which conceals itself in its very appearance as a being. Being appears as a being (as this or that), but it shows itself in its singularity. The pataphysical, as Deleuze suggests, is a phenomenology of the singular and institutes itself through drawing a distinction between the appearance and the phenomenon: “The phenomenon, on this account, does not refer to a consciousness, but to a Being, the Being of the phenomenon that consists precisely in its self-showing [se montrer]. The Being of the phenomenon is the ‘epiphenomenon,’ non-useful and unconscious, the object of pataphysics.”¹¹ Pataphysics thinks being as chance (singular occurrence, aleatory encounter), which withdraws from all objectification and is hidden in the form it induces.

Through pataphysics, Duchamp aestheticizes science in order to de-aestheticize art. He thereby traces a “new” art object that can be thought but not known (to appeal to the distinction first drawn by Kant between thought and the understanding and radicalized by Heidegger when he distinguishes thought and philosophy). This is what Duchamp calls the nonretinal: an object of an intelligent art (Duchamp’s preferred nomenclature), an art that is not “dumb” like painting.

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There is something genuinely humorous about this strategy of “aestheticizing” science in order to liberate art from the aesthetic. Duchamp himself describes the Stoppages as a “joke about the meter.” The work takes its departure, quite literally, from the meter as the standard unit of measure. In using the meter as a ground for a new measurement, he regrounds the meter and measurement as such in that which it excludes from all measurement: namely the act of measurement itself. Here we see Duchamp’s pataphysical brilliance in all its luster. If the piece has to be understood as a joke whose punch line discredits “science mildly, lightly, unimportantly,” as Duchamp puts it, this discrediting is pataphysical. Its seriousness does not consists in its scientific skepticism, but in the manner in which Duchamp takes the measure at its word. The Stoppages is not funny, but “violently comical” in the sense in which Deleuze formulates it: “it means only what it says, literally.”¹²

What does Duchamp do? He uses the measure (the standard meter) to make a measurement, but he does not use it in its intended sense. He does not measure something. Rather he measures nothing. He uses the measure improperly. He does not make use of its form: the end for which it was fashioned. Rather he uses its matter (its literal quantity, its material length). Rather than using the meter to make a measurement, he makes a new measure, a new standard of measurement. Duchamp does not abide by the rules of good measure, which imply, of course, that the meter be used for the sake of making the measure. Duchamp takes this rule quite literally, reading it to the letter. He uses the measure for the sake of making the measure. He thus takes the measure of the measure, forcing it to literally do what it says it does. This is the literalization of its rule. It has the effect of reducing the measure to non-sense, and one can only take the measure of the “new” measure through the production of new measures, which is no doubt, in my view, the central import of the fact that there are three stoppages. Just as Frege shows that one cannot say the sense of what one is saying without formulating a new proposition to say it, thus proliferating sense, one cannot take the measure of the measure without creating a new measure. Thus, Duchamp creates a “sign” of measurement: a pataphysical sign. Yet such a sign does not designate or signify; or it signifies only itself (self-referentially) by showing itself. It is the measure, not a sign of it. It is a measure that can only be shown, presented but not represented. It can never be treated as a means for measuring; it is its own ground, an end in itself.

If we treat the meter as a “standard,” the pataphysics of measurement critiques the metaphysics of measurement. The measure necessarily forgets or conceals its relation to the immeasurable—its relation to that which it is not—and this “not” does not admit of measure. Each measure includes within itself an uncertainty that indexes its imperfection, its deviation from the ideal it incarnates. This sleight of hand is not merely accidental but necessary, if it is going to serve its function as the standard of measurement. Duchamp exposes the reifying nature of standardization by stripping the meter of its use value, of its essential quality; if we are used to treating its essential quality as a quantity that can be used, Duchamp perverts this procedure by treating its quantity as a quality. This quality of the act of measuring is necessarily concealed by the creation of its intended function or use that presupposes a determination of the limit of the measure, the cut that installs the measure as the representative of the measure.

