Thisisnotapipe

The ascendancy of poetry over painting

The relationship between words and things was pre­ cisely the theme so many of Magritte's canvases

Magritte and Foucault must have recognized in one another a common fas cination with what I earlier gave the inadequate label of visual non sequiturs, and which Foucault himself has dubbed heterotopias. From a passage in Borges, Foucault explains in Les Mots et les choses, he was led to a strange suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inap­ propriate; I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately, in the lawless and un­ charted dimension of the heteroclite

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, be­ cause they make it impossible to name this and that

heterotopias ... dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of lan­ guage at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences

Magrittes pipe:nothing is easier to say-our language knows it well in our place-than the "name of a pipe

Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. It is the drawing within the painting, firmly and rigorously outlined, that must be accepted as a manifest truth

the pipe floating so obviously overhead (like the obj ect the blackboard drawing refers to, and in whose name the text can justifiably say that the drawing is truly not a pipe) is itself merely a drawing. It is not a pipe.

The statement is perfectly true, since it is quite apparent that the draw­ ing representing the pipe is not the pipe itself. And yet there is a convention of language: What is this draw­ ing? Why, it is a c alf, a square, a flower