11

November 16  Dubuffet and Burke Again ---The Cabinet Logologique

Explained

After years of looking, desultorily, for an explanation of Dubuffet's use of "logologique," I finally broke down and bought a big book on Dubuffet. In there I found his explanation of why in his late work he used the term "logologique."   In a letter dated September 15, 1969 he tells Arnold Glimcher, owner of the Pace Gallery, about the sort of line he uses in his Hourloupe paintings.

". . . a meandering,uninterrupted and resolutely uniform line, which brings all planes to the surface and takes no account of the concrete quality of the object described, its size and position but, rather, abolishes all the usual categories of one notion and another, of the notion of chair, for instance, as distinct from that of tree, person, cloud, earth, landscape, or what you will.  Thus this constantly uniform line, applied to all things (and, I insist, not only to the things we see but also to those which have no concrete being but are mere figments of caprice or imagination, all of them mingled indiscriminately together), reduces them to a common denominator and restores us to a continuous, undifferentiated universe.  It melts down the mental classifications which we apply to the interpretation (or, rather, the listing) of everyday facts and sights and, in this way, the play of our minds between one object or category and another is liberated and acquires notably greater mobility.

This uniform, departicularizing line, applied indifferently to all objects and extended, without a break, to mental as well as physical phenomena, is something I associate with the idea of a new logos.  Hence the titles which I have frequently pinned to objects of the Hourloupe cycle, such as "Boundary to the Logos," "Outpouring of the Logos," "Element of the Logos," "Logological Site" and so on.  It may be objected that I endow this word with the opposite of its usual meaning, since it commonly designates the mental operation of name and classification, whereas my intention is, on the contrary, to wipe out categories and turn back to an undifferentiated continuum.  But the aim of these works is, by breaking down the conventional logos, to set up or, rather, to suggest a new one, to reveal the arbitrary and specious character of the logos with which we are familiar and the enduring possibility of reinterpreting the world and basing our thinking on a logos of a very different kind.

Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality. Essays by Mildred Glimcher, Writings by Jean Dubuffet. New York: Pace Publications, 1987: 223.

What I wanted to see is whether Dubuffet could be said to be using the term "logology" in any way similar to the way Kenneth Burke uses it in his 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. 

The answer at first glance could seem to be No.  The two artists/philosophers are indeed doing very different things with the "same" word.  I put same into quotations because however much the word is identical and taken from the Latin, its history and usages within French must be very different from its survival in English.  But apart from that sort of quibble, it is clear that Burke is the word-man and Dubuffet the visual line-man and Burke's studies of rhetoric and the rhetorics of rhetorics verges at times on the musical so far as speculative philosophy goes, whereas Dubuffet the visual artist makes his lines first and then names the results of that practice afterwards.  We can, though, try to find or create, more of a linkage by noting that Burke's analyses of religious texts does involve pretty much what Dubuffet describes---the breaking down of the text as authored by for example Augustine and the re-configuring of it into a new reality, a reality designed to lay bare its underpinnings of an ordered meaning of which Augustine himself could not have been aware.  To rephrase Dubuffet, Burke as logological critic,

breaks down the conventional logos, the flow of the text as ordered to give it conventional meaning as Augustine's spiritual autobiography, in order to set up or, rather, to suggest a new logos, to reveal the arbitrary and specious character of the authored logos with which we are familiar and the enduring possibility of reinterpreting the text and its world and basing our thinking about it on a logos of a very different kind---a kind that is very different from the mind of Augustine, no matter how we attempt to re-construct that idea from the text we have that he wrote.  That sort of works.  If Burke had been able to sit in the chair in the middle of Dubuffet's Cabinet Logologique, he would have dug it, no doubt about that.  He would have gotten it, marveled at it, been fascinated and he would have seen how well it captures or expresses our imprisonment by language, by symbols, by the logos of conventional meaning as well as our attempts to construct from it another logos.  We're still left with the sheer coincidence of these two thinkers coming to some sort of roughy simiiar logological meditation at the beginning of the last phase of their careers.  The final third of their lives and works.  Just for the sake of the comparison I'm assuming that each artist, Burke and Dubuffet, can be seen to have had a three act career, or maybe a five act career.  This "turn" to the logological comes for each in act four, meaning, it is not The most significant point of their life or work, but rather a move toward the tranquility of the foreseen ending.  Perhaps for each, a vision of the logological, a retreat to the logological garden and meditation pavilion is a state of full acceptance of possibility.  Dubuffet puts it rather well:  "I am inclined to regard my Cabinet Logologique as a sanctum for philosophical exercise, a place where one can familiarize oneself with the deceptive aspects of what is normally termed "reality," and also become aware of the infinite variety of possible realities which are open for consideration. . . . Furthermore, it proposes that each one of us is entitled to invent his own type of reality for his own personal use and amusement." (249-250).

Nov 17   Marveling at the Language of Philosophy

Gilles Deleuze in The Fold, trans. Tom Conley

Even in a physical sense we are moving across outer material pleats to inner animated, spontaneous folds.  These are what we must now examine, in their nature and in their development.  Everything moves as if the pleats of matter possessed no reason in themselves.  It is because the Fold is always between two folds, and because the between-two-folds seems to move about everywhere:  Is it between inorganic bodies and organisms, between organisms and animal souls, between animal souls and reasonable souls, between bodies and souls in general?  (13)

Nov, 17, 2011   News from the Former Life

Tim Andy sent me news from  campus

via Facebook

" i overheard two students arguing about you today, it made me laugh. hope everything is going well

hey--glad you got the laugh but what was the argument about ??

9:00pm

a male student was saying that you were the most interesting person to teach something and the female student disagreed

i would rat them out but i haven't taken the time to learn their names "

November 22, 2011   Dealy Plaza

TUESDAY  NIGHT  NOV 22

48 yrs ago JFK.  I was 19.  It was 1963.  I had graduated from high school the year before.  18 months before the event in Dallas.  I was living in Elkins Park, PA.

"In the end, not writing and resigning yourself to an absurd life may be nearly the same as writing and not resigning yourself to anything."  --Enrique Vila-Matas  Intro to My Two Worlds

November 26, 2011   Clothes Make the Person

Watched the movie "Bill Cunningham New York" --  strangely non-punctuated title but perfect for the work--we have a great portrait of Cunningham who is remarkable in his own right and we have a portrait out the corner of our eyes of New York---a portrait we never see much of but which is revealing in profound ways.  I looked up The Sartorialist website again, which I used to look at regularly.  Have to look up Cunningham in the Times to see what he does every week---- he must be in his 80s.  In great shape because he rides his bicycle all over Manhattan to cover his beats.  Cunningham gives us the best possible explanation of the importance of fashion to all of us.