This is not a Text or, Do We Read Images?

Abstract

Magritte's enigmatic title, Ceci n'est pas un placed upon his of a pipe poses a problem not unlike the problem of the Text in the family of post- a- or non-Modem theories currently fashionable in Euro-American philosophical contexts. Clearly the pipe is not a real pipe, yet the confusion which the title, juxtaposed with a painting of a pipe, produces raises a wide set of questions worthy of surrealistic inquiry. might invert the same problematic as applied to this essay: in some sense it is a and thus to claim it is not would be to perform or claim a kind of trickery that belies its mode of being-as-taken. But in Magritte's case it is the that is not the (real) Thus one might begin somewhat analytically and note that are a number of matters that need to be sorted out: (a) the presumed referent, an actual pipe but which refers, the title disclaiming reference, or the image with implicit reference?--(b) if the latter, it is a representation, or an image which somehow representationally refers; and (c) then is the ironic disclaimer found in the sentence itself, is not a pipe. But this will not do precisely because the very field in which referents, representations, and various kinds of metaphorical structures obtain is also that which is under contestation in post-, a-, and non-Modern contexts. This family of contesters of modernism has both a positive and a negative side. Its positive side might be called its textualism or discoursism and it finds itself a proponent of a kind of metaphorical totalization in which the phenomena of (a) reading, (b) writing, and (c) are spread out over the entire and cultural worlds to be analyzed. Everything becomes a text or text-like with the characteristics of indeterminacy, arbitrariness, and finitude. It could be called in a significant sense, a literarization of the World. The reverence texts that themselves help establish this mode of analysis are primarily those stimulated and arising out of Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard in the fashionable Euro-American discourse, but adumbrated both in very widespread social constructionism approaches as well as a bodies approach particularly developed by late twentieth century feminism. The negative side is the critique that addresses what are sometimes identified as Modern stances regarding a number of related phenomena. Let us look briefly at what is being contested: 1) Any realistic theory of reference is contested. From structuralism on, and particularly among the poststructuralists, reference or realityreferencing disappears in the notions that language refers only to itself or is a play of signifiers/signified within an arbitrary or-as I shall put it-literary fictive mode of construction. Positively, what emerges is some finite, indeterminate mode ofdiscourse, episteme, or other largely socially or fictively constructed text-like phenomenon. 2) Similarly, while frequently used in postmodern contexts also is contested with respect to what I shall call Body One, a located, sensory body. In most radical form, one finds the Derrida position as one that claims there never was perception,1 in that the discovery ofpresence always takes place within some form of non-presence that, in turn, relates back to inscription or trace or writing; or in less radical form, is seen to be a Modem invention-along with Man-in Foucault's sense that perception is socially constructed and as such can be both invented and dis-invented in some present or future episteme. In short, the perception that remains is solely the cultural perception that is socially constructed. 3) Bodies, in my sense of Body One as a being-here, located, sensory being with specific styles of movement, are also contested, either in a conservative sense as being malleable down to a highly reduced biological dimension, or replaced as a body, whether in the form of the body of the condemned (as in Foucault), or as a breasted being whose breasts are clearly socially constructed (as in Young). …