Using examples from Marcel Duchamp and Roland Barthes, Michael Schwab’s “Transpositionality and Artistic Research” proposes understanding transpositions as differential constructs that may but need not “decay” into representation, that is, conventional forms of knowledge. In fact, Schwab argues that certain types of art and artistic research tend towards a continuing suspension of representation proposing new and more complex epistemic objects that, while exceeding conceptual understanding, can still be grasped aesthetically through further transpositions. However, while historisation, like representation, may be based on transpositions, he contends that transpositions need neither history nor representation to be of value for artistic research. Thus, the chapter speculates that, as a particular kind of “science,” artistic research has a tendency towards the concrete for which it requires transpositional operations. Both Duchamp and Barthes hinted at this direction: the latter by wondering about an “impossible science of the unique being,” the former through his involvement with pataphysics.
