Dedal and the "Dans"

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."

Some words from Philip Cunha

Today's recursivism takes as its object that ever-receeding vesper that was the object of Gramont's project- the possibility of truly primordial eggression. If we consider centrism as ground, a tacit assumption perhaps, but one which has become inextricably embedded in the tradition at least since Desmarais, it becomes not only the most urgent question that the Recursivists find themselves tasked with addressing, but one upon which the much-discussed new paradigm of navigation is predicated.

Gramont and the Cut-Up Mode of Labyrinthology

As many of our readers are no doubt aware, much of Matthieu Gramont's labyrinthology is heavily informed by Dadaism. We know from his letters that Gramont corresponded extensively with Tristan Tzara in the 1930's. Particularly influential upon Gramont's labyrinthology is Tzara's notion of the cut-up method of composition. As Desmarais and Belanger turned their critical efforts increasingly towards the problems of ethical navigation, establishing the mode of labyrinthology that has since become known as Principalist Centralism, Gramont's writings became more polemical and more oblique. He became possessed of the notions that labyrinthology must mirror properly recursive navigation, and that virtually all labyrinthology that preceded Recursivism was, at root, prescriptivist and sought to delimit the scope of both labyrinthecture and navigation. In a 1938 letter to Tzara, Gramont writes,

"Explicative and poetic modes of discourse, though dissimilar in execution, do equal violence to the mystery of the labyrinth and thus to the fundamental aim of Recursivism as such. It is thus that a labyrinthology that is proper to Recursivism must employ aleatory and even misleading prose that is, to a certain degree, fundamentally unparsable to the reader or - at the very least - a discourse which lends itself to such a subjectivism that, for the hypothetical walker, it becomes 'in each case my own." (trans. Schaeffer, 1998)

If we look at Gramont's lectures and scant publications of the 1940's, we find a labyrinthology that is, by all rights, inscrutable. Gramont eschewed punctuation and structure, composing instead through chance-based processes of reorganization. According to Inès Bédard, Gramont would often flick matches at his manuscripts, letting "the documents burn here and there before stomping out the flames...he would piece together the fragments later with no concern as to how they would function as a text." By way of example, I've quoted from an unpublished essay on the atriums of the Alpujjara Mountain Labyrinth given as a lecture in 1941:

"in rant in the atriums the contradiction walker is with the chamber the attention to light allowing structural tasked like notions as components scriptural or design which may most productive offer take a must arriving atrium the ring is remain charge purely passive actively passive this deciphering seems of terms, for the more of example emotive second upon stance exuded by a both base to the location aesthetic paid of either a navigation of center to disclose the receive the vestibule but clue disclosures the room may be temporal structural aesthetic the logic of or purely rooted as or even fourth he mode of then engagement when intuition bullfighter regarding in the navigator reaching the atrium must all of knowing door or how to egress third and in something like secondary…" (trans. Sonnenberg, 2010)

I'm curious indeed to hear what some of our readers thoughts on the late Gramont, the writings of whom we have yet to dissect here at CLP, but which remain relevant and compelling in our current epoch.

Gramont and "La ligne propre"

As I mentioned in my comment to John's thread below, naturalism and observational navigation are issues which are given sustained consideration in the thought of a wide range of modern and contemporary labyrinthians. In Aaldi's text, nature as such is subjected to the quantalogical reduction. Reede's interiorist skepticism, manifested most notably in the writings and lectures from the Tiranė period, often takes as its subject the sensible and corporeal experience of the natural labyrinth. As John intimated, it is in the labyrinthological project of Gollesten that naturalism is reclaimed from the critique of the Medialists.

