Mute in oil
The relationship between tongue and language deserves examination. The tongue is language less speech. To free the tongue, there is therefore a need to interrupt it, which is radically achieved by cutting out the whole tongue. This carnage of the tongue is called language. The operation itself is called langagement.

To cook, just follow the right recipes. A good recipe means good cuisine. It’s all there. Good things are done by means of good words. Better than a simple verification, we are dealing here with the methodological recipe for the structuring of culinary recipes. Scientifically gastronomic cuisine is spoken cuisine. We cook the recipe and we stuff ourselves with it. Good cuisine is a myth. A good dinner is read aloud. Those who imagine the distribution of a scriptural menu to be enough are mistaken: it is only a dead letter, and inedible. "The animals feed on each other, man eats, intellectual man alone knows how to eat. This knowledge is enough for him as nourishment, since this knowledge blocks his ears. The oral butchery of the intellect is a primary element of cuisine. In fact, the two participating earplugs establish a bilateral system essential for culinary structuring: they are simultaneously two (earplugs) and synchronically mouth and ears.

“It is because a language supposes a sequence of thoughts that animals have none,” Buffon already said. The fact that animals have no language is, at first glance, a little disconcerting for cooking, but it should be remembered that “all languages ​​are the measure of men”, as Turgot attested, even if they are small. This is because all the languages ​​of the world belong to man: a tongue of an ox or a tongue of a cat, a bird or a cod are, according to myths, tongues that belong to man, therefore the languages of man that replace the language of man, already extinct with man.

Jorn and Arnaud, La Langue verte et la cuite, pp. 48-9.

Commentary

SOURDINE instead of SARDINE, in relation to the disappearance of tongues/language.  There is a lot of wordplay in this passage where ‘language’ and ‘tongue’ are signified at the same time.

‘dégager la parole’ and ‘couper la parole’ are idioms in French that mean ‘to take back one’s word’ and ‘to interrupt’.  Both are operative in the second sentence.

langagement, a neologism, is obviously a homonym for ‘l’engagement’, which is superfluous to the argument here but which is a bon mot the author clearly couldn’t resist

The second paragraph focuses on the written word, and moves from cooking and eating to hearing, all of which are made more difficult or impossible by the emphasis on the intellect at the expense of the senses.

structu-ration in the original emphasizes the rational approach, as the intellect becomes the measure of all things

The third paragraph is the one with the most interplay between the meanings of language and tongue, and the remark on ‘small’ languages being the measure of man only makes sense if these are understood to be the tongues of small animals like cats, birds and cod.  For ‘language’ one also needs to read ‘tongue’, and vice versa, each time they appear.

All the languages of man belong to man, who however does not exist according to structuralist theory (Foucault is a target here, more than Lévi-Strauss).

The Science of Culiphonic Marmyths, such could have been the title of this book, if we had not been reduced to more modest ambitions by the amply justified feeling that, on the voice that we are trying to open, everything or almost everything remains to be said before one has the right to speak of true marmyths. Indeed, if, as we hope, the homocony on the birth of man marks here some smoking points, these are due to nothing other than a resolute attitude of the enlightened person before the obscure object which, perhaps for the first time, allows us to consider the marmyths from a completely chromic point of view.

The pfuisical sciences of our time evolve arbitrarily among the understandings of the works of a Nature which, according to scholars, no longer exists. Man himself and his tongue must undoubtedly pass to the same marmyth and be served one day as an object of scientific knowledge, too. This knowledge will inevitably demonstrate the power of freedom in the arbitrary games of the mind, which makes man a language and language, so to speak, a man, which is only a way of speaking and of making oneself interesting, as one can always claim that the art of today remains the future anterior to the present infinitive of science today.

Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud, La Langue verte et la cuite: Étude gastrophonique sur la marmythologie musiculinaire (S.l.: Jean-Jacques Pauvert Éditeur, 1968), p. 12.

Commentary

culiphonic=neologism combining ‘culinary’ and ‘phonic’

marmyth=neologism combining ‘marmite’ (i.e., cooking pot) and ‘myth’

‘on the voice that we are trying to open’=‘sur la voix que nous essayons d’ouvrir’ instead of the more usual ‘sur la voie’ (path or way), etc., a homonym that changes the meaning of the phrase, but which is related to language, speech and the tongue, which are a leitmotif of the whole book

fumants=this could have been ‘embrouillants’, or confusing, the latter in relation to ‘brume’ or mist (a ‘fumisterie’ is a practical joke, related to the same root of ‘smoke’ in ‘fumants’), but the authors chose ‘fumants’ here, in relation to the title ‘Smoked Sermon’; in general, this kind of word play relates to the musical or phonic side of the book.

homocony=not sure what this means, other than that it’s related to ‘man’

pfuisical=not sure what this means either

chromic=adjective of chromium, which may relate to stainless-steel cooking pots

The final paragraph uses the two words ‘connaissance’ and ‘langue’ extensively; the former has been translated once as ‘understandings’ and the rest of the time as ‘knowledge’; ‘langue’ has been translated the first time as ‘tongue’ and the rest of the time as ‘language’, but this is part of the play on words throughout the book, as its authors take issue with the separation of language from the body in structuralist theory.

The text is accompanied by two images of St. George and the dragon, with the dragon’s tongue coloured in pink like the title of the text.  This individual becomes the ‘dénicheur des langues’ in the book:  literally, the ‘dislodger of tongues’ who cuts off speech, but a ‘dénicheur’ is more commonly understood to be a kind of beachcomber or curio-hunter on the lookout for finds, a searcher in other words, and a ‘chercheur’ in French is a researcher.  The scholars who are researching language are those who are separating language from the body, ‘la langue’ (language) from ‘la langue’ (tongue), in this construction.  The ‘smoked sermon’ of the title may be that neither man nor nature exist.