Picabia and his circle, later perhaps through the artist Mary Reynolds, who
was Pound’s friend and Duchamp’s longtime mistress—but Pound’s aestheti-
cism was a far cry from Duchamp’s cultivated indifference, his persistent
question whether, as he put it in a youthful notebook entry, one couldn’t
perhaps “make works that are not works of ‘art’,” which stands behind his
“readymades” and boxes.^18 In Duchamp’s lexicon, each word, number, or ma-
terial object bears a distinct name—a name not to be confused with any other
and pointing to no universal concept outside itself. The term nominalism it-
self comes up in a number of notebook entries. Here is one from 1914:
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. The word also loses its mu-
sical value. It is only readable (due to being made up of consonants and
vowels), it is readable by eye and little by little takes on a form of plastic
signi¤cance....
This plastic being of the word (by literal nominalism) differs from
the plastic being of any form whatever... in that the grouping of sev-
eral words without signi¤cance, reduced to literal nominalism, is inde-
pendent of the interpretation.^19“This nominalism,” says Thierry de Duve, in his important study of Du-
champ (called, after a related note, Pictorial Nominalism), “is literal: it turns
back on metaphor and takes things literally. Duchamp intends to specify
those conditions that in his eyes allow the word to remain in is zero degree,
force it into the realm of nonlanguage.”^20
Duchamp understood, of course, that such “zero degree” nominalism
could not exist, that the plural form cannot “forget” that it derives from the
singular, the feminine from the masculine, and so on. In wanting to endow
the word with “a form of plastic signi¤cance” that would be “independent
of interpretation,” he hoped to heighten the reader/viewer’s sensitivity to dif-
ference, to what Duchamp called, in his posthumously published notes, the
inframince. This word—in English, infrathin—de¤es de¤nition. “One can
only give examples of it,” Duchamp declared (Notes #5). Here are a few:
The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin (#4)In time the same object is not the / same after a 1 second interval—
what / relations with the identity principle? (#7)Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 45