grant interviews, “explain” the sources of his poetry, or participate in dis-
course on poetics. Living in near poverty, he has largely gone his own way,
although his Web site, featuring his recent political collages and obituaries
for poet-friends, is surprisingly genial and reader-friendly, his radical poli-
tics presented as high comedy. Indeed, reading Raworth suggests that given
the endless discourse of isms and izations (as in globalization) that confronts
us today, perhaps the most fruitful task is to discriminate difference, both
within a given work and within the larger categories of artworks. I am well
aware, of course, that the choice of works to be so read in the ¤rst place is
inevitably based on larger theoretical assumptions; otherwise, there is no way
to get beyond empiricism. Still, now that the long twentieth century is be-
hind us and many of our sacred texts are ripe for revaluation even as other
newer ones crowd the ¤eld, it may be a good moment to focus on what
Marcel Duchamp called the infrathin.
What is infrathin? In the later thirties, when Duchamp was restoring his
Large Glass after it was shattered and was beginning work on his Boîte en
valise, he wrote a series of notes on what he called the inframince.^15 The term,
he declared, could not be de¤ned; one could only give examples of it. I pro-
vide a list of Duchamp’s most telling examples elsewhere;^16 here let me cite
just a few:
The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin. (no. 4)Infra thin separation between / the detonation noise of a gun / (very close)
and the apparition of the bullet / hole in the target... (no. 12 verso)2 forms cast in / the same mold (?) differ / from each other / by an infra thin
separative / amount—just touching. While trying to place 1 plane surface/precisely on another
plane surface / you pass through some infra thin moments— (no. 45).Those infrathin moments or qualities are related, in a slightly later note, to
Duchamp’s de¤nition of “Nominalism [literal]”:
No more generic / speci¤c / numeric / distinction between words (tables is /
not the plural of table, ate has nothing in common with eat). No more physical /
adaptation of concrete words; no more / conceptual value of abstract words.
(no. 185)xxvi Introduction