@mastersthesis {7866,
	title = {Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910- 1943},
	year = {1995},
	school = {Harvard},
	abstract = {By charting complex discourses of the machine and the commodity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1913-1943 demonstrates that Duchamp{\textquoteright}s art of the teens, twenties, and thirties is a self-conscious embodiment of the terms and contradictions of consumer society. The central theme of this work is the metaphorical intersection of industrial production and consumption--an encounter which Duchamp represents as a renegotiated relationship between mind and body. A fundamental methodological strategy of Infinite Regress is to maintain an integrated discussion of the linguistic, economic and erotic terms which Duchamp weaves together in his works of art.
Chapter 1 concerns Duchamp{\textquoteright}s painting from 1911 to 1918. Building on the recent definition of Picasso{\textquoteright}s cubism as a transformation of the body from its carnal nature into an abstract, differential semiotic system, I argue that Duchamp{\textquoteright}s cubism maintains an important alternative to Picasso{\textquoteright}s by attempting to develop a language immanent to the body, an embodied language. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Duchamp{\textquoteright}s readymade strategies of the teens served to transpose the terms of his cubist dialectic between immensurable carnality and geometric quantification, to an opposition between commodities and the linguistic inscriptions which, in Duchamp{\textquoteright}s formulation, elevate manufactured objects to the status of art. The metaphorical function of the machine is the subject of Chapter 3. By situating Duchamp{\textquoteright}s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1415-23) within a series of cultural re-definitions of industrial production and burgeoning consumption between 1885 and 1925, I argue that the Duchampian machine, and the dada machine more generally, operate as switching stations between the modern rationalization of the body and newly developing techniques of disciplining the mind--particularly through the colonization or commodification of desire. Chapter 4 explores what I would call Duchamp{\textquoteright}s spatialization of the unconscious through a renewed engagement with the readymade. I argue here that Duchamp{\textquoteright}s pursuit of chess from the early twenties onward became a defining metaphor for a new topographical exploration of mental structures.},
	keywords = {19th- and 20th-Century European Art},
	author = {David Joselit}
}
