René Magritte

Magritte’s drawing (for the moment I speak only of the first version) is as simple as a page borrowed from a botanical manual: a figure and the text that names it. Nothing is easier to recognise than a pipe, drawn thus; nothing is easier to say –our language knows it well in our place– than the “name of a pipe.” Now, what lends the figure its strangeness is not the “contradiction” between the image and the text. For a good reason: Contradiction could exist only be­ tween two statements, or within one and the same statement. Here there is clearly but one, and it cannot be contradictory because the subject of the proposi­tion is a simple demonstrative. False, then, because its “referent” –obviously a pipe– does not verify it? But who would seriously contend that the collection of intersecting lines above the text is a pipe? Must we say: My God, how simpleminded! The statement is perfectly true, since it is quite apparent that the draw­ing representing the pipe is not the pipe itself. And yet there is a convention of language: What is this draw­ing? Why, it is a calf, a square, a flower. An old custom not without basis, because the entire function of so scholarly, so academic a drawing is to elicit recognition, to allow the object it represents to appear without hesitation or equivocation. No matter that it is the material deposit, on a sheet of paper or a black­ board, of a little graphite or a thin dust of chalk. It does not “aim” like an arrow or a pointer toward a particular pipe in the distance or elsewhere. It is a pipe.

What misleads us is the inevitability of connecting the text to the drawing (as the demonstrative pro­noun, the meaning of the word pipe, and the likeness of the image all invite us to do here) –and the impos­sibility of defining a perspective that would let us say that the assertion is true, false, or contradictory.