Foucault is Genius.
"In its millennial tradition, the calligram has a triple role: to augment the alphabet, to repeat something without the aid of rhetoric, to trap things in a double cipher. First it brings a text and a shape as close together as possible. It is composed of lines delimiting the form of an object while also arranging the sequence of letters. It lodges statements in the space of a shape, and makes the text say what the drawing represents. On the one hand, it alphabetizes the ideogram, populates it with discontinuous letters, and thus interrogates the silence of uninterrupted lines. But on the other hand, it distributes writing in a space no longer possessing the neutrality, openness, and inert blankness of paper. It forces the ideogram to arrange itself according to the laws of a simultaneous form. For the blink of an eye, it reduces phoneticism to a mere grey noise completing the contours of the shape; but it renders the outline as a thin skin that must be pierced in order to follow, word for word, the outpouring of its internal text."
-Michel Foucault, Ceci n'est pas une pipe
You most likely cannot understand, out of the context of Foucault's book, why this is perhaps the most perfect passage I've ever read. Let's just say that after I was finished reading it, I stopped and said out loud, "Wow." Books are perhaps the only material possessions that I deem of as much importance as anything. They can convey any emotion and inspire us. Any time with a book, to me, is time well spent.
-Michel Foucault, Ceci n'est pas une pipe
You most likely cannot understand, out of the context of Foucault's book, why this is perhaps the most perfect passage I've ever read. Let's just say that after I was finished reading it, I stopped and said out loud, "Wow." Books are perhaps the only material possessions that I deem of as much importance as anything. They can convey any emotion and inspire us. Any time with a book, to me, is time well spent.