A Hole in a Thing It Is Not

But Melville knew better. “God help the poor fellow,” he notes with reference to Emerson’s advice, “who squares his life according to this.”² Danny’s world is one in which fathers, like kings, having lost all sense of measure, can only maintain their authority by devouring their children. This Titanic world is one of consummate horror, where the least sign of a subject’s appearance, Danny’s footsteps, marks one for death. Unable to efface his traces without, in turn, being effaced, Danny finds an ingenious solution: actively unhinging the sign from its signifying function—untethering it from all sense of propriety—turning the very marking of his place to his advantage. Like the confidence man, Danny makes use of the sign’s leading quality to mislead.

Danny escapes from the destructive logic of his trace—the way in which it marks him for death—only by assuming the signs of his presence as the very markers of his absence. Assuming his footprint not simply as a sign of his presence but the very cut (a void in the snow) that marks his relation to absence, Danny impersonates the signs of his own absence. To retrace his footsteps, to count them again in reverse, he must proceed negatively, he must be able to count the manner in which he counts for nothing. He counts himself out. Presenting himself as absent, Danny misleads neither by leaving a false trace nor by simply effacing his tracks in the snow, as a cat covers its shit, but hides them in place by retracing, remarking, registering, that is to say, repeating them, as if to absent himself in place.

The illusion of his disappearance lies in making a footprint that is not a footprint by being a footprint.³ A logical riddle that Danny indeed solves by walking backward in the very dint of his own tread: repeating not simply the footprint but its character of lack. By doing so, Danny differentiates the sign’s referential function (i.e., the sign’s capacity to present what is absent) from the mere fact of its inscription. He registers the difference between the imprint (the fact of inscription) and its sense: shifting the stress from the presentation of absence to the presentation of absence: from absent presence to present absence. A slight, imperceptible shift, as if passing from void to void (to recall M. Teste: dandy and nihilist), that has miraculous effects. By repeating the sign of his absent presence as an empty act of inscription, what is registered is his present absence.

This act of repetition differentiates the footprint as a hole in a thing it is not from its referential function as a sign that indicates the direction of his person. Danny makes something … he makes something vanish, namely the presence of his person. It is his capacity to repeat the empty place of the sign (the sculptural act that objectifies his presence) by registering it that allows him to appear to disappear. Proceeding negatively, repeating the place of his absence, Danny makes an object of his absence. He objectifies the void.

By relating to the sign that marks the absence of his presence as an absence, Danny can mislead precisely by leading, that is, by leading his father to his absence. Like a magician, he makes his person vanish. Positioning the sign within the space of its own inconsistency—where it at once leads and misleads, is true and false—Danny hides the signifying power of his trace by repeating it, occupying the difference between his footprint’s signification (an absence that refers to a presence) and its pure form (the presentation of an absence). He positions himself in the place of his own absence: the empty footprint, the void of his presence.

Danny thus inhabits the gap within signification that is constituted by the act of repetition itself. The fact that the presentation of an absence enables one to hide a presence through a repetition of the act of registration indicates a difference between that which is repeated (the imprint) and the act of repetition itself (the act of imprinting). This structural difference between repetition (that which is repeated) and the act, between the place and an act that takes place, entails that signification is always already divided. The repetition of an act divides the act differentiating the place from the place that the mark occupies. Repetition reinscribes through the registration of absence a difference between the material event of the sign, the act of its taking place, and the advent of its signification.

It is this difference that Lacan highlights when he maintains: “the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance as such.”⁴ The act of inscription (the realization of the signifier) divides the real, marking the space of a cut (a division, a gap) that can only be repeated, since its act evades designation. What is designated by means of repetition is the place of signification, but not the act that introduces absence into the real. That which can only be repeated is paradoxically that which is not repeatable, for repetition names something that repeats (anything whatever), and yet, on the other hand, that thing which is repeated has to be differentiated from the act of repetition as such, which is nonidentical with the thing, concept, word, etc. that is repeated. Repetition divides itself between the act and what it makes possible, namely the repeatable.

