The unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root every name in history is I.
—Deleuze and Guattari, quoting Nietzsche
“I always wanted,” she said, “to find a way to make sculpture. … What I wanted was to be able to make a sculpture.” And what had he said, a quarter of a century ago now? “I wanted to make a railroad car,” he wrote from Voltri, in 1962. “Given enough time I could have made a train.” David Smith, however, was already a sculptor; the “way” he wanted to find was not on the order of how to make the object, but how to make its phallic import absolutely unmistakable, even to himself.
So these two desires—to make a sculpture, to make a train—are different desires, we might say; they are the effects of different orders of fantasy.
But why, you could ask, would Sherrie Levine need to “find a way” to make a sculpture? Isn’t the strategy of the readymade (her adoptive strategy, after all) itself, in fact, already, a way of making sculpture? The series of things it produces—the snow shovel, the bottle rack, the urinal, the comb—are already part of the order of the freestanding object; even his calendar (Pharmacy) and the advertisement he “corrected” (Apollinaire Enameled) enter the world of the readymade as objects rather than images. And so her grids, painted on lead, are likewise displaced from the domain of the image. Through the strategy of the readymade they are reinvented as chessboards, as checkerboards, as objects. If she called her early, pirated photographs “collages,” it is because the image, scissored out of the pages of an art book, acquires along with its status as a readymade, the reified condition of the object.
But the difference between the (readymade) object and the sculpture may be this: that the sculpture makes it absolutely unmistakable, even to us, that the world of things to which it belongs is that of the “part-object.” It has not come from off the shelf, of supermarket, or department store, or bookshop. There is no question but that it has migrated off the body: so many detachable organs, so many areas of intensity, the effects of so many proper names. The series: Rodin, Maillol, Duchamp, Brancusi, and closer to us, Morris, Andre, Hesse. So many names to which to attach the effect of a desire for the part-object: breast, penis, eye, hand, anus. The Rodin effect we could call it, the Brancusi effect, the Duchamp effect.
It was in 1952 that Michel Carrouges isolated the Duchamp effect. He called it “the bachelor machine,” and he linked it to another series of names: Franz Kafka’s mechanism for torture through tattooing, in The Penal Colony; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s irresistible automaton, in The Eve of the Future; Raymond Roussel’s machines for textual production, in Impressions of Africa.1 The model of the machine was clearest, most complete, however, in Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Everything was there: the plan for perpetual motion which the “Litanies” chanted as “vicious circle”; the complexity of the interconnections (glider, malic molds, sieves, chocolate grinder, scissors …); the sterility of the cycle, its autoeroticism, its narcissism; the utter self-enclosure of the system, in which desire is at one and the same time producer, consumer, and reproducer (recorder or copier), which is to say, the bachelor apparatus, the oculist witnesses, the top inscription of the bride.
Marcel Duchamp, Neuf Moules Mâlic, 1914–1915. Glass, lead, oil paint, varnished steel, 26 × 40 inches. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris AM1997–95. Photo: Philippe Migeat. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resources. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.
In 1972 the bachelor machine was there, waiting, for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to hook it up to the body without organs, to plug it into the logic of the desiring-machines, to reinvent the Duchamp effect within the world of schizo-capitalism.2 The total interconnectedness of the machines and the absolute deterritorialization of the world onto which they cling: an undifferentiated socius, the body without organs, the subject without a center, the world without Oedipus.
The bachelor machine of Anti-Oedipus constructs the relationship between the desiring-machines and the body without organs, between the bachelor’s world of production and the bride’s domain of inscription. The desiring-machines produce by intercepting the continuous flows of milk, urine, semen, shit; they interrupt one flow in order to produce another, which the next machine will interrupt to produce a flow for the next, and so on. Each machine is a part-object: the breast-machine, the mouth-machine, the stomach-machine, the intestine-machine, the anus-machine. As opposed to this the body without organs produces nothing; it re-produces. It is the domain of simulation, of series crossing one another, of the possible occupation of every place in the series by a subject forever decentered. “I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say that I am also Lesseps. … I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new idea—that of a decent criminal. I am also Chambige—also a decent criminal. … The unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root every name in history is I.”3 The body without organs is the place of inscription; it is textual, semiological. But its logic is not that of the signifier, that of representation. Rather it is the logic of flows of information in which the content of the first flow (its product) is the expressive medium of the second (its producer). Deleuze and Guattari quote McLuhan here: “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.”4
The same logic is at work, then, within the world of production—the desiring-machines—and that of consumption and reproduction—the body without organs. That is the achievement of the bachelor machine; it holds up the mirror in which the blossoming of the bride reflects onto the cemetery of the uniforms and liveries, in which the inscription is the same as the production, a place where the erotic energy of the “shots” is locked forever in a “mirrorical return.” The bachelor machine produces this folding of the one over the other as a moment of pure intensity.
