How Language Looks: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

How Language Looks:
On Asger Jorn and Noël
Arnaud’s La Langue verte*

STEVEN HARRIS

In November 1968, the Paris publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert brought out Asger
Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s La Langue verte et la cuite, an event accompanied by a banquet
pour 2,000 at a Danish restaurant in Paris, and a considerable response from the press,
though the book has largely dropped from view since.1 Initially titled La Langue crue
et la cuite, the book was written in French by artist Asger Jorn, founding member of
Cobra and of the Situationist International, and revised by Arnaud, member of the
Surrealist “Main à plume” group in occupied Paris, founding member of the
Revolutionary Surrealist group in postwar Paris (with which Jorn was also involved),
and later regent in the Collège de ’Pataphysique.2 Jorn, in addition to writing the
text, also chose the illustrations, while Arnaud added sections of his own and
reordered the material in collaboration with Jorn. It is thus the collective labor of
two individuals who had first met in Paris in 1946, and who were both involved in the
Revolutionary Surrealist group, a splinter group of Communist persuasion that had
seceded from the main body of the Surrealist group shortly before the opening of its
exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947, at the Galerie Maeght. If Cobra was very much ori-
ented against Arnaud when it was first formed in 1948, the paths of the two men
crossed numerous times in subsequent years. Jorn turned to Arnaud as a trusted
friend who was in in sympathy with his aims, who corrected Jorn’s rather casual
French, and who in general was willing to lend a hand to the enterprise.3

*
Support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the
University of Alberta enabled the primary research for this essay to be undertaken. Mme. Danielle
Muzerelle of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris granted me access to the fonds Arnaud before the
holdings were catalogued, and Troels Andersen and especially Dorte Kirkeby Andersen of the
Museum Jorn (formerly the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum) were remarkably generous during my various
stays at the museum. Gavin Parkinson prompted an earlier version of this essay by inviting me to a
conference on Surrealism and theory at the Courtauld in November 2009. I thank my sister and fel-
low collaborators on this issue, especially Karen Kurczynski.
1.
Noël Arnaud claims that the book was widely reviewed by the press at the time of its publica-
tion in C’est tout ce que j’ai à dire pour l’instant: Entretiens avec Anne Clancier (Saint-André-de-Najac: Patrick
Fréchet, 2004), p. 140.
2.
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris.
3.
Cobra was founded in November 1948 by six individuals who had walked out of the
Conférence du Centre international de documentation sur l’art d’avant-garde organized by Arnaud,

The various drafts and the visual materials used for the book are in the fonds Arnaud in the

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112

OCTOBER

As the original title La Langue crue et la cuite indicates, the book was a
response to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked), lequel
was published in 1964, as well as to structuralist theory more generally. I want to
focus here on the nature of this response, as well as on the respective interests
that Jorn and Arnaud brought to their project. For La Langue verte et la cuite is a
book t hat includes a
t remendous amount of
visual imagery as well as
written text, and its pro-
portion of imagery to text
(t here are roughly 67
pages of text distributed
across the 327 pages of
the book, et 315 images)
is one of the most signifi-
cant features of Jorn’s
response.
et
Arnaud’s dissat isfact ion
with structuralist theory
is articulated by means of
a parody that neverthe-
less depends on t he
notion of difference for
t he effect iveness of it s
critique, as well as on a
series of permutations of
images of tongues which
constitute the iconogra-
phy of the book.

Jorn

Le Cru et le cuit is, de
cour se, Lév i-St rauss’s
examinat ion of
t he
ext rapolat ion of myt hs
based on a common myth
about the origin of cook-
ing, which exemplifies in his view the transition from nature to culture. Jorn’s first
title, La Langue crue et la cuite, makes explicit the role of the tongue in both eating
and speaking, and refers implicitly to the Saussurean linguistic theory underpin-
ning structuralism, lequel, in distinguishing between la langue (langue) and la

Cover of Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s
La Langue verte et la cuite. 1968.

Édouard Jaguer, and René Passeron, all former members of the Revolutionary Surrealist group in
Paris, which had been dissolved in April of that year.

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How Language Looks

113

parole (speech), strips the word langue of any association with the body, despite the
fact that langue denotes both “language” and “tongue.” The title can be translated
as The Raw Tongue and the Cooked One, with the added implication that la cuite is
also an idiom that signifies being drunk. It is Arnaud who introduced the word
verte into the title. La Langue verte et la cuite does not literally mean The Green
Tongue and the Cooked One, since la langue verte is an idiom for slang or popular lan-
guage, but rather “Slang and Drunkenness,” two kinds of improper behavior
involving the tongue. A Dictionnaire de la langue verte was compiled by the French
journalist Alfred Delvau in the 1860s, and the term was used by later lexicogra-
phers of popular language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. La Langue
verte is also the title of a book of poetry published in 1954 by the Belgian writer
Géo Norge and reviewed two years later by Arnaud in Georges Bataille’s review
Critique; an epigraph by Norge is used to preface one of the sections of La Langue
verte et la cuite.4 Thus, if the relation of langue to language is maintained in
Arnaud’s revision of the title, it is to a language that is spoken on the street.

Arnaud had understood popular language to be a source for poetry and for
the renewal of language since his days as a Surrealist in the 1940s. In an essay from
1945 with the significant title “Il faut que l’homme mange ses mots,” Arnaud pro-
posed the renaissance of a popular poetry through “a delirious utilization of the
normal forms of popular expression,” as in such phrases easily translatable into English
as “to lose face,” “to learn by heart,” “to have on the tip of one’s tongue,” “to put
one’s finger on something”—phrases that are both figurative and concrete.5 For
Arnaud, popular language is already poetic in this sense, and it and Surrealist
poetry can mutually inform and enrich one another. This aspiration was condi-
tioned by Arnaud’s Communist politics at the time, but also by the need to
develop an alternative to the return to traditional poetic forms then being cham-
pioned by the Communist poet and former Surrealist Louis Aragon.

Jorn’s views were similarly oriented to a popular art and were based on his
understanding of folk culture, such as had existed before art had become the spe-
cialized activity of professional artists. Jorn’s account of early egalitarian societies,
which largely depended on Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (1884), held that agrarian societies had developed cults related to fer-
tility and the seasons, which were only later elaborated into myths and then
eventually into religions; religions were a consequence of the stratification of soci-
ety, which also gave rise to forms of knowledge produced by individuals who were

4.
Noël Arnaud, “Norge ou l’éloge de la langue vivante,” Critique 107 (Avril 1956), pp. 319–31.
A short poetic text by Norge incorporating references to poetry, musique, and eating, taken from his own
La Langue verte, prefaces the sixth section of the “Premier Service” of La Langue verte et la cuite, which is
entitled “Fugue aux figues à la gomme chromosommaire” (p. 79).
5.
Noël Arnaud, “Il faut que l’homme mange ses mots,” in La Terre n’est pas une vallée de larmes,
éd. Marcel Mariën (Brussels: Éditions “La Boétie,» 1945), p. 49 (emphasis in the original). The list of
phrases Arnaud highlights includes: “Peigner la girafe, avoir la tête farcie, parler à bâtons rompus,
mâcher la besogne, faire tapisserie, branler dans la manche,” etc., in addition to those more easily
translated into English.