Repetition as the act of repeating is nonidentical with that which is repeated. And this leads to an interesting paradox of repetition, namely that what is repeated is repeatable, but the act of repetition itself is unrepeatable. One cannot repeat the act of repetition, only the thing repeated. The paradox of repetition’s sense can be posed as follows: to repeat repetition is to repeat the unrepeatable. “Repetition,” as Lacan puts it, “demands the new.”⁵ That which is new is the absence, which as such is unrepeatable: the hole that is punched by the placing of the sign. This paradox results in the tendency for the act of repetition to divide itself from that upon which repetition depends, which is always something other than repetition, namely, that which is repeatable. Thus repetition repeats the unrepeatable.

Furthermore, repetition of the act enacts the liquidation of its sense. Each act of repetition involves the whole of repetition, including through its act that which is unrepeatable. Repetition is nothing but this splitting of itself and thus the very sense of the whole, since it becomes identified with its act. Repetition, as at once part and whole, names this identification with its own non-sense. A whole and a part is a whole that is not. This disjunctive synthesis of an opposition unhinges the sense of the whole by including it in what it is not, a single act (a part). Repetition repeats this internal division that makes possible the distinction between that which takes place (the act of repetition) and the place of taking place (the repeatable).

In retracing his footsteps, Danny does not repeat himself, but relates to the act of repetition that divides his appearance between its place (the act of placing that makes a void) and the sign’s occupation of that place: a difference between the presence of the foot (even qua absent) and the hollow it makes in the snow (the void of its presence). The sign becomes a sign of its own absence through a repetition of the sign’s indicative function, situating it in the place of its own absence, repeating the manner in which it indicates the place of Danny’s presence. The sign must lead in order to mislead; it thus leads and therefore misleads. In effect, by relating to the act of repetition Danny separates himself from himself, the place of subject from the person that appears in its place, by separating the lack (the void in place) from what is lacking (the presence toward which the absence points). To repeat, to proceed negatively, is not merely a matter of going in reverse, like playing a film backward. The thinking required to repeat an act relates to the disjunction between the forward and the backward. The backward repeats the forward and thereby misleads by leading. What is marked or registered through the act of repetition is the footprint as thing, i.e., as a hole in a thing it is not. By identifying with this gap—this object-void—occupying the site of a repeated footprint, Danny identifies with that character of absence that assigns to him his lack of character. Becoming the impersonator of his own absence, Danny is what I have been calling an absentee subject. To be an absentee subject, it is not enough to simply efface one’s traces; one has to repeat the absence they make, positioning the subject in the object place of its absence.

This formula—a thing is a hole in a thing it is not—I borrow from a statement by the sculptor Carl Andre.⁶ The place of the subject is positioned in relation to the difference between the hole that is made in space and the space of the hole, a difference the subject maintains only through the object of its attachment. The subject is attached to the thing as hole. If Danny sustains this difference through the act of repetition, it is because through this act he makes an object of his absence. Danny is a sculptor. He shines. He has the sixth sense.

If Danny is a sculptor, it is because he relates to the absence he makes. A sculptor thus need not make anything. It is only necessary that one make nothing. Like a poet (from poiein: to make), to borrow W. H. Auden’s formula, the sculptor makes nothing happen. In making something, whatever it may be or become, the sculptor makes a hole. Nothing is always made, in addition to whatever is made.

If I opened this study of the absentee subject, as the subject of disorientation, with a consideration of Duchamp as a thinker whose thought is inseparable from the apparatus he constructs, it was to assert the novel hole he makes. He makes a hole into which art itself is then placed. Duchamp’s readymade is a paradigmatic case of making in this sense, regardless of how he himself may have understood it. The readymade is obviously something, but its function establishes art within a generic space by making a hole with art. As not not-art, I tried to show, the readymade’s in-difference is not simply a double negation, but something like a hole in art. A form of thinking about art practice that is a result of the decision to not make something but to make nothing (the thing was ready-made) and to place what was made, namely the void. The readymade becomes a matter of placing, with all the consequent problems that accrue to this new problem. In placing the readymade, Duchamp does not take the space as given; he makes the place for it, generically speaking, so that the hole that he’s made, no matter how slight or infrathin, becomes discernible. Art then is that thing, which is a hole, or, better, makes a hole in given sense for a subject summoned to think the nothing that happened. A hole is a thing in a hole it is not.

