EXCERPT The shop window proof of existence of the outside world, even. If, as has been argued, ‘Duchamp’s Opus Major is unquestionably the Large Glass, but his paradigmatic work […] is the readymade’, then the incipit we propose here, a round trip into the shop window, even, may provide us with an aided readymade scale model for our investigations of the field [du champ], of an artificial work of (at least) second degree: an artefact of an artwork reduced to ‘object-words and word-objects’. For a shop window is a vitrine, a kind of optical box, an opticerie whose glass wall, a transparent ‘large glass’, separates us from what it places before our eyes—those items which, supported by advertising, are called (socially) commodities or (etymologically) artefacts (Latin factum / ars, artis). This last term seems doubly apt: ‘scientifically’ it designates a phenomenon created from scratch by applied techniques which alter an experiment bearing upon natural phenomena (a kind of parasite, not unrelated to the pseudo-experimentation of the 3 Standard Stoppages), but in ‘current’ usage it generally designates a product that has undergone a transformation, even a minimal one, at the hands of homo artifex. Which permits us to verify, hands down so to speak, that ‘the question of shop windows’ is already implied in the earlier question that opens those ‘Speculations’ placed ‘in the infinitive’ in the White Box: ‘Can one make works which are not works of “art”’? In ceremonially decorating ‘art’ in this way, Duchamp objectivates it (the quotation marks around ‘art’ setting apart the works that go by this name) and literally summons it to appear, in a legal sense, by virtue and ‘title’ of what is meant by and in this word, and will speak itself (with delay) as Objet-Dard (1951). ‘To undergo the interrogation of shop windows’, Duchamp continues, and, before clarifying himself on the subject (and the way in which we are subjected to these shop windows), intercalates two phrases in which ‘the exigency of the shop window’ is stated to be ‘proof of existence of the outside world’. The outside world, that is, ‘of works that would not be of “art“’, the outside which they might stand in for, is once again exhibited in the shop window, and offered up to its ‘interrogation’. The sentence is then pronounced: ‘When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one also pronounces one’s own Sentence’ (emphasis ours). ‘In fact’, Duchamp explains and unpacks in a single stroke—‘one’s choice is “round trip [allé et retour]”’. The choice of an object in the shop window, choice reduced to the choice of a readymade object (‘ready made, in series’) in a shop window to which the making of art and the art of making is condemned in a round trip, in so far as ‘to make something is always to choose […] always choosing’, leads to that ‘neuraesthenic form of a successive and infinite repetition’, an eternal return of the same of choice in a serial reproduction of supply and demand which, equally confounded, pass onto the side of the desire of the shop window (in the double genitive, subjective and objective).…