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114

OCTOBER

freed from the need to labor because others labored for them.6 Structuralism was
for Jorn a contemporary example of the disembodied, idealist forms of knowledge
that stratified societies produced.

Art, on the other hand, was for Jorn a subjective reworking of matter that trans-
formed its materials, rather than a representation of nature, and thus was not
superstructural in the Marxist sense but rather part of the base, a material practice
that transformed nature. Art, which was mimetic in hunting-and-gathering societies,
became nonmimetic or symbolic in agrarian ones.7 This is one of his major points of
disagreement with Lévi-Strauss, for whom the primary function of art was mimetic.8

Jorn saw both folk culture and contemporary experimental art as active
reworkings of matter. Upon resigning from the Situationist International in 1961,
he conceived the multivolume series 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art, and founded
the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism with a few friends to oversee
this project; he is named as director of this institute on the title page of La Langue
verte. Each volume was to be dedicated to a particular aspect or region of
Scandinavian folk culture, with a written section contributed by a scholar and a
larger section of photographs to follow. Jorn was struck by the possibilities of
André Malraux’s various series of books on art, published from 1947 sur, and even
hired Gérard Franceschi, the chief photographer at the Louvre—whose pho-
tographs Malraux frequently relied on—to take the majority of the photographs
for his own, even larger series. Significantly, Jorn insisted on the separation of text

There is an eight-page manuscript in French entitled “Sience [sic] et Matherialisme [sic]»
6.
in the Jorn archives at the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, which is dated by the museum ca. 1948–49, et
which discusses what Jorn views as the inseparable relation between cults and agricultural labor in
early agrarian societies. Il écrit:“The materialist cults are cults of utility inseparable from work. The cult of
the moon and the stars, the cult of the boat, of fish, of the lion, etc.. are tied to Navigation, fishing and hunt-
ing, which—especially the latter two—are work of the night and the winter. The cult of the sun, of the
rain, of watering, the cult of the Bull, de [illegible], of bread, of milk, of trees etc. are tied to agricul-
ture, the work of the day and the summer, and there is nothing ‘supernatural’ in this. These are cults
of realities essential to man. Noone can deny that the whole of terrestrial life depends on the sun, et
to recognize it is poetry.” Jorn, “Sience et Matherialisme,” pp. 5–6. On p. 7, Jorn claims that the
materialist cults that he describes here are identical to popular festivals, which are in turn tied to
the rhythms of agricultural labor. Jorn also discusses these views in “La Roue de la fortune:
Méthodologie des cultes,” trans. Matie van Domselaer and Michel Ragon, the French translation of
Jorn’s text that was included in Asger Jorn, Guldhorn og Lykkehjul (Copenhagen: self-published, n.d.
[1957]), pp. 83 et 85. Jorn discusses the development of specialized forms of knowledge by those
freed from productive labor on p. 88. On the influence of Engels on Jorn’s understanding of early
agrarian societies, see Graham Birtwistle, Living Art: Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between
Helhesten and Cobra (1946–1949) (Utrecht: Reflex, 1986), pp. 149–53.
Birtwistle, Living Art, pp. 115–16.
7.
8.
Lévi-Strauss makes this point in the “Ouverture” to Le Cru et le cuit; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le
Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology I, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Nouveau
York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 18–22. For Jorn, a mimetic art was proper to a society of hunters and
gatherers, but the return to mimesis in Renaissance art and after was a regression and a mistake. In his
annotated copy of Le Cru et le cuit, which can be found in the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Jorn wrote the
word idiot beside one of Lévi-Strauss’s remarks on the essentially mimetic nature of painting (in the
1964 Plon edition, p. 28).

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How Language Looks

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and image, so that images could function independently of text and be arranged
according to an order intrinsic to the images themselves; in this arrangement, his
own projected series most closely resembles one of the lesser known of Malraux’s
series, his three-volume Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952–54), dans
which a short introductory text in each volume prefaces a large collection of pho-
tographs of sculpture from different per iods and places, with scholarly
descriptions of the works found at the back of the volumes.9

Jorn was well aware, through Malraux’s books and through the Swedish art his-
torian and architect Erik Lundberg’s multivolume series Arkitekturens Formspråk (Le
Formal Language of Architecture) (1945–61), of the uses of photographic reproduc-
tion in disseminating ideas about art and architecture.10 There are significant
differences, cependant, between Malraux’s use of photography and Jorn’s. In both
Psychologie de l’art (1947–49) and its single-volume revision, Les Voix du silence (1951),
Malraux claims that black-and-white photography, through its elimination of color,
texture, volume, and scale, tends to focus attention on style. When objects lose their
material properties through reproduction, when they can be gathered together in
the pages of a book and placed in proximity to one another, one can begin to notice
similarities in the style of artworks that used to be widely separated in time and
espace. For Malraux the photographic detail is especially useful in this regard, since it
fragments the unity of an artwork that would more likely be perceived as a gestalt or
whole by a viewer standing before the original, and in isolation a detail indicates
something to the viewer of the reproduction that might otherwise escape notice.11
Autrement dit, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, the photographs decontextual-
ize artworks as museums do, and Malraux was certainly aware of this when he
coined the term musée imaginaire for his series.12

In contrast to Malraux, Jorn focuses on the motif or gesture rather than on

9.
On the separation of plates and text, see Anneli Fuchs, “Asger Jorn and Art History,” Hafnia:
Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art 10 (1985), p. 132, and Ann-Charlotte Weimarck, “‘Nordic Anarchism’:
Asger Jorn and the Project 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art,” the English summary of ‘Nordisk Anarkism’:
Asger Jorn och projektet 10 000 års nordisk folkkonst (Århus: Kalejdoskop Förlag, 1980), p. 84.
Jorn reviewed the first volume of Lundberg’s series in 1946, and the entire series up to the
10.
fourth volume in 1950; see Asger Jorn, “The Living Essence of the Language of Form” (1946), dans
Fraternité avant tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, éd. Ruth Baumeister, trans. Paul Larkin
(Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), pp. 84–102, and Asger Jorn, “Changement d’époque dans la
recherche stylistique,” in Discours aux pingouins et autres écrits, éd. Marie-Anne Sichère, trans. Anne-
Catherine Abecassis (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2001), pp. 100–11. Jorn com-
ments approvingly in the latter on the layout of the books.
11.
André Malraux, Museum Without Walls (1947), vol. 1 of The Psychology of Art, trans. Stuart
Gilbert (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), pp. 24 et 50; André Malraux, The Voices of Silence (1951),
trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 21 et 44.
12.
Rosalind Krauss, “The Ministry of Fate,” in A New History of French Literature, éd. Denis Hollier
(Cambridge, Mass.: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 1989), pp. 1005–6. Henri Zerner and Douglas Smith also
discuss this aspect of Malraux’s imaginary museum: see Henri Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of
Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, éd. Geraldine A. Johnson
(Cambridge: L'université de Cambridge, 1998), p. 117; and Douglas Smith in “Without Walls: ‘World Art’
and Malraux’s Imaginary Museum,” in Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History, éd. Eric
Caldicott and Anne Fuchs (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 181.