This is not a formula that Duchamp himself uttered. Rather he had it coined. In the image that Duchamp used for the cover of the International Collectors Society sales brochure (1967), Duchamp shows himself smoking a cigar, prominently displaying in his left hand a coinlike medallion that looks a lot like one of his last assisted readymades, Drain Stopper (Bouche-évier) (1964), but is likely the medal for the Marcel Duchamp Art Medal, which is indeed based on Drain Stopper.⁷ A hole is a thing in a hole it is not: Drain Stopper as a sculpture could not be more succinctly formulated.

Duchamp the subject, by basing the medal on Drain Stopper, could not be more clear: as a symbol whose function is to symbolize value, excellence, meaning in art, and whose title bears the name of Duchamp’s person as its ground and guarantor, this symbol counts for nothing. Whatever value it may serve to generate will amount to nothing but an elaborate hoax, appealing, of course, to the human, all too human, need for idols and honors, as that crucial support that allows a person to say it is not nothing. Thus Duchamp forces a decision: one can either recognize the medal as a medal of value, a tangible guarantee that the artist, when all is said and done, is not nothing, or one can see the not nothing for what it in fact is: a drain stopper, a bouche-évier, a collector and decisive mediator whose function is to facilitate drainage.

A symbol, like a word, is a sieve whose sense is composed of the filth that does not simply pass but collects on its surface. A word is a clogged pore. The French title, Bouche-évier (literally referring to the hole or “mouth” of the sink), puns on the French word bouche-trou. Between bouche-évier and bouche-trou a host of senses proliferate: a lowly, ordinary object of great use if one wants to prevent the clogging of one’s pipes; the hole in the sink itself; more colloquially, it is a stopgap, a substitute or surrogate, a replacement for lack of something better, the last thing one can use to plug up a hole, to fill a gap, a go-to device, ready to hand like spray foam; it also has the sense of being filler, a throw-away amusement, something senseless to amuse or dispel boredom, to while away a little time, to fill the space between 0 and 0; more literally, and altogether Beckettian, it is the mouth-hole (bouche: mouth and trou: hole or gap), the site of speech and consumption, not to mention the place where words themselves get eaten, where sense goes down the drain.

Drain Stopper puts all these senses into play. It is a truly comical object. It presents itself as an object-image of the drain of sense: the empty place of the signifier whose meaning is formed through the filling of its void—which is, after all, the use to which one puts a drain stopper: it fits into a hole; it catches debris. Drain Stopper provides as object an image of a hole that one inserts into a hole: a hole as thing in a hole it is not. This is the groundless ground upon which the Duchamp Art Medal is based. To believe and invest in its symbolic significance forces a perverse compromise: a betrayal of the non-sense of art for which Duchamp deeply and sincerely cared, namely the art that can make holes happen, that can make subjects think. Duchamp never abandons Julien Torma’s aligning of thought and charlatanism:

There is perhaps no better description of the Duchamp Art Medal. Duchamp was always willing to play the confidence man, nihilist, and dandy; the medal would be a final homage to the ridiculous, a monument to stupidity, a comical perversion of his concerns and legacy, and for that very reason, perhaps, a fitting end. Serving the umouristic function of turning his career as an artist into an elaborate and senseless joke that builds, like the Aristocrats, through elaborate profanation toward a deflationary end. A one-liner that falls flat: a joke without a punch line. Duchamp, like Beckett (albeit more aloof, less anguished, more nonchalant), borrowing Coetzee’s description of the latter, “eventually settled on philosophical comedy as the medium for his uniquely anguished, arrogant, self-doubting, scrupulous temperament.”⁹

