Michel Foucault’s analysis of Rene Magritte Ceci n’est pas une pipe goes far beyond observations of his technique in tromp l’oeil. The paintings circulate, to Foucault, as visually and conceptually loaded calligrams. Like the visual poems of Apollinare, which consist of words arranged to form a picture of the topic described, Magritte calls attention to how the signifier can invoke the signified. In Les deux mystères,, the viewer is confronted with two objects—a shadow-y, hovering pipe and a framed canvas. On the framed canvas is a realistically rendered pipe and underneath it a written script saying, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).”
The statement seems pretty ludicrous at the outset. Of course it’s a pipe. But then the postmodern in us kickstarts and a cloud of dust obscures that clarity of mind. What does “this” refer to exactly? The first obvious reference is the pipe which is depicted as a painted rendering of a pipe. Not a real pipe. It could also be the slightly ambiguous, gravity-defying pipe which seems to be just the shapely ideal of a pipe. Not a real pipe. It could also refer to the words themselves. These words strung together are not a pipe. The individual words “this” and “pipe” are not real pipes. None of these depicted objects, we realize, ever could be painted and be real at the same time. But moreover, if we suspend disbelief in the painting as a window into a real space, these are simulacra that do not even resemble a theoretical original.
Foucault reasons that, in resemblance, there is a “model” or original to which the copies are representatively faithful. Magritte’s painting refutes the existence of such a thing. Similitude exists among all the versions of pipe, but there is no authentic resemblance to a pipe. This is a fascinating differentiation to make. It calls into question the authority and power of words and images to adequately express our intent. It reminds us that symbols are not ubiquitous representations—they are fragile, elusive, and remitting.
What troubled me about Foucault’s synopsis was his very negative characterization. Without resemblance, signs are “gravestones” under which meaning is “annulled.” The signified are “divorced from what they name,” and the signifier can “never replace what it describes.” Foucault seems to be treating language somewhat like a stillborn—it grew in our bellies but was and is incapable of ever being alive. Personally, I don’t think language tries or needs to emulate actual objects, which is somewhat amazing. How do we come to grasp and communicate abstract ideas when there is no literal object they correspond to? This is part of the efficiency of language as well. Words don’t have to look like their object in order for us to convey and understand meaning with one another quickly.
If language is so fatally flawed, how am I able to write this at all?
Yes ma’am; that is just it: within the framework of representation there’s both puncturing of the subject and a filling of its objectification. Language works, but it is its own imprisonment; all that’s “other” we bring to it through acts of the imagination.
In other words: if a word falls in the forest, it is as the slightest of breezes.
Of course, Magritte probably would have said “Of course it’s a pipe!”
Language works by using mental abstraction, which is the fundamental principle of imagination. Language and imagination are not separate acts, they are intrinsically entwined. How is this anything but expansive? Language cannot be music, for example, it does have limitations. But I fail to see why having an identifying structure is automatically an “imprisonment.”
Magritte is quoted several times in the book talking about how differently images and text are interpreted on the canvas, but his words aren’t connotatively negative the way Foucault uses his.
A minor point, but—it’s actually the modern kicking in, rather than the postmodern, in the resistance of the pipe in its representational form. In this way, modernism itself was “deconstructive”, as it often sought to empty symbolic meaning to make a point of recognizing the form of the artwork. This is what eventually led to abstract expressionism, and your argument about the “painting as material fact” rather than “window to the world” is parallel to the neo-Kantian theories of modernist critic Clement Greenberg.