This limit, this cut, is the notion of stoppage. The problem of measure in art (as with metrology) is bound up with the art of measurement, which is a matter of stoppage. By impersonating the metrologist, Duchamp approaches art anachronistically as a question of techne (know-how). He treats both the artist and the metrologist as artisans, with sets of skills (techniques), and it is precisely the question of skill that Plato thinks implies the problem of measure. The one who practices the art of measuring would be the technician of technicians, the philosopher. For Plato the problem of measure is posed by those who practice an art (techne), for it is only insofar as they are in possession of a proper measure that they can practice their art, as a horse trainer must know what is good for a horse in order to train it. If this measure did not exist (if there were not a measurable difference between what is good and bad for horses), then horses could not be trained. Without knowing the “due measure,” one cannot grasp what is “fitting” for horses. As the “visitor” says to the young Socrates in the Statesman: “There is in fact an art of measurement relating to everything that comes into being. … For it is indeed the case, in a certain way, that all the products of the various sorts of expertise share in measurement.”¹³ Yet the Stoppages inverts the Platonic inquiry. For Plato the problem of measurement serves to ground the knowledge that the technician possesses; for Duchamp, on the contrary, posing the problem of measurement will serve to separate the problem of art from that of techne; it will serve to unground, to destabilize what the artist presumes to know. It is chance that undoes this hinge. For whereas Plato inhabits a cosmos where chance as such does not exist, everything having its proper place, its proper measure, grounded ultimately in that which is beyond all measure (the Good beyond being), for Duchamp chance undoes propriety. With the Stoppages, he grounds the measurement of art in chance; an operation that will unground measurement, for chance itself will not only be immeasurable but imperfect.

Duchamp claims that the notion of stoppage occurred to him while on a stroll on the rue Claude Bernard in Paris when he encountered the sign stoppage above a tailor’s shop. That Duchamp himself chose thread (the stitch) for his “experiment” is hardly beside the point. In French, stoppage has both the sense that it has in English of “coming to a halt” and the additional meaning of being an “invisible mend” (the utopia of tailors). The process of standardization has the effect of being an invisible stitch, for the measure itself conceals the fact that it required an act of measurement. As with the structure of natural, which is to say metaphysical, illusions in Kant, the mind has the tendency to treat the measure as if it were a thing and not a relation. One treats the meter as if it were a thing, objectively present, simply given, which can in turn be used for the sake of measuring. One does not grasp in the thing its institution. Its apparent stasis (the line marked on the meter bar delimiting what a meter is) is in fact the result of a movement, an act of constitution that, of course, did not have the “meter” to which it could refer. The meter itself should be understood as a dynamic tension, as if it were a string held taut. If the meter sets the measure of truth, establishing a relation that can thereafter be thought as a base unit, then the meter itself, as Henri Poincaré suggests, and whom Duchamp himself had read with great interest, is neither true nor false. It can be neither proven nor falsified, since it becomes the ground for the determination of the true and the false. There is thus an irreducible contingency to the genesis of the measure, bound up with its act, the act of taking the measure, which, after it has been set or established, i.e., standardized, appears as something necessary, an unshakeable foundation. The play of sense within the French word stoppage no doubt suggested to Duchamp that the meter itself (the standard of standards) seems to have been something tailored: the essential and irreducible gap between its necessity and its contingency mended invisibly. It is thus a piece of art (an artifact). Its whole display serves to reinforce its appearance of perfection: its ideality reinforced, bolstered by its staging. And yet this visible display, which serves its authority, also serves to conceal the imperfections, no matter how slight, that mar its ideality irreparably.

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Duchamp knows full well that, for the measure to work (to fulfill its function), this seam has to remain invisible; it has to be stopped up, if I can force a bit of French into the English connotation. The art of measurement lies in concealing itself as an art (techne), for without this sleight of hand the standard itself would not be set. In this sense, it is metaphysical; it is an art that cannot appear as such, lest its credibility be shaken. The metaphysics of measurement commits it to an infinite horizon of perfectibility.¹⁴ The more refined the technique, the better, the more seamless, the illusion. The scientist is then the most refined of artisans, and is nothing without his or her technique. However, if one is not to be distracted from the seam, one cannot commit oneself to the art of measurement nor remain faithful to the consistency of logic. As Heine suggested, in a poem about Hegel that Freud often liked to quote:

Life and the world’s too fragmented for me!

A German professor can give me the key.

He puts life in order with skill magisterial,

Builds a rational system for better or worse;

With nightcap and dressing-gown scraps for material

He chinks up the holes in the universe.¹⁵

The artist, in this sense, has nothing on the scientist as the inventor of beautiful illusions. The Stoppages seems to be animated by this resolutely Nietzschean insight. If the scientist is more artful, a better technician, than the artist can ever hope to be, then the artist can either become a scientist—reaffirming the relation that was forged during the Renaissance with the emergence and refinement of perspective—or make art pit itself against technical refinement, making an “enemy” of the hand. Or is there, perhaps, a third option? In The New Introductory Lectures, Freud alludes to Heine’s poem:

[Philosophy] departs from [science] by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent. … It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations. … And it often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen / Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus. [With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.]”¹⁶

Freud presents an image of science stripped of its metaphysical artifice, a science that refuses to present a coherent picture of the universe, refusing to overestimate the value of our logical constructions. Duchamp like Freud will marshal this poetic incisiveness against the philosopher’s will to coherence, laboring to make visible the invisible stitches that sustain the belief in the world as an integral whole.