Duchamp apprehends, like Danny, that the place of the object is a hole and that the most one can do is relate oneself to it by making an object of one’s absence. Duchamp leaves a footprint in art. And like Danny, Duchamp plays with its duplicity. In the photograph in the brochure for the Collectors Society, Duchamp shows us his Medal, this signifier of his absence and the hole that he has made in art. As already mentioned, Duchamp himself from out of a thick cloud of cigar smoke does indeed appear to be absorbed in its contemplation; the medallion seems to magnetize his gaze as it does our own. Its rather peculiar manner of presentation makes us think of a hypnotist. As a symbol of his artistic achievement, the Duchamp Medal is, of course, an honor, but such honors only come at the end of a career, the end of a life. Although the medal recognizes the value of his artistic contribution, it also implies his imminent absence: an absence from which its symbolic value derives. The Medal itself can only confer value through its attachment to Duchamp’s person, becoming a symbol of his absent presence. Although those to whom he shows the medal in the photograph may indeed see this presence (its symbolic value), Duchamp qua subject, qua model, can only see a surrogate, a decoy, an imposter; he can only see his present absence. Is not the Duchamp Medal, like all “values,” Duchamp asks with Nietzsche, just a decoy that prolongs “the comedy without ever getting closer to a denouement”?¹⁰ As Duchamp doubtless understood, as an object of vanity the Duchamp Medal is at once a vanitas. Although it may show us the value of his absence, it can only serve to show Duchamp himself his own absence, his imminent end, and the place where all values go, not simply down the drain but into the grave. It presents to him the hole he already occupies.

The Duchamp Medal is a skull bone. In the end, we return, as does Duchamp, to the readymade as the bone of culture. Yet if Duchamp is a melancholic, he too, like Baudelaire, is happy. His illustrious art of living absently shows that “continuing with an ‘In vain,’ without aim and purpose,” far from leading to paralytic thought, leads to the comic embrace of what could be indeed framed as a tragic insight: “when one realizes one’s being fooled and yet has no power to prevent oneself being fooled.”¹¹

The fool is not a tragic but a comic figure. And only a fool would indeed treat a thing as a hole, to declare that something is nothing. Democritus, after all, is the laughing philosopher. Duchamp, for all his intellectual refinement, knew how to play the fool. To say that something is nothing by being something is foolish. When we relate to a footprint not as a sign of mastery but as a hole in the ground, something magical happens: the subject appears as absent. In this hole, the intelligent and the foolish meet. Like Dupin, whose name alludes to the dupe, Duchamp grasps that ratiocination is the art not simply of unmasking deception but of grasping its truth. Art is nothing if not the truth of deception. To say this is a sculpture that is not a sculpture by being a sculpture is to speak non-sense. It is to say this footprint is not a footprint by being a footprint. It is to say a thing is a hole in a thing it is not, or a hole is a thing in a hole it is not. The figure summoned by such non-sense cannot escape thinking its own absence. Positioned in the void, such a subject exhibits itself as the object of its absence. Like the sculptor, this subject makes an object of its absence.

Duchamp himself does this not simply with the Duchamp Medal, but above all with the play that he sets into motion in the brochure photograph. Duchamp shows us, as if through anamorphosis, what it is that he sees and what it is that we are to see by his seeing. Although it appears that Duchamp is looking at what we are looking at, namely the Medal he shows us, this is in fact impossible. The photograph functions like a magic trick that exhibits its own sleight of hand. Positioned in darkness, engulfed in cigar smoke, the very image of Lucifer—or is it Alistair Crowley?—Duchamp’s obscure gaze emanates as if from a hole. We spectators are transfixed by what he shows—the Medal—and this hypnotic spell is only broken at a second glance, so to speak, when we notice that Duchamp cannot see the object he shows. The fact that he appears to see it is a photographic sleight of hand. Far from transfixed by the surface of The Medal’s radiance, Duchamp’s gaze, at this second glance, falls into the void, as if sucked into the black hole that devours the center of the image and whose vortex is marked by a turbulent swirl of cigar smoke. Duchamp in fact looks upon nothing: the void between his eye and the object. The object of The Medal, despite appearances, does not triangulate our respective points of view. Our respective gazes do not meet. And as if to stress both this perspectival illusion and its shattering, the actual object on which the lens itself is focused is Duchamp’s face and perhaps even his eye: an eye, however, that is obscured, hidden by the smoke he is in the act of exhaling. Duchamp is blowing smoke in our eyes, blinding us just as the Medal itself blinds us to the hole it occupies.