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style in his choice of images. What he adapts from Malraux is the focus on the sig-
nificant detail as revealed by the photograph, but what this detail exposes is a
motif that might otherwise be overlooked, rather than a style. We see this method-
ology at work as well in the images chosen for La Langue verte et la cuite, when a
tongue or tongue-like motif that might otherwise pass unnoticed is highlighted in
color. While Malraux tended to select masterworks from museums around the
world for his books, Jorn’s choices for the Nordic folk-art series are specific to
Scandinavia, and are deliberately provincial; his imagery, for the most part known
only to locals or to specialists, is often astonishing, but the images are intended to
demonstrate the value and interest of Scandinavian popular culture as opposed to
the culture of elites.13

As Anneli Fuchs and other scholars have shown, Jorn became interested in
the ideas of nineteenth-century Danish art historian Julius Lange as he was think-
ing about how to arrange the material for his Nordic folk-art series in a way that
would give at least equal weight to the images as to the text.14 Lange focused on
the motif or gesture in a rather Warburgian way, and in the books in the series
that have been published in recent years by Borgen and Walther König according
to Jorn’s specifications, as well as in the organization of images in La Langue verte et
la cuite, particular attention is paid to the way the images relate to one another on
the level of their motifs; the visual play between images always takes precedence
over issues of formal resemblance, the history of the development of a motif, ou
iconography.15 The range of materials in each volume of the Nordic folk-art series
est, by the nature of its subject, much narrower than in La Langue verte, where the
corpus of imagery is multicultural; in the latter, Jorn incorporated photographs of
objects and images from around the world, including a number of cartoons that
he had brought back from a recent visit to Cuba. That said, the majority of the
images in La Langue verte are of European origin, and just under one quarter
come from his archive of photographs for the Nordic folk-art project.

It should be noted that this project was stillborn, as Jorn was unable to per-
suade funding agencies to support the project unless he relinquished control of its
overall direction—and over the presentation of images in particular, which others
found eccentric. Jorn produced one volume as a pilot, in order to give potential

Fuchs, “Asger Jorn and Art History,” pp. 139, 141–43, and Peter Shield, “An Artist’s World-

13.
Michel Melot notes the academic and conventional nature of Malraux’s choices of artworks
in “André Malraux, du Musée imaginaire à l’Inventaire général,” in André Malraux, D’un siècle l’autre:
Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, éd. Jean-Claude Larrat and Jacques Lecarme (S.l.: Gallimard, 2002),
pp. 256–57.
14.
View: The Writings of Asger Jorn,” Asger Jorn (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), pp. 288–89.
15.
Fuchs, “Asger Jorn and Art History,” p. 142. Recently, the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther
König has published six volumes of the series in association with the Museum Jorn (then the Silkeborg
Kunstmuseum), where the archival materials are held, and Borgen reissued the 1965 pilot volume in
1995. (Borgen also published the Scandinavian-language versions of the series, which are appearing in
German or English through König.) This is as many volumes as Jorn’s increasingly sketchy directions
for the series will allow.

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investors a proper idea of what he had in mind, but rather than lose control of the
project, he chose to shut it down in 1965.16

Cependant, Jorn published a related book in 1964, Signes gravés sur les églises de
l’Eure et du Calvados. This was the second volume of a series Jorn edited called the
Alexandrian Library: a series of Situationist pamphlets made up volume one, et
La Langue verte was volume three. Signes focused on graffiti carved into the stone
interiors of Norman churches between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, lequel
it presented as an unofficial culture contributed over the centuries by worshippers,
as they attended Mass or visited the churches for other purposes.17 Jorn was drawn
to this graffiti for several reasons. D'un seul niveau, he saw a resemblance between the
kinds of marks made in these Norman churches over several centuries and the graf-
fiti found in Scandinavian churches, which implies the persistence of cultural ties
between Normandy, settled by Scandinavian peoples, and the cultural heritage of
his homeland. (While Jorn was not a nationalist, he saw a specificity to Scandinavian
culture that he wished to make available to others.) On another level, he was drawn
to this graffiti as a popular expression that is also a commentary on, and a supple-
ment to, the official culture of the Catholic Church.

For Signes, Jorn solicited texts from scholars, and wrote an important one him-
soi; these texts are interpolated with full-page photographs of the graffiti, which are
nearly all figurative rather than verbal. The images punctuate the essays, which refer
to them, but they are not a function of the texts; rather, they are on an equal foot-
ing. Supporting visual materials drawn from other sources are shown facing the
texts, but the photographs of the Norman graffiti are always displayed as full-page
spreads, uninterrupted by text other than a number that refers to a table at the back
of the book indicating the site of the graffiti. The photographs also focus on details
and motifs without situating them in the architectural context of the churches in
which they were found. This is one of the Malrucian features of Jorn and
Franceschi’s approach: to emphasize a significant detail through a close-up, which is
what the photographic art of technical reproduction allows.

Such an approach is also taken in the Nordic folk-art series and in La
Langue verte. In his presentation of the series, Jorn’s thinking about the relation
of part to whole is closely associated with his social thinking, wherein society
ought to be a structural support for the individual, rather than the individual
being subordinated to the needs of society. Emphasized here is a way of thinking

Anneli Fuchs, “Roots and Perspectives: Asger Jorn and Traditions in Art,” trans. Annette

16.
Mester, in Asger Jorn (Ishøj: Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 107.
17.
The graffiti has often been described as Viking, but there are quite a few images, pour
instance of rigged sailing ships, that bear no resemblance to Viking ships, as well as a few words in
Roman script. One of the contributors to the book, Norwegian ethnographer Gutorm Gjessing, dates
the graffiti to between 1110 et 1800, noting that several inscriptions are dated to the eighteenth cen-
tury. Gutorm Gjessing, “Nord et Normandie,” Signes gravés sur les églises de l’Eure et du Calvados
(Copenhagen: Éditions Borgen, 1964), pp. 35 et 39.

