More accurately, both reflect and reciprocally modify the favored categories which shape our understanding of the world, and these categories are structurally bound into historically conditioned conventions of syntax, rhetoric, and logical operations.
Nobility grows out of contained emotion. . . .
However, and very few commentators on the development of early high modernism seem to have noticed this, the repressed dimension inherent in Picasso's and Braque's use of collage was a fear of abandoning themselves to a completely non-figurative mode, which early Cubism was moving towards. Braque himself said that he used the stencil letters 'to get as close as I could to reality'. Perhaps the single most important preoccupation of early modernism is just this, redefining the uses to which representation may be put in art and literature. A more difficult challenge. In and of itself, collage today is one more tool in the artist's hands and can no longer lay claim to lending a privileged status to its products.