Prompting their readers/spectators to be concerned with seemingly infinite minutiae that some might call trivia and which consistently prompt scholarly historical location and relocation, Duchamp and Joyce call attention to Time, to Deferment, and to DifferAnce in language and therefore to the � as Tofts puts it: �folding and unfolding of ideas as a sequence of anachronous moments, where remembered associations coalesce with newly formed combinations, forestalling decisive outcomes or closure�. Strategies and ways of presenting my own work, though I can only put this simplistically, have led to the creation of routeways for visual/literary virtual complexes in the library of the university for which I once worked at Coventry where the images and texts are on display as work in progress. I have been appropriating from images and texts deemed relevant to Joyce and Duchamp so that �mimesis� and the production of allusion and meaning is sustained by the tension between the signified object in the images and the very process of signification itself. These are also the operations between Derrida�s writings and his readings and re-marking of Joyce�s texts that may be likened to the development of signifier and signified in the plastic works and writings of Duchamp. The function of Joyce�s and Duchamp�s thematic displacements and congruities, of separation and accordance within the logic of their work is shown most profoundly through the principles of infrathin: Duchamp�s poetic experimentation and elaboration of possibilities according to the logic of that term�s cross-referential chains that rest finally on the individual responses of the spectator.
What we find is that the condition of their working methods of correcting, recuperating, linking, doubting and creating are purposely located along temporal lines within textual spaces that are clearly unsatisfactory and signify nothing necessarily but which privileges the experience of a poetic of thought, of the Heideggerian aletheia. Joyce and Duchamp articulated their work as temporal fields and these are re-marked and explored, wittingly or otherwise, in Derrida�s �deconstruction�. Duchamp�s quest in his long association with The Bride stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was essentially and critically futile. It becomes increasingly unworkable the more one Reads Joyce and Reads Duchamp to take a view or a position on what is originary and what is derivative in their work, what is forward-thinking on their part and what pertinent to the decades of technology to which they belonged. As other commentators have noted, anyone who has attempted to write on Joyce will know the sense of failure with which that task can begin. While this might also be the case for writing about numerous other writers, with Joyce this sense of failure can be intensified by the feeling that anything one might try to say about Joyce�s writing has already been said by that writing itself. This is a general predicament of all commentary and criticism, but the complexities of Joyce�s and Duchamp�s work make the predicament more obvious than it might be in the case of commentary on other artists. Derrida sums up the impossibility of writing on Joyce when he discusses the ways in which we are all caught up in Joyce�s �archive as in a spider�s web�.


ian Hays