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118

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about the relation of detail to structure, or of individual to society, that also
bears on Jorn’s critique of structuralism.18

Much of Jorn’s own written and visual work takes the form of a commentary
on the work of others. As in his Modification and Défiguration series of paintings of
1959 et 1962, respectivement, and in his critique of Marx’s concept of value in his own
Critique de la politique économique, published as a Situationist pamphlet in 1960, it is an
active response to that work, rather than a passive reception and absorption. In a
similar way, La Langue verte is an active response to and commentary on structural-
ism, and on Lévi-Strauss’s Le Cru et le cuit in particular. This response produces
something quite different from what prompted it; the source text or image gives
shape or structure to the commentary, even as their possible meanings diverge.

Jorn first addressed structuralism in an article titled “Strukturalisme og
Fortielse” (Structuralism and Suppression), published in the Danish periodical
Kriterium in September 1967. He is critical of structuralism for “excluding the human
being by claiming the human being was nothing other than an invention of the
natural sciences that is no longer needed. The human being is that which the struc-
turalists must not discuss, if they are to structure the human sciences.”19 Here Jorn
also quotes Lévi-Strauss from his 1965 essay “Le Triangle culinaire”: “Thus we can
hope to discover . . . how the cooking of a society is a language through which it
unconsciously translates its structure.”20

It is these concerns that orient Jorn’s conception of La Langue verte, the third
sentence of which reads: “Strictly personal, this book evidently does not exist, depuis
by definition that which [ce qui] does not exist is no one [personne], and no one can
exist at the present hour.”21 It is significant that the organization of Jorn and Arnaud’s
own book turns on the orientation to cooking taken by Lévi-Strauss rather than to a
general principle of structuralist method. This relation of one book to another, dans
addition to being a form of commentary, is itself a nearly structuralist opposition,
which depends, cependant, on several conceptual differences important to Jorn in par-
particulier: on a philosophical and practical materialism, through which art is a practice
dans, and on, the real; on the idea of an experimental knowledge or connaissance,
achieved through an engagement with empirical matter; and on the notion of a
visual thinking that is independent of language. In a brief unpublished and undated
text (which is given the approximate date of 1972 by the Museum Jorn), Jorn writes:

Why did we make La Langue verte et la cuite? First because the tongue as
a subject of visual art is fascinating and much more varied than still

Asger Jorn, “Structuralism and Suppression,” trans. Niels Henriksen, in this issue. The article

Asger Jorn, “Description préliminaire du dispositif et du plan pour la publication de 10 000

18.
ans d’art populaire nordique” (1965), in Jorn, Discours aux pingouins, p. 346.
19.
was originally published in Kriterium 2 Non. 4 (Septembre 1967), pp. 6–8.
20.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” trans. Peter Brooks, Partisan Review 33, Non. 4
(Fall 1966), p. 595; quoted by Jorn in “Structuralism and Suppression.” “Le Triangle culinaire” was first
published in French in L’Arc 26 (1965).
21.
Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud, La Langue verte et la cuite: Étude gastrophonique sur la marmytholo-
gie musiculinaire (S.I.: Jean-Jacques Pauvert Éditeur, 1968), p. 11. In French, qui can signify both “that”
and “who,” depending on the context, and Jorn plays on this ambiguity here.

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How Language Looks

119

lifes, and these images have never been shown together, and then
because the linguists are seriously beginning to plague us [nous casser
les pieds]. It was time to leave this “too defensive a posture against the
power of words,” with which John E. Burchard reproaches artists in his
chapter on “The City as Symbol” in Sign, Image and Symbol.22

In other words, there is a relation in Jorn’s mind between the critique of struc-
turalism and an emphasis on the visual image. Jorn’s materialist orientation
presupposes human agency, which is threatened by structuralist theory. En effet, un
essential component of the beliefs grounding Jorn’s artistic practice is that the
artist gives shape to matter and eventually to an image that is prior to language.

The differences that Jorn draws between structuralism and his own values
appear in La Langue verte as an excess to the structure, which is related to a corpo-
ral embodiment that the authors believe to be absent from structuralism.
Lévi-Strauss’s interest in cooking seems to be based primarily on his insight that it
is a universal human activity that can be diagrammed and thus understood con-
ceptually in a way similar to that other human universal, langue. Lévi-Strauss’s
“Le Triangle culinaire,” for instance, is largely concerned with diagramming struc-
tural oppositions between food in its raw state and in different states of cooking
and decomposition, which he describes by adapting Roman Jakobson’s “vowel tri-
angle” and “consonant triangle” (by which phonemes become significant through
a structure of difference) to the “culinary triangle” of the title. Nevertheless, Lévi-
Strauss opens the “Ouverture” to Le Cru et le cuit with these words:

The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories—such as the
categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, le
moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined
by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the
standpoint of a particular culture—can nonetheless be used as concep-
tual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in
the form of propositions.23

C'est, Lévi-Strauss is ordering empirical data using a structuralist method, et
this grounding in practices of cooking, manger, and drinking, and in Amerindian
myths about the origins of these practices, itself structures the relations between
La Langue verte and Le Cru et le cuit.

One of the initial themes of La Langue verte, adapted from Le Cru et le cuit, est
that of the dénicheur des langues, the “dislodger of tongues,” which is both
described as a myth in Jorn and Arnaud’s text and displayed as a motif in numer-

Asger Jorn, untitled and undated typescript (1972?), 4 pp., in Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Jorn
22.
is quoting John E. Burchard’s essay “The City as Symbol” in Sign, Image and Symbol, éd. Gyorgy Kepes
(Londres: Studio Vista, 1966), p. 236.
23.
Cooked, p. 1.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (S.I.: Plon, 1964), p. 1; Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the

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ous images—in fact, 102 of the
315 images in t he book are
included under the rubric of
héros dénicheurs de langues in the
“Service de table des enlumin-
ures” at t he back of t he
volume.24 (The dénicheurs des
langues are a variation on the
dénicheurs in one of the fir st
in Lév i-
myt hs descr ibed
Strauss’s book, concerning the
“bird-nester s” of the Bororo
tribe in the Mato Grosso state of
western Brazil, who rob nests of
young macaws. 25) Comme
t he
authors write in La Langue verte,
t he “heroes dislodger s of
tongues” are those in structural-
ist linguistics who separate the
human being from language:

The relation between
tongue [langue] et
langue [langage]
merits examination.
The tongue is lan-
guage less speech [parole]. To extract one’s tongue, it is therefore neces-
sary to cut off one’s speech, which one achieves in a radical manner by
cutting out the whole tongue. This carnage of the tongue is called lan-
guage. The operation itself is called langagement.26

Plate from La Langue
verte et la cuite. 1968.