I find Mathieu Gramont's naturalism to be particularly interesting due in part to the fact that much of his labyrinthology functions as what is essentially a deconstruction of modern labyrinthological theory at large. As our readers know, the recursivist movement, which Gramont initiated, denies both exteriorism and interiorism as appropriate methodologies for navigating and investigating labyrinths as such, advocating instead a labyrinthology in which navigation and ambulation are paramount. In a lecture from the spring of 1940, entitled "La ligne propre" ("The Clean Line"), Gramont articulates an aesthetics of observational navigation. The piece is contained in the French language collection of Gramont's letters and lectures published by Editions Arceneaux, unavailable in translation at present. This excerpt finds Gramont sympathizing with Gollesten, and calling for a new vocabulary with which to assess the aesthetics of the labyrinth. The translation is my own.

"By decisively avoiding the center and the perimeter alike, we bring about a state of affairs in which the structure of the corridors within the sensible labyrinth effectively becomes our horizon. Our eyes focused solely upon the expanse of the corridor, undeniable as Gollesten has shown, and irreducible to constancy as posited by Aaldi. The aesthetics of the post-Industrial labyrinth force us to approach naturalism within the labyrinth in the same manner posited by the exteriorists, though we dispute their fundamental teleologico-labyrinthology. As Gollesten points out, the structure of the labyrinth may only be assessed in the context of properly authentic navigation. But how may we consider the aesthetics of the corridor?

Labyrinthectural theory, bound and blocked from primordiality by its dependence on quantalogical notation, does not provide us with a suitable vocabulary for assessing the beauty of the labyrinth's form. Moreover, the teleological fallacies of post-Aaldian labyrinthology continue to exercise their insidious influence on the topography of contemporary labyrinthecture. Utility should never be the locus. A corridor should beckon us in manifold ways, entreating us always to ambulate. It is the task of the labyrinthian to assess the corridor, but not to explain it away. This is, as Gollesten points out, the crisis of observational navigation in modernity."

The French Recursivists

The only known photograph of Matthieu Gramont, taken by Inès Bédard in Vitré, Ille-et-Vilaine in 1940, two years before his untimely death.

Inès Bédard, Paris, 1944 (photographer unknown)

From left to right: Hubert Belanger, Rémy Desmarais, Arnaud Duverger. Photo taken in 1939 by Maurice Fournier near the perimeter of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Labyrinth, Belarus.

French Recursivism: A Brief Overview

John’s excellent Pierre Coulet bibliography thread below made me realize that we here at CLP have, heretofore, presented precious too few posts which investigate the fascinating annals of 20th century French labyrinthological thought. The French occupy an important and unique place in the canon of modern labyrinthology. Undoubtedly the most intriguing, not to mention controversial, of French labyrinthological factions were the Recursivists, a group born out of a manifesto written by Matthieu Gramont in 1939.

Gramont was an erstwhile exteriorist who had grown dissatisfied with labyrinthology at large as a result of the widespread influence of New Constructivism in 20th century European intellectual circles. He reacted with ire to the dominance of Aaldian thinking in modern labyrinthology, putting forth theories that rejected both constructivist and exteriorist ideas alike. For Gramont, the walker should fully embrace le chaos de la navigation (“the chaos of navigation”), employing counter-intuitive, willfully anti-logical navigational tendencies in an effort to, at all costs, avoid both the center and the perimeter alike. Gramont’s labyrinthology was, of course, reviled by Aaldians and Gollestenians, though certain of the more idiosyncratic acolytes of the latter contingent did find his ideas invigorating (c.f. Belanger’s Gramont at the Perimeter of Gollesten). For Gramont, what mattered most was existing as “walker qua walker,” and nothing more.

Gramont met with an almost poetic demise at the young age of 27 in the Shiriri Mountain Labyrinth in 1942, apparently resigning himself to wander the awe-inspiring labyrinth for several days until he perished of hunger. The mantle of Recursivism was taken up by Arnaud Duverger, Inès Bédard, and Rémy Desmarais, the former of whom used a highly selective interpretation of Coulet’s First Juncture to provide theoretical underpinnings to Recursivism.

I’ll try to get excerpts from Gramont’s manifesto and Desmarais’ seminal essay Il y a Seulement le Couloir (“There is Only the Corridor”) posted in the next couple days.