# Duchamp’s Fountain and Deleuze’s Repetition and Difference



## somnambulist (Oct 4, 2011)

by Gregory Minissale

Duchamp’s Fountain began as a rather ordinary object—a urinal—in a mundane and anonymous context. It was then taken out of this indifferent continuum and ‘placed’ into the realm of art where it became an ongoing event. According to Deleuze, the naïve understanding of the eternal return posits an original from which copies are made, continually repeating time through the mode of representation. This repetition also implies a repeater: in another model, time is experienced by a present, phenomenological “I” through whose linear progression of sense experiences time is marked. The first part of this essay examines why these two models of time and experience lead to rather circular and unproductive art historical analyses, especially of Duchamp’s Fountain, where the notion of an original is irrelevant, and where as a concept, it continues to resonate in difference. The last part of this essay shows how Deleuze’s affirmation of difference as a principle of time and becoming supersedes these models, and opens the way to a living diversity of artworks that engage with Duchamp’s Fountain by challenging the blockages of regress, repression and solipsism inherent in the notion of repetition.

The traditional notion of representation which underlies much art historical method tends to identify an original (reality, identity or concept) which is repeated by the representation or series of representations thereby valorizing repetition. Deleuze’s concept of difference places an emphasis not on representation but on the actualization of difference or differences. In this way, each ‘urinal-event’ the artworks which refer to it do not repeat an original so much as unfold an ongoing multiplicity of new problems and solutions. Several scholars have allowed us to look at the productivity of individual artists, Gerard Richter, Mary Kelly and Leonardo da Vinci, for example, fruitfully developing Deleuze’s difference and repetition in order to show how art actualizes becoming in many forms.[1] Instead, I will look at a number of artists’ works, rather than an individual artist, which form a collective intensity with Duchamp’s Fountain within a larger complexity of difference, one which now spans almost a hundred years from the date of the Fountain, 1917, to the present.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence which Deleuze rechannels into his philosophical project is not one of simple repetition. The thought experiment of the eternal return posits a recurrence of becoming, a circle (or a loop) which encloses (or ties off) difference from what lies outside of the loop or circle, which is sameness. The eternal return leads to a plurality of these loops or actualizations of difference giving a richness and depth to the world.[2] For Deleuze, Nietzsche affirms difference in itself, his eternal recurrence of every event is a continual becoming. This is quite different from the Platonic notion of transcendent Ideas eternally recurring in history in the form of debased copies or representations, an attitude which has dominated our view of works of art as representations.

Each of the works of art that I will examine here positively actualizes difference as an intensity in itself, an event which may involve an individual who does not, however, constitute the event in its entirety, for this event has connectivities in time and with other events. This difference should not be defined negatively as a lack of sameness. For Deleuze, organisms are sites of transformation through which these differences are actualized, and the art work becomes the site of an event, challenging the restrictive formulation of a repeat representation and disturbing repetitions of habit and memory trapped in a succession of lived presents. Thus both representation and individuation have to be rethought in our encounter with art. Art does not mean the encounter of a viewing subject with a representation, both these terms are undermined by Deleuze, for the ‘I’, the self, is disseminated “in a field of forces and intensities and individuations that involve pre-individual singularities.”[3] These pre- and post-date the ‘event’ of art, and partly constitute that very event.

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