Here Jorn and Arnaud are playfully taking up the Saussurean distinction
accepted by Lévi-Strauss between langue as system and parole as speech—as well as,
secondarily, Sartre’s notion of commitment (l’engagement).27 Their critique of the sep-

Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 35–47. In the 1964 Plon version read by Jorn, le

One of the many untranslatable examples of wordplay in La Langue verte et la cuite, ce
24.
expression condenses the service de table or “dinner service” and the table des enluminures or “table of
illuminations,” enluminure also signifying the coloring of the tongues in the same way that a print may
be printed in different colors.
25.
relevant pages are pp. 43–55. Dénicheurs is the French term, “bird-nesters” its translation.
26.
Sartrean term l’engagement (“commitment”).
27.
Lévi-Strauss refers to Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole in two places that
would have been easily accessible to Jorn and Arnaud: in “The Structural Study of Myth,” first pub-
lished in English in 1955 and included in Structural Anthropology (1958), trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Schoepf (S.l.: Basic Books, 1963), p. 209; and in Lévi-Strauss’s 1960 Leçon inaugurale for the

Jorn and Arnaud, p. 48. Langagement is literally “languagement,” but it sounds like the

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How Language Looks

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aration of language from the
human animal is made in
two ways. One is through the
predominance of the visual
over the verbal in the book,
which shows the tongue as an
implicit critique of struc-
turalism’s pr ivileging of
language—although the text
is full of exuberant wordplay,
and offers up its own mythi-
cal narrat ives to com-
plement and parody those
that Lévi-Strauss has gath-
ered in Le Cru et le cuit. Le
other is through an insis-
tence, both verbal and visual,
on the tongue in all of its
functions—eating, drinking,
vomiting, speaking, kissing,
or being shown in a spirit of
der ision. If myths about
cooking are the basis of Lévi-
Strauss’s study, they are for
Lévi-Strauss “structured like
a language,” a point of view that Jorn and Arnaud counter with the unruly tongue of
their title, which is language but also more than language—language as but one
function of a Rabelaisian body.28

Plate from La Langue
verte et la cuite. 1968.

This raises the possibility of a Bakhtinian analysis of La Langue verte as a car-
nivalesque response to structuralist theory. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His
Monde, first published in the Soviet Union in 1965, had not yet been translated into
French by the time of La Langue verte’s appearance, though Julia Kristeva had
introduced his work to a French public in an important article published in

Collège de France, published as “The Scope of Anthropology,” trans. Monique Layton in Structural
Anthropology, vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 17. Lévi-Strauss famously cri-
tiqued Sartre in the last section of La Pensée sauvage (1962), which is probably why Jorn and Arnaud are
bringing Lévi-Strauss and Sartre together here.
28.
The image of a tongue being used as a musical instrument, which comes from a book of
engravings of grotesque figures entitled Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, is the first one in the book,
the epigraph reading: “Any intelligent man who builds begins wisely by starting with the kitchen.” Jorn
and Arnaud, p. 5. The caption specifies that the image comes from a book, published by Richard
Breton in Paris in 1565, de 120 engravings of figures purporting to have been invented by Rabelais.
This is the first of nine images from this source used in La Langue verte et la cuite.

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Critique in April 1967.29 Arnaud was a contributor to Critique, and therefore may
have read this text. Cependant, Kristeva introduced Bakhtin as a member of the for-
malist circle (which he was not), and analyzed his work from a structuralist
perspective, so it is unlikely that Bakhtin’s thinking would have been available to
either Jorn or Arnaud as an alternative to structuralist theory.30 In any case, un
knowledge of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque was not necessary in order for
Jorn and Arnaud to conceive their book; the Cahiers du Collège de ’Pataphysique had
published special issues on “Rabelais pataphysicien” and “Jarry pantagruéliste” in
1954, and an interest in Rabelais was shared with other pataphysicians like
Raymond Queneau in the 1950s and ’60s.31

Even if Jorn lacked direct knowledge of Rabelais and His World and his “Forms
of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1975), Bakhtin’s theories can be
useful in understanding the orientation of La Langue verte et la cuite. Bakhtin
insists that both the language and the viewpoint of Rabelais’s fiction enter litera-
ture from a popular consciousness, rather than from elite or official culture. Pour
Bakhtin, they are related in a fundamental way to the seasonal rhythms of agricul-
tural labor and to the commerce of the town fair, as well as to the festivals that still
punctuated everyday life in sixteenth-century France. Autrement dit, Bakhtin’s is
a class analysis, through which he argues convincingly that the emphasis on the
material in Rabelais, as opposed to the spiritual and ideal of the religious and aris-
tocratic communities that made up the official culture of the time, is closely
related to popular experience in towns or on estates.

In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin argues that
labor processes are oriented to harvest and birth, and throughout Rabelais and His
World he claims that folk or popular cultures are closely related to nature, in ways
that aristocratic, clerical, et, plus tard, bourgeois conceptions of culture are not.32
Bakhtin understands the human body to be open to the world, and one of the fig-
ures of this openness in Rabelais’s fiction is the mouth, through which food and
drink flow (and from which vomit issues in moments of excess): “But the most
important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all

29.
Julia Kristeva, “Le Mot, le dialogue et le roman,” translated as “Word, Dialogue and Novel”
(1967) in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, éd. Leon S. Roudiez, trans.
Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University, 1982), pp. 64–91.
The article was first published in Critique 33 (Avril 1967).
The English translation of Rabelais and His World was published in 1968, the French one in
30.
1970. For a helpful discussion of Bakhtin’s reception, including Kristeva’s, see Karine Zbinden, Bakhtin
between East and West: Cross-Cultural Transmission (Londres: Legenda, 2006).
31.
The Cahiers du Collège de ’Pataphysique 13–14 (Mars 9, 1954) was devoted to “Rabelais pata-
physicien” and to “Jarry pantagruéliste” in issue 15 (Avril 14, 1954). Raymond Queneau alludes to
Rabelais in his novel Les Fleurs bleues (1965). Bakhtin mentions Jarry as an example of the modern
grotesque in Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University,
1984), p. 46.
32.
M.. M.. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays (1975), éd. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 206–07.

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How Language Looks

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else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other fea-
tures are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss.”33

Popular language also issues from the mouth, of course, in shouts, curses,
and wordplay, which Bakhtin finds of great interest in The Histories of Gargantua
and Pantagruel, an early instance of vernacular literature in France.34 Laughter,
aussi, comes from the mouth, and Bakhtin sees parody and the grotesque as essen-
tial features of the literature he is investigating:

Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people’s festive
laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not
exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. Ils, aussi, sont
incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of
the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure
satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places
himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The whole-
ness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears
comic becomes a private reaction. The people’s ambivalent laughter,
on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; il
who is laughing also belongs to it.35

This for Bakhtin is one of the dimensions of the popular consciousness that inform
Rabelais’s fiction. Exaggeration and hyperbole are two of the qualities of parody and
the grotesque, which debase the ideal and the hierarchy of official culture into the
material of unofficial popular culture: “The essential principle of grotesque realism is
degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a
transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble
unity.”36 The giants Gargantua and Pantagruel exemplify these qualities in their size
and their actions, despite the fact that they are also princes.