The Stoppages plays with reopening and closing this gap, this seam that logical reality must close in order that its machinations do not come to a halt. Thus, stoppage itself should be understood as that which halts movement, interrupts the fall of the string, giving it a permanent shape or form (an ideal appearance fixed for all time), transforming contingency into necessity; standardization as stoppage, as the cessation of movement, the end of an act. And yet it exposes itself (a bride stripped bare) as an interruption: as a measure, it is necessarily contingent. Its contingency lies not in the ideality of the genesis of form but in the manner in which all form is indexed to the non-sense of “taking place.” The sense of this art “posits” as its necessary condition the nonanteriority of meaning. The Stoppages in the end is a pataphysical experiment that grounds a Lucretian physics:

Thus it will have been noticed that this philosophy is, in sum, a philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void [fait le vide philosophique] in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous “philosophical problems” (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any “object” whatever (“philosophy has no object”) in order to set out from nothing, and from the infinitesimal aleatory variation of nothing constituted by the swerve of the fall. Is there a more radical critique of all philosophy, with its pretension to utter the truth about things?¹⁷

In founding art on chance, Duchamp founds it on the void. Art founds itself not through an appeal to any kind of authority outside itself (to science), but on its own lack of authority. For Duchamp the modern artist has to come to grips with this lack; the artist can rely on nothing but the emptiness of art’s name as indexed to the ultimate vacuity of its capacities.

This is the cost of art’s commitment to the immanence of its measure, a judgment wagered on its own indifference. If the Cartesian cogito effectively seals its foundation within itself, becoming the presuppositionless beginning necessary for science to ground its universal pretensions, the Duchampian cogito is split by chance that serves to separate the artist from his or her own capacities, his or her essential possibility qua artist/artisan, in order to think an impossible object. The line that divides the Duchampian cogito is curved. It is attached to the event of its being drawn; neither here nor there, neither inside nor outside, providing no orientation outside its own event, its act of taking place. The Duchampian cogito is a true travesty of the meter, its nonsymmetrical shadow, making use of its authority to found a “system” whose extension is singular: as if trying to speak with a language of proper names. The only system of measurement which in fact could fulfill its own requirements would not be a system at all, since its universality would coincide with its singularity (a name that would only name itself; a measure that could only measure itself). Duchamp exposes the measure’s symbolic import, namely that it founds itself through those subjected to it. In becoming subject to its law, one thus recognizes it and is gripped by its constraining objectivity. Yet, like the space of perspective in painting, its illusion only appears to those who occupy the place of its projection. It is a view from a perspective whose objectivity is founded on the emptiness of the subject who occupies the point external to the picture plane. The meter, just like the scientific pretensions of perspective, depends on establishing the symmetry between the inside and the outside of that which the measure measures.

If perspective subordinates the line to the subject which must hold it taut at the end of the visual pyramid, Duchamp’s subject lets the line slacken, releasing it from its constraint, opening it to contingency. One can imagine the picture plane whose axes (x, y, z) are diverted by their fall, warping the Euclidean space of one-point perspective. This effect of warping is already registered in Cézanne’s distortion of perspective (the strange effect of bulging that is often noted). Yet if Cézanne’s importance lies in a form of painting that breaches the requisite distance of the perspectival subject from the eye, placing it in things (the eye’s palpation, as Merleau-Ponty describes so well), Duchamp’s operation displaces the space of the picture altogether. It is not merely the decentered, impersonal subject of the visible that interests him but a subject that situates itself at that point of radical indifference which threatens the collapse of all distinction, all measure: art can be everything or nothing. Only a subject that will invest in its own nothingness will back art. Duchamp’s line is abstract in the sense that Deleuze articulates it at the beginning of Difference and Repetition: “The abstract line acquires all its force from giving up the model—that is to say, the plastic symbol of the form—and participates in the ground all the more violently in that it distinguishes itself from it without the ground distinguishing itself from the line.”¹⁸ The chance operation generates a nonlinear line whose form is not governed by an intention. Duchamp’s procedure liberates the line from its strict measure (loosening it); if the meter is indeed the paradigmatic image of a line ordered by a rule, the Stoppages serves to standardize a disoriented line, a line thrown off its axis. The procedure liberates the meter from its own standard, subordinating the “magnitude” of its measure to the incalculable. Inaugurating a form of thought at home in its disorientation, Duchamp’s greatness is that he drew from it very personal consequences, bequeathing to each artist the task of tracing a cogito of his or her own.

Chapter 1 The Metrologist: On Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages

Notes