Readymade

The citation of the readymade calls upon the reference of Duchamp, the full time chess player and sometimes artist, who Miller elevates in his address to the Joyce of the fine arts. But if we are to make something of this citation, the route is rather that of debasement, which leads from Duchamp's operation; the art object raised onto the escabeau of the dignity of the Thing, to its inverse; the Thing lowered to the ignobility of the object of the marketplace. This turn, from the escabeau to the marketplace, was prefigured by Lacan in his conceptualization of the lathouse in Seminar XVII. 2 In 1970, Lacan rightly placed these tiny little objects a where they once were behind every window, but where there was a behind every window there is the ubiquity of the on the screen in the 21 st century. The effects of this movement from behind every window to on the screen, produced by the combinatory of the discourse of Capitalism and Science, are as ubiquitously displayed as the screens they appear upon. Here we can propose the signifier online shopping as that which can best serve as a point of reduction to situate these phenomena. Principally, online shopping, which we can take in its verb and noun form collapsed as one, in its diverse manifestations — from Amazon to Tinder — acts to consumerize not only the object of desire, but the subject itself in its alleged free agency of contractual relations. We can call this subject turned object of online shopping, the online shopper. The contract of the online shopper; governed by rules of engagement, consent, and rights of return, offer the exchange of desire for the protection against the par hazard, and against contingency as such, from which there is of course no guarantee of defense. To cite two figures of centuries past, now faced with extinction