Although La Langue verte et la cuite is a parody of structuralist theory, aussi
as of the musical and scientific pretensions of Le Cru et le cuit, it also adopts Lévi-
Strauss’s method in the organization of its images and prose. The permutations of
images of the tongue—which are broadly organized in the “table service of illumi-
nations” into héros dénicheurs de langues, la langue pédale (roughly, “foot lickers”),
tireurs (those who show their tongues), les langues élémentales (the elements in ques-
tion being chiefly air and fire), la langue orientable (in which tongues take the form
of vegetal arabesques), la langue zoomorphe (which are mostly snakes, but on two
occasions frogs), bi-langues, and tri-langues—are transformational in nature. Donc, pour
instance, the series of images of dislodgers of tongues begins with the “heroes”

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317; see also p. 26.
Ibid., pp. 15–17 and p. 182.
Ibid., p. 12. The first trait of laughter according to Bakhtin is that this laughter is festive and

33.
34.
35.
therefore collective, rather than individual.
36.
sidered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style.” Ibid., p. 303.

Ibid., pp. 19–20. He also writes: “Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally con-

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124

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“dislodging” the tongues of
dragons; it t hen shift s to
images of heroes forcing
open an animal’s jaws (a tra-
ditional sign of strength and
courage), which are followed
by human hands being
grasped in the mouths of
beasts—a literal inversion of
the hero’s domination in the
earlier images. This series of
transformations is in keeping
with Lévi-Strauss’s account of
how myths spread in Amer-
indian societ ies through a
logic of difference.

The text is organized
according to a different logic
of development than that
found in the “table service of
illuminations.” The table of contents is set up as a menu, with each dish an example
of wordplay whose name often incorporates both musical and gastronomic refer-
ences (par exemple, “Pizzicato al pommo d’oro” and “Elégie au fromage blanc”). Le
texts that have been given the names of individual dishes are modular, and they
develop over the course of the book as a series of dismythes and marmythes.37

Plate from La Langue
verte et la cuite. 1968.

The musical references in the book’s organization refer of course to Lévi-
Strauss’s own use of musical terms to structure the four volumes of his Mythologiques
series, whose first volume was Le Cru et le cuit. Lévi-Strauss uses similar titles in the
organization of his chapters (par exemple., “Fugue des cinq sens,” “Cantate de la sarigue”
[opossum]—which later shows up as “Cantate des seringues” [syringes] in Jorn and
Arnaud’s book). Lévi-Strauss adopts a musical structure because he believes myth
and music to be organized in similar ways, but he keeps the structure of his book
and the contents of the myths he discusses separate; in the organization of their
livre, Jorn and Arnaud integrate the content of those myths as two forms of plea-
sure.38 The difference is subtle but of great importance, for Jorn and Arnaud’s
synthesis acts as a critique of the separation they see informing Lévi-Strauss’s struc-
turalist method. Within the texts, Jorn mimetically adopts the same academic
rhetorical devices that Lévi-Strauss frequently relies on (“Mais il y a plus” [But there
is more], “La démonstration peut être poussée encore plus loin” [The proof can be

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37.
for “cooking pot.”
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Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, pp. 34–35; The Raw and the Cooked, p. 26.

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Plate from 12th-Century Stone
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pushed even further], etc.), which he noted in his copy of Le Cru et le cuit, and which
serve to tie the parody more closely to its model.39

Jorn and Arnaud’s emphasis on the embodied tongue, a response to a disem-
bodied structuralist discourse that has eliminated the human being from its
reasoning, takes the form of a Joycean excess of language and of images that bear
witness to orality. For Bakhtin the mouth has symbolic value as an opening to the
monde, especially in those cultures and for those classes involved in agricultural
labor that are most dependent on nature, and Jorn seems to share Bakhtin’s view-
point.40 If the variety of these nonverbal images of the mouth and tongue initially
fascinated Jorn—he may first have noticed the motif when collecting photographs
for the Nordic folk-art series (comme, par exemple, in a remarkable image of a figure
showing his tongue at a crucifixion, found in both La Langue verte and 12th-Century
Stone Sculptures of Scania (Skånes Stenskulptur under 1100-tallet), Jorn’s 1965 pilot vol-
ume for the Nordic folk- art ser ies)—he offer s them as a response to the
structuralist reduction of la langue (the tongue) to language. This is so even if the
organization of the images in the book is sometimes based on shifts in sounds and
meaning in language—for example, from la langue forgée (the forged tongue) de
one image to la langue fourchue (the forked tongue) of several later images, and to
the bi-langue of yet others, which sometimes takes on the properties of the plant

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Jorn underlined all of these figures of speech in his copy of Le Cru et le cuit, and used them

39.
liberally in his own text.
40.
Cru et le cuit, pp. 133–34; The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 125–26.

Significantly, Lévi-Strauss also discusses laughter and eating as openings to the world, in Le

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motifs in decorative arabesques. Extending the visual logic at work here, in some
images the leafy tongues suggest intoxicat ion, as in the image capt ioned,
“Bilinguiste viniculaire éméché” (tipsy vinicular bilinguist).

Intoxication has a positive value for Jorn and Arnaud, and Jorn in fact

describes it as “natural aesthetics” in his 1952 book Luck and Chance:

Bacchus, Dionysius, Liber and our Nordic Frø all personify this ancient prin-
ciple of intoxication or natural aesthetics which is, en effet, the divine origin

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Plates from La
Langue verte et
la cuite. 1968.

of the concept of freedom itself. But it is very significant to point out that these
are above all symbols of fertility, travail, love and liberation, montrant que
true freedom to consist of liberation into life, not of freeing oneself from life, as is
normally maintained in the modern presupposition of unproductive
independence, where freedom means passivity.41

Jorn’s painting Dead Drunk Danes, 1960, its title an allusion to Shakespeare’s line
“your Dane dead drunk” from Othello, is another instance of this, though it is also
in keeping with the Rabelaisian theme of banqueting that runs through La Langue
verte et la cuite.42 The title of the painting appears to be a response to a remark
made by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower at an address to fellow Republicans
on July 27, 1960:

Only in the last few weeks, I have been reading quite an article on the
experiment of almost complete paternalism in a friendly European
country. This country has a tremendous record for socialistic opera-

Asger Jorn, Luck and Chance: Dagger and Guitar (1952, revised 1963), in The Natural Order and
41.
Other Texts, trans. Peter Shield (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 273. This last remark would seem to refer
to the passivity and atomization of the consumer in consumer society, a point of view shared with
Jorn’s once and future comrades in the Situationist International.
42.
Iago: “Why, he drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk. He sweats not to overthrow your
Almain. He gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled.” This very Rabelaisian speech,
from Act 2, Scène 3 of Othello, vaunts the superiority of Englishmen where drinking is concerned.

