“This story has a lot to do with why there isn’t very much variety. I don’t think that this characteristic is confined to America at all. Two well-known characters might be taken as the prototypes of our artists today: Faust and Schweik. Faust who makes a gnostic religion or way of life or even mystery out of art is the older style. He is beautifully described in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which is said to be based on the life of Alban Berg. Mahler, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Paik – I think of these people as Faustian.

The other type of image is even more poetic than old Faust. Schweik is a character in a great novel by that name by Haşek. Schweik is a soldier. The world explodes, but he endures. His country crumbles, but he sells dogs. He is forced into the army. He is buffeted and thrown around here and there. But he is too naive and too fine a person to pay any attention to all that. He is, perhaps, above it. At the end of the novel he wanders off into no man’s land, in pursuit of a beautiful butterfly. He may have been captured or shot: we do not know.

Right now this is the more popular kind of image. Most artists are behaving as if they had set this image for themselves. I think some consciously have. And to me, the terrible thing is that anyone behaves as if they had set any image for themselves.

Schweik is poetic. But to live up to one’s image is sheer Madison Avenue. And Madison Avenue is sick, don’t you think? Madison Avenue may plant the trees on Park Avenue every Christmas, but Madison Avenue is available to the highest bidder.

And so is living up to the image of Schweik being for sale at the noblest phrase.

But that is to get ahead of the story.”

(Dick Higgins, Postface, p. 4 in Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface, 1964.)

“Magritte reopened the trap the calligram has sprung on the thing it described. But in the act, the object itself escaped. On the page of an illustrated book, we seldom pay attention to the small space running above the words and below the drawings, forever serving them as a common frontier. It is there, on these few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification. The calligram absorbed the interstice; but once opened, it does not restore it. The trap shattered on emptiness; image and text fall each to its own side, of their own weight. No longer do they have a common ground nor a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and images of entering into lexical order. The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse – an uncertain foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line. Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image. The ‘pipe’ that was at one with both the statement naming it and the drawing representing it – this shadow pipe knitting the lineaments of form with the fiber of words – has utterly vanished. A disappearance that from the other side of this shallow stream the text confirms with amusement: This is not a pipe. In vain the now solitary drawing imitates as closely as possible the shape ordinarily designated by the word pipe; in vain the text unfurls below the drawing with all the attentive fidelity of a label in a scholarly book. No longer can anything pass between them save the decree of divorce, the statement at once contesting the name of the drawing and the reference of the text.”

(Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, pp. 28–29)