Types of difference, The Writing lesson. Cantigas. More slip.

Texts considered:

Alfonso X. Cuarenta y cinco cantigas del códice rico de Alfonso el Sabio. Luis Beltrán ed. Oro Viejo: 1997.

Barthes, Roland, and Honoré de