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tion, following a socialistic philosophy, and the record shows that their
rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably and I think they were
almost the lowest nation in the world for that. Now, they have more
than twice our rate. Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is dis-
cernible on all sides. Donc, with that kind of example, let’s always
remember Lincoln’s admonition. Let’s do in the federal government
only those things that people themselves cannot do at all, or cannot so
well do in their individual capacities.43

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These remarks were widely reported in the Scandinavian press. Eisenhower did not
name the country he was referring to, but Jorn’s title—with its reference to drunken
Danes—reads as a playfully intertextual response to it.

While there is a necessarily close relation between word and image in La
Langue verte—given that language is a property of the tongue—much of the book
is focused on the visual relationships between images, independent of text, lequel
they do not illustrate. For Jorn images are not dependent on words, and have had
a long history of use independent of language; one reason for his interest in the
graffiti found in Norman and Scandinavian churches is that they are figurative
rather than verbal, possibly because the worshippers who carved them into wood
and stone were not literate.44 In 1965 Jorn titled a painting Im Anfang war das Bild
(In the Beginning Was the Image), inverting in an obvious way the intent of the
first words of the Gospel of John to indicate the precedence of image over lan-
guage. As Jorn’s biographer Troels Andersen notes:

Traditional iconography compares motifs that “illustrate” known sto-

43.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the Republican National Committee Breakfast,
Chicago, Illinois.” This address was given at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago on July 27, 1960. It can
be found online at The American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11891 (accessed
Avril 15, 2012). I am grateful to Howard L. Pankratz, archivist at the Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, for indicating this source to me.
44.
fiti in the book is exclusively figurative in nature.

There are a few photographs of inscriptions in Signes gravés, but the vast majority of the graf-

128

OCTOBER

ries such as classical myths, Biblical tales or accounts of historical
events. Jorn’s approach was different. He rejected the accepted notion
among scholars that an image illustrates a pre-existing, verbally formu-
lated content, whether transmitted orally or in writing. Instead he pro-
posed the hypothesis that a pictorial representation may generate a
verbally expressed myth.45

Jorn was for this reason extremely interested in the cultural tradition of the husdrapa,
in which Nordic bards constructed poetic improvisations based on images. Images are
thus prior to their interpretation in words, rather than second-order phenomena.46

As a critique of structuralism’s privileging of language over other forms of
expression and other aspects of human behavior, La Langue verte attempts to read-
just the balance between word and image by insisting on the inseparability of the
two meanings of langue. Jorn and Arnaud link them graphically through the iden-
tical coloring of titles and of tongues on each page where titles are found,
connecting rather than separating the two. Thus the tongue is sometimes literally
vert, though at other times it is pink, blue, yellow, or orange. This is the image of
langue (langue)—how it shows itself, how it looks.

I noted earlier that Arnaud was a regent (and later satrap) in the College of
’Pataphysics. Invented by Alfred Jarry in the 1890s (and institutionalized by the
College in 1948), pataphysics, “the science of exceptions” or “the science of imagi-
nary solutions,” is noted for its ironic adoption of scientific procedures. While
Jorn was ambivalent about pataphysics and, despite the claims of many scholars,
was never a member of the College, there is nonetheless a pataphysical quality to
La Langue verte et la cuite.47 In the manuscript version of a text prepared for the
Magazine littéraire, which was published in a shortened version in February 1969,
Arnaud noted:

A methodology has been made of a method (that of Lévi-Strauss). . . .
Alors, as always happens with ideas that become dogmatic, what we call
in our book a methodotautology has come to be made of the method-
ology; in other words, the endless repetition of the same idea of

Troels Andersen, “Thidrek,” in Asger Jorn (Ishøj: Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 139.
45.
On the husdrapa, see Weimarck, p. 87.
46.
Jorn was honored with the title of commandeur exquis of the Order of the Grande Gidouille by
47.
the College in 1961, after his resignation from the Situationist International, but this was an honor
bestowed on members and nonmembers alike, and Jorn neither subscribed to the College’s publications
nor occupied any position in its hierarchy. E-mail correspondence with Thieri Foulc, regent of the
Collège de ’Pataphysique, Février 16, 2009. An article by Jorn that was rather critical of pataphysics, “La
Pataphysique, une religion en formation,” was published in Internationale situationniste 6 (Août 1961),
pp. 29–32, after his resignation, together with an editorial note clarifying the Situationists’ position on
pataphysics; the date of this publication, following the announcement of Jorn’s award in the Dossiers du
Collège de ’Pataphysique 15 (which appeared in late June 1961), is perhaps a sign of a strategic move against
the College by the Situationist group that was designed to embarrass Jorn.

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method in regards to no matter what. Pataphysically speaking, it does
not displease us in the least that a simple scientific hypothesis has been
set up as a Table of the Law. Science, and culture in general, are above
all administration. Culture is administered as one administers the Holy
Sacrament and as one administers a potion, et, of course, as one
administers the State. Culture is the police of the spirit. A naive person
can find it astonishing that Lautréamont, Rimbaud and even Dada
have become the topic of theses at the Sorbonne. To us it’s not. Le
Sorbonne congratulates itself on having good digestion. And indeed, it
swallows everything, in hoping that everything it hands back will be
something unrecognizable. Structuralism is undeniably neater. It’s the
dietetic, hygienic Sorbonne. Lévi-Strauss’s culinary obsession is, in this
regard, quite symptomatic. And it’s this, in the end, that makes him
extremely sympathetic.48

Lévi-Strauss’s culinary obsession makes him sympathetic to Arnaud, and this
despite the universal application of his method. It is not in fact the universality
of this application that is the problem for Arnaud, but its truth claims, for pata-
physics is the science of exceptions, where any law is only applicable to a single
instance; par conséquent, there are no universal laws or truths, and structuralism,
with its claim to the scientific status of a savoir or theoretical knowledge, is just
as imaginary a solution as any other. This is the challenge pataphysics makes to
science, even while scientific procedures are scrupulously followed in the
research published in the College’s own periodicals over the sixty-plus years of
its existence. En même temps, the concept of pataphysics, as established by
Jarry, is founded on the notion of equivalence, of nothing’s being, in itself,
more or less true than anything else, and this brings it close to the differential
logic of structuralist method, for which it is the differences between myths that
are significant, rather than the veracity or content of specific myths.49 It is this
aspect of equivalence, Je pense, that informs the organization of the photographs
in La Langue verte et la cuite.

