This Is Not an Introduction
During World War I, several artists coped with a world that had seemingly rejected logic and reason by creating art that embraced nonsense and irrationality. Dada, as this movement was called, strove to strip words and images of meaning. An installation titled Fountain is really a porcelain urinal. A poem titled Karawane (Caravan) is really just a sequence of nonsense sounds.
As the world returned to sanity following the Great War, Dada gave rise to Surrealism, which preserved the nonsense but turned it into the nonsense of dreams and then made an effort to reconcile it with the reality of our waking lives. Think: Salvador Dalí's La persistència de la memòria (The Persistence of Memory), also known as "that painting with the melting clocks".
One of the great surrealist painters was Belgian René Magritte. You're probably familiar with several of his works, such as Golconda (also known as "a bunch of guys standing around in midair") and The Son of Man (also known as "that picture from The Thomas Crown Affair").
My favorite of Magritte's works, though, is The Treachery of Images. It is a very simple picture: a realistic drawing of a pipe with "this is not a pipe" written beneath it in French.
Like a lot of Dadaist and Surrealist art, it left many people confused and angry. Of course it was a pipe! Just look at it!
Responding to the furor later, Magritte said, "The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!"
The great power of art lies in its ability to reveal what is hidden, to convey deep truths—some of which lie below the level of language or conscious thought itself. The painting was not a pipe; it was a painting, and yet it took the artist spelling it out underneath for us to see it.
Around the same time Magritte was active, a Polish-American scientist and philosopher named Alfred Korzybski argued that no one has direct access to reality, since all our knowledge is limited by our bodies and our languages. We could only know what we saw, and we could not see everything. We thought in words and were therefore bound by their meanings.
As an example, Korzybski once stopped in the middle of a lecture, declared himself famished, and pulled a pack of biscuits wrapped in white paper from his bag. He ate one, then gave a few to the students in the front row, and then ate another.
While the students were chewing, he tore the white paper off the pack to reveal that they were, in fact, eating dog biscuits. Several students immediately felt ill and had to run from the lecture hall, at which Korzybski triumphantly declared: "You see, I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."
Korzybski is best known for the declaration that "the map is not the territory". More specifically, Korzybski wrote in 1933, "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
(Lewis Carroll illustrated this point decades earlier in Sylvia and Bruno Concluded, writing about a map that used a scale of one mile equals one mile, which allowed for plenty of detail but presented some practical difficulties—prompting a character to conclude "We now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.")