In 1989 the bachelor machine was there, waiting, to provide Sherrie Levine with “a way” to make sculpture. The Duchamp effect she needed was not that of the readymade, which describes the relations among commodities, and between commodities and their consumers, but that of the bachelor-machine, which invokes the connections between part-objects. And the malic molds, otherwise called the cemetery of uniforms and liveries, would provide these part-objects “readymade.” The “way to make a sculpture” would be to exhume them, to liberate them from the plane of The Large Glass, to cast them in three dimensions. By freeing them from their connection in the series: sieves-malic molds-capillary tubes-glider-chocolate grinder …, they would be liberated ever more securely into the other series: Rodin-Maillol-Brancusi-Duchamp-Hesse …, the series that includes David Smith most clearly when he dreams of wanting to make a train.
Sherrie Levine, The Bachelors (Gendarme), 1989. Cast glass, approximately 12 × 5 × 5 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
Sherrie Levine, The Bachelors (Gardien de la Paix), 1989. Cast glass, approximately 12 × 5 × 5 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
And nothing needs to be added to these bachelors. They are just as Duchamp left them, readymade. Not as he made them, for on the field of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even they are in the two dimensions of sheets of lead; but as he projected them, within the notes he so patiently stored in The Green Box. For he envisioned them as molds after all, and therefore to be cast. Each cast producing a bachelor, or as he would also put it, a malic form. And the contents of the molds he described as well, when he imagined the illuminating gas inside the molds as solidifying into frosty spangles—“a thousand spangles of frosty gas.” To cast the bachelors in glass, and then to frost the glass, is therefore to add nothing, to create nothing. It is to accept Duchamp’s bachelors, his malic forms, readymade. It is to do nothing more than to occupy that historical position that can be called the Duchamp effect.
The only thing here that is added to the Duchamp effect is what is subtracted, namely, the effect of cutting away the bachelors from the rest of the apparatus, from the glider, the sieves, the grinder, the scissors, the splashes …, and finally of separating each bachelor from his fellows. The isolation is what is added. It is, we could say, an added subtraction. So that the question is how to characterize this excision that the artist’s own desiring-machine produces within the connected flow of Duchamp’s apparatus, of Duchamp’s glass.
One answer is that the added subtraction equals “lack.” Desire, according to this, desires what is absent. It wants to have the missing thing. And that thing that is missing will, by giving lack its name, also give desire its meaning. In this reading the sculpture occupies the level of a fantasy. It stays within the world of representation as the model of something desired. Its lack is castrative; its meaning is redemptive, meaning redeemed. It is sculpture as the desire for meaning.
But another answer is that the added subtraction allows the bachelor, now cast in glass, actually to be produced, and thus to be added to the domain of reality. The bachelor does not mark the place of lack but rather the site of production. And within this production it forms a series, for it is produced in multiple. It creates a flow of little glass replicas, the continuum of the series which the machine now slices apart, making one little thing after the other. And, actualized within this production, it enters the whole array of other, similar, series:
It is the very isolation of Levine’s Bachelor that allows us to plot the array of its possible connections, to see it not only as the little phallic part-object, the desiring-machine, but also as the slippery, undifferentiated surface of the closed form, Anti-Oedipus’s body without organs, the locus of desire as an endless play of substitutions. And it is onto this deterritorialized body that the Levine effect can be plotted, produced.
The little Joey of Bruno Bettelheim’s Empty Fortress announces his own occupation within the labyrinth of the bachelor machine. “Connecticut, Connect-I-cut,” he cries. All of his life functions, Joey claims, will only work if he is plugged into machines that will, with their motors whirring and their lights blinking, allow him to breathe, to eat, to defecate. “Connect-I-cut” is Joey’s rare instance of the first person, of “I.” Mostly he is a third person, a function of the machine. He is an effect of the machines, rather than a subject. The Joey effect.
To release desire into a world without a subject, a world in which proper names form a series among themselves, a world in which the name claims nothing, “means” nothing, even though it continues to produce: this is a description of the Levine effect.