In anticipation of the upcoming Charles Dedal Colloquium that I am organizing—tentatively scheduled for October 2011 at the Bothnia Center for the Arts in the charming lacustrian town of Raahe, Finland—I thought it apropos to share some thoughts on the colloquium's late and celebrated namesake.
Near the end of his life, Dedal's health may have been waning, but his spirited intellect and almost feverish commitment to labyrinthology certainly were not. When he passed away in 2010, we inherited an incomplete (and decidedly, perhaps intentionally, inscrutable) manuscript, known only as A Syntax. In his prime, Dedal dedicated his research to a rigorous elaboration of Gramont's unfinished lifework: a grammar of the labyrinth. Dedal hungered for its structure. Yet, in the years after 9/11, Dedal forfeited much of his endeavor, so disaffected as he was with the resurgence of Oriolo's Aggressivism. As he remarked, "Aggressivism is hungry not only to slaughter the labyrinth, but our very imagination and compassion as well." Seldom of late have we witnessed such a marriage of mind and morality in the field.
Dedal lived his final years in obscurity, haunted by the idée fixe of the dans, or, in lay terms, the condition of being inside the labyrinth. In his drafted foreword to the pending Stand Me Now: The Collected Dedal (Black Thrush Press), Philip Cunha stirringly memoralizes: "The academy may fain laugh at Dedal's intellectual ghost, but such cachinnation only echoes back to those sardonic lips. Dedal knew what many have forgotten: the dans is all."
Expect Dedal's A Syntax to be the subject of much study and controversy in the coming years. Here's an excerpt from a chapter called "Dans: Against Mereological Sums":
"Many logicians and philosophers alike have made attempts to universalize the ontological axioms of mereology, that slippery study of parthood relations. In specific, they have postulated:
1. Everything is part of itself.
2. Any part of any part of a thing is itself a part of that thing.
3. Two distinct things cannot be part of each other.
These axioms, in a word, are founded on relationships of reflexivity, transitivity, and anti- symmetry. But, inside the labyrinth the navigator is necessarily and incontrovertibly thrown into that all-conditional experience of the dans: a labyrinth sans navigator is only architecture and a navigator sans labyrinth is only subject. The best we can describe navigation, then, is through that notion of 'insideness.' And this is prior even to 'lostness.' We see, then, grounds for irreflexivity: nothing is part of itself. And by extension emerge evidence for intransivity and symmetry.
Does a person speak a language if he is the only speaker? No. A labyrinth's grammar fundamentally rests on an intersubjective syntax. As the navigator's relationship to a labyrinth is always unstable, changing, unpredictable, so the syntax of a labyrinth is fluid.
We cannot hope to codify the dans. It is real but indeterminable. Thus navigation is ultimately and infinitely modal. Thus navigation is not a mission of domination but an art of documentation."
Near the end of his life, Dedal's health may have been waning, but his spirited intellect and almost feverish commitment to labyrinthology certainly were not. When he passed away in 2010, we inherited an incomplete (and decidedly, perhaps intentionally, inscrutable) manuscript, known only as A Syntax. In his prime, Dedal dedicated his research to a rigorous elaboration of Gramont's unfinished lifework: a grammar of the labyrinth. Dedal hungered for its structure. Yet, in the years after 9/11, Dedal forfeited much of his endeavor, so disaffected as he was with the resurgence of Oriolo's Aggressivism. As he remarked, "Aggressivism is hungry not only to slaughter the labyrinth, but our very imagination and compassion as well." Seldom of late have we witnessed such a marriage of mind and morality in the field.
Dedal lived his final years in obscurity, haunted by the idée fixe of the dans, or, in lay terms, the condition of being inside the labyrinth. In his drafted foreword to the pending Stand Me Now: The Collected Dedal (Black Thrush Press), Philip Cunha stirringly memoralizes: "The academy may fain laugh at Dedal's intellectual ghost, but such cachinnation only echoes back to those sardonic lips. Dedal knew what many have forgotten: the dans is all."
Expect Dedal's A Syntax to be the subject of much study and controversy in the coming years. Here's an excerpt from a chapter called "Dans: Against Mereological Sums":
"Many logicians and philosophers alike have made attempts to universalize the ontological axioms of mereology, that slippery study of parthood relations. In specific, they have postulated:
1. Everything is part of itself.
2. Any part of any part of a thing is itself a part of that thing.
3. Two distinct things cannot be part of each other.
These axioms, in a word, are founded on relationships of reflexivity, transitivity, and anti- symmetry. But, inside the labyrinth the navigator is necessarily and incontrovertibly thrown into that all-conditional experience of the dans: a labyrinth sans navigator is only architecture and a navigator sans labyrinth is only subject. The best we can describe navigation, then, is through that notion of 'insideness.' And this is prior even to 'lostness.' We see, then, grounds for irreflexivity: nothing is part of itself. And by extension emerge evidence for intransivity and symmetry.
Does a person speak a language if he is the only speaker? No. A labyrinth's grammar fundamentally rests on an intersubjective syntax. As the navigator's relationship to a labyrinth is always unstable, changing, unpredictable, so the syntax of a labyrinth is fluid.
We cannot hope to codify the dans. It is real but indeterminable. Thus navigation is ultimately and infinitely modal. Thus navigation is not a mission of domination but an art of documentation."
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