For there is indeed another object in the photograph held poised and whose ash is directed at the picture plane, as if to burn a hole in its surface. This form of the hole, this vitola, repeats the circular form of the Medal, placed on the same horizontal axis. The photograph’s composition establishes a formal relation of equivalency between cigar and Medal, the left and the right hand, as if Duchamp himself was taking the measure of these two objects on display, each competing for presence. Although the Medal at first takes pride of place, it is clearly the cigar that wins out, whose formless emissions take command of the tableau and fill it with their ominous meanderings.

The smoke itself doubtless reminds us of Duchamp’s cover for View magazine (1945) depicting a bottle emitting smoke into the cosmic abyss and whose back cover contained the following definition of infra-mince: “Quand la fumée de tabac sent aussi de la bouche qui l’exhale, les deux odeurs s’épousent par infra-mince [When the smoke of tobacco also smells of the mouth which exhales it, the two smells are conjoined [literally, married] by the infra-thin].” On the brochure, Duchamp as his own substitute (bouche-trou) appears as the one emitting smoke. With the aid of his object—the cigar—he imbricates space (the void) with his present absence, filling it with a smoke that retains the trace imprint of Duchamp’s own mouth cavity. The smoke that wafts in the direction of the Duchamp Medal based on Bouche-évier is blown from the hole of a mouth: that hole into which one plugs a cigar. It is not merely the art object, the Duchamp Metal, that is a substitute for Duchamp’s presence; the stub of a cigar becomes an instrument for making Duchamp absent. If the cigar establishes one’s identity—as Charles Dickens captured when he uttered: “Ah, if only I had brought a cigar with me! This would have established my identity”—it can also serve the function of making absent, hiding Duchamp’s presence as the footstep occasions Danny’s disappearance. The identity of Duchamp here at issue is not that of the name DUCHAMP which lends a symbolic identity and value to the Medal on display, but that other Duchamp whose identity is wagered on infra-mince (the less than thin). This present absence is marked by the hole that he holds aloft between his index and middle fingers. A better bouche-trou than bouche-évier, the cigar makes an object of Duchamp’s absence. The stub is that eternal remainder stained by Duchamp’s singular breath.

Sculpture makes an object of one’s absence, locating oneself in the void that appears as a thing. Nobody has understood this better than Isa Genzken. Sculptures themselves are always self-portraits. Not strictly speaking of the visage, of the person of the sculptor, but of the meat of the brain (Mein Gehirn, 1984), the bone of the cranium, the jaw, the tooth (X-Rays, 1989–1991). These are not necessarily the works that garner a reputation or make a career, but, existing in the margins or cracks of a stupendous oeuvre, they serve as reminders that the effort of sculptural thinking strives to form some image, however vague or precise, of the nullity of the real. Genzken’s X-Ray self-portraits are perhaps the most literal way to index the concern that I have pursued in the course of this book. The skull bone of the artist tipping a glass. In this ridiculous and dark image, bleak and relentlessly funny, we see the present absence of one trying with drink and/or art to loosen the skin of the person, to draw near to the heap of bones we are.

Notes

7. Dalia Judovitz writes, “Drain Stopper is an item of hardware that Duchamp recycles from his bathroom in Spain, modified by being thickened with additional lead. Marcel Duchamp Art Medal is a cast from Drain Stopper in several versions, including bronze, steel, and silver editions, issued by the International Numismatic Agency (also known as the International Collectors Society, New York). … Thus, like Fountain, Drain Stopper is only provisionally a work of art; it is more like a stopper—a stopgap measure or makeshift substitute (a pun on bouche-trou, its French title)—or a punctuation mark (indicating a pause or delay), rather than an actual art object. Poised between the wet (an allusion to painting as a purely material art ‘the splashing of paint’) and the dry (a conceptual interpretation of art that includes mechanical reproduction), Drain Stopper acts like a regulative device controlling the transition between art and nonart. Like a pun, ‘stopper’—which means to regulate sound (as pitch in music) or light (as a photographic aperture)—mechanically triggers both the linguistic and the visual registers.” Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 186–188.