ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss what they call the black hole in several parts of A Thousand Plateaus, connecting it to the vital concept of strata – “acts of capture” similar to “occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach” – and pairing it with the white wall. The black hole is futurity, but a futurity – very much like the readymade – devoid of the need for subjectified exhaustion. Unlike the Futurists, he understood the prerogative of speeding up culture as an experience of the mind first, before it can be a sensual one – a program that defines the core of the readymade aesthetic. The politics of the Duchampian readymade are therefore quite relevant to questioning the process of object-oriented valuation on the level of subjective experience, especially considerations of how individuals create identity through the meanings given to objects.
