“In 1913, ... Duchamp set down a meditation that provides strong support for ... the existence in his mind of themes we have tried to identify in the family scenes. (These themes, according to Seigel, are possible human relations, the desire for such, when detachment is the reality. rt) He included the text in the third of the collections of notes for the Large Glass, the White Box (also called à l’infinitif), published in 1966, so that it serves to tie this early work to his major project, helping make clear what it was about the relations between the bride and the bachelors that he found so engrossing. The note has a special place in Duchamp’s writings because it is the only substantial one in all those he either published or left behind (the latter were brought out after his death by his stepson, Paul Matisse) that speaks directly and in a general way about his own feelings rather than addressing some possible or actual feature of his work. [7] The note’s explicit subject, looking into shop windows, may seem far from the concerns of Duchamp’s pictures, but in France before World War I there was much discussion about how modern commerce sought to harness the powers of desire and fantasy for the lowly purpose of selling goods. Merchandise displays of all types -department stores, international expositions, and the salons of individual products like automobiles- all enveloped things in search of buyers in an aura of exoticism and sexual suggestion.
The shop window, Duchamp wrote, was “proof of the existence of the outside world.” The way in which this proof was established, and what he meant by it, appeared through the following set of reflections.
When one undergoes the interrogation of shop windows, one also pronounces one’s own sentence. In fact, one’s choice is “round trip.” From the demand of shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, the fixation of choice is determined [se conclut l'arrêt du choix]. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in gnawing at your thumbs [s’en mordre les pouces] as soon as possession is consummated. Q.E.D. [8]
Duchamp’s English translators render s’en mordre les pouces as “feeling regret,” but the affect dramatized by the action is more painful than that. The sentence pronounced on oneself in the first sentence is the “round trip” of the second: drawn outward into the world of desired objects by seeing them displayed, we will be sent back into ourselves once the possibility opened up by desire and choice has narrowed to fixation on certain ones.
Until that moment desiring carries us outward toward a still-imagined state, promising an expanded and altered form of existence; but once satisfaction occurs, we have only the particular things chosen, and we return, frustrated and chagrined, to the previous boundaries of the self. It is this state of disappointment that provides the proof of the outside world referred to at the start: Q.E.D.
In this text the passage between hopeful desire and disappointed possession that window-gazing calls up in Duchamp's mind takes the place of the contrast between anticipation and disillusionment ... But the note casts a darker light on the difference between the two states, because it makes chagrin and regret the proof that we live in a world external to ourselves; these somber affects arise not from something specific to sexuality or from any correctable defect in the way we choose objects, but from the necessity for finding the means of satisfaction in the world outside the self. To experience the external world in this way is to know that what may promise to be sources of sustenance or pleasure within it are traps; survival and growth require radical strategies for avoiding these dangers.
The note also suggests where Duchamp's preoccupation with human communication and separateness would lead him. His window-gazer communicates in fantasy with the objects behind the pane: that is what the "coition" named in the text is about. This kind of communication is satisfying while the kind that comes with actual physical contact is not, because only the first allows the self to set the terms of its relations with objects; …”
7. The only other personal reference I have found is very brief, saying simply "Given that ...; if I suppose that I am suffering a lot" ("Étant donné que ...; si je suppose que je sols souffrant beaucoup"), Duchamp du signe , ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Paris, 1975, 1994), 36. Duchamp du signe is the expanded version of the original collection, Marchand du sel (Paris, 1958), which was published in English first as Salt Seller (New York, 1973) and later reprinted as The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, trans. Elmer Peterson (New York, 1989).
8. This note was not published in the Green Box of 1934, but later on in the White Box ( À l'infinitif ) of 1966; Writings , 74. I have altered the translation found there, using the original in Duchamp du signe , 105-6. "Interrogatoire" is not just an examination, but a judicial interrogation, and it is not enough to translate "se conclut l'arrêt du choix" as "my choice is determined." On advertising, fantasy, and the world of commerce and consumption in fin-desiècle France, see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982). [Seigel, 1995. Pp. 29 - 31]
Seigel, Jerrold E. The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.