On the jacket of this book is a reproduction of Magritte's Le Chateau des Pyrdn~es. On the backleaf an unnamed commentator writes:
The painting depicts a stone castle resting on a huge rock. Despite their size and weight, the castle and the rock float in mid-air suspended over the sea. when the inhabitants of the castle look down, they see that it is built on solid foundations. If they were to gain perspective, however, they would see that their world is not as secure as they believe.
We appreciate the irony: the inhabitants of the castle cannot see, and therefore cannot known, that (should the laws of the physical universe suddenly come into force) they stand to have their perceptual and epistemic limitations pointed out to them in grave detail. The irony resides in the juxtaposition of the "view from the castle," which is secure but false, with a "view from afar" which reveals the pretentiousness of the castle-dwellers' lifeworld, and the gravity of its illusions. By treating the "view from afar" seriously, the description encloses the ironic potential of Le Chateau des Pyrdn£es within the field of the castle natives' collective myopia, enlisting the painting in the revelation that the world is radically other than native experience would have it.
What is remarkable about the passage is that it asks us to forget what is at once most immediate and striking about Le Chdteau des Pyrenees, namely that here is a castle on a huge rock hovering over the sea. What sort of strange view is this?
The painting mimics the mechanical .realism of photography. It depicts itself as an unmediated, detailed reproduction of just what was there to be seen, just then. It does not represent reality, it captures it. By masking its * A discussion of Melvin Pollner, Mundane reason: Reality in everyday and sociology discourse. Cambridge,