Peter James Muir

This essay considers the beginnings of the journal October's critical practice and the significance of a work by Michel Foucault: “Ceci n'est pas une pipe”.1 The theoretical issues/problematics raised by this essay became key to future debates in and around October; the essay becoming something of an emblematic means by which October might be distinguishing from other visual art critical practices. The importance of Foucault's text in relation to October was revealed during correspondences with Rosalind Krauss in August 2001. Foucault's self-referential essay can be seen as crucial not only to Rosalind Krauss's intellectual development, but also to the continuing debate on the nature of text and image in which the journal would be involved. The spiralling interplay of Foucault's narrative, combined with Magritte's picture, might be interpreted as a metaphor for the mediations of post-structural visual criticism itself as its practitioners sought to institute language into the visual sign, a project that attempted to produce a theoretical rationale – and perhaps a justification – for images being treated as if they were texts; thus, paraphrasing Foucault, introducing into the plenitude of the image a certain disorder. Such a weaving together of representation and discourse is interpreted as the formation of a destabilizing dialectic, a dialectic that can be linked to the writings of October as it shifts its rhetorical locations in an attempt to break down the normative pictorial and discursive frames of reference; becoming in essence a dedisciplinary and de-formative critical practice. This essay provides an outline of the determining conditions that led to the development of this “linguistic turn” and an associated reflection on Foucault's text that seeks to direct attention specifically towards its semiotic and discursive implications in relation to the developing oeuvre of criticism exemplified by the magazine. The essay is supported by interviews with Rosalind Krauss and Douglas Crimp conducted by the author in March 2002.