In the interview that was the basis for Pierre Hahn’s article in the Magazine
littéraire, Arnaud notes that “Lévi-Strauss affirms that ‘there can be nothing arbi-
trary in works of the mind,’” and goes on to say: “For, as you have understood, nous
are passionately though imperturbably for the arbitrary in works of the mind,

48.
Noël Arnaud, manuscript of an interview with Pierre Hahn, Janvier 17, 1969, in Asger Jorn
and Noël Arnaud, La Langue verte et la cuite: Manuscrits, photographies et documents originaux (Toulouse:
Librarie Champavert, 2002), pp. 64–65. (Note: This is the catalogue for the sale of the manuscripts for
La Langue verte et la cuite, which are now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris.) The interview was
used as the basis for Pierre Hahn, “Argot, structuralisme et gastronomie,” Magazine littéraire 26
(Février 1969), p. 24.
49.
des sciences,” Le Monde, Novembre 29, 1967.

Arnaud writes about the pataphysical notion of equivalence in “Mythe du mythe et science

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for caprice, for delirium and for the absolute sovereignty of the imaginary.”50
This pataphysical preference for the arbitrary—for the exception rather than
the rule—is what Arnaud brings to the book, in addition to his erudition, his
excellent French, and his gastronomic interests. As a founding member of
Oulipo, or the “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” Arnaud was also interested in
structures, but ones consciously devised as rules for literary games, plutôt que
the unconscious structures investigated by structuralists. He notes, in a later
interview with Warren F. Motte, Jr., that Oulipo and structuralism share quite a
lot, but that there is this significant difference.51

In keeping with the pataphysical attitude towards science, it is a matter of

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Gauche: Two plates from
La Langue verte et
la cuite. 1968.
Photographs by
Manuel
Bidermanas/akg-
image and Arthur
Sasse/AFP/Getty
Images.
Droite: Jorn. Pas de
puisance d’imagina-
tion sans images
puisante. 1968.

course that La Langue verte includes Arthur Sasse’s now-famous UPI photograph of
Albert Einstein showing his tongue on his seventy-second birthday, next to a pho-
tograph from the weekly magazine L’Express of a young woman on the streets of
Paris in May 1968, captioned, “La Langue universitaire pavée de bonnes inten-
tions” (“The university tongue paved with good intentions”—pavée is the verb
ici, but a pavé is also a cobblestone, which she holds in her hand).52 This is the
only reference to the recent events that had shaken French society so thor-
oughly—indeed, the only reference to current events generally—in a book that
appeared five months after the May revolt.53 While its publisher Jean-Jacques
Pauvert was closely involved in the events, Jorn, according to his former girlfriend

The photograph, taken by the photojournalist Manuel Bidermanas, was first published as part

Arnaud, interview with Hahn, p. 65.
Warren F. Motte, Jr., “Twenty Questions for Noël Arnaud,” Studies in Twentieth-Century

50.
51.
Literature 10 Non. 2 (Spring 1986), p. 293.
52.
of a suite of six photographs of police repression and student resistance in L’Express, May 13–19, 1968.
53.
With one other exception: there is a drawing by Roland Topor of the head of a gagged
man, whose forehead opens to stick out a tongue, which evidently connotes the mind’s ability to
resist even where speech is prohibited. The drawing, which was published in Action 9 ( Juin 13,
1968), p. 2, is reproduced in small dimensions on p. 156 of La Langue verte. (Action was a newspaper

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Jacqueline de Jong, remained far away from them in the suburbs.54 He neverthe-
less produced a series of four posters in solidarity with the May–June events,
which were as he says “conscientiously misspelled.”55 These posters take the form
of a comment ar y on t he
May–June events, as well as on
the posters produced by the
Ateliers populaires in the occu-
pied art and design schools in
Paris and elsewhere, which fea-
tured simple graphics and
slogans or iented to the de-
mands of workers and students
in the occupied factories and
universities and in the streets.

Jorn’s own poster s are
also a combination of word and
image, though their slogans,
such as “Pas de puisance
d’imaginat ion sans images
puisante” (No power of the
imagination without powerful
images), which refer s to the
1968 slogan “L’Imagination au
pouvoir” (All power to the
imagination), differ from those
of the Ateliers populaires, as do
their images. Jorn was one of a
number of artists who made
posters in solidarity with the
May events but who declined to
t ake part in the anonymous
production of the Ateliers pop-
for reasons both
ulaires
aesthetic and political. There is no question that, in the economy of La Langue verte
et la cuite, the image of the woman showing her tongue is a positive one, precisely as

published by the Comités d’action organizing resistance to the regime, and featured many cartoons
by different hands, including regular contributions by Topor.) Cependant, the drawing’s reference to
the May–June events is not explicit, whereas the subject of Bidermanas’s photograph would have
been instantly recognizable at the time of publication.
54.
(Milano: Skira, 1996), pp. 524–25.
55.

“Interview with Jacqueline de Jong by Graham Birtwistle,” in Luciano Caprile, Asger Jorn, vol. 2

Asger Jorn, untitled and undated manuscript, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

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a gesture of derision aimed at
pouvoir, part of a long-standing
popular tradition that Jorn and
Arnaud are highlighting here.
There is a whole section of La
Langue verte devoted to tireurs de
langue, which is an instance of
corporal humor aimed at
authority, and the book’s final
image is a drawing the former
Cobra artist Pierre Alechinsky
made for the cover of Les Tireurs
de langue, the book on which he
collaborated with the Israeli
writer Amos Kenan.56

It is important to empha-
size that Jorn and Arnaud’s book
is a response to structuralism
from the viewpoint of artists; it
therefore differs from the intel-
lectual critiques made by Claude
Lefort, Henri Lefebvre, and oth-
ers in the 1950s and ’60s. Un
of the key aspects of Jorn and
Arnaud’s response is an expan-
sive humor—derisive, parodic,
but also generous. It is not, in other words, a humor that treats either its object of
parody or its audience as an idiot; it is, rather, an inclusive humor, a carnivalesque
attitude as described by Bakhtin. In their critique of the separation that informs
structuralism’s logic of difference, Jorn and Arnaud focus on a materialist knowl-
edge gained through the senses (a connaissance rather than a savoir), placing an
emphasis on the unruly human animal rather than on a system. They focus on syn-
thesis rather than on distinction, bringing images together in often astonishing ways
that are both in keeping with Lévi-Strauss’s notion of transformational structures and
different from it. They enact their own logic of difference in differentiating them-
selves from a differential logic, which is and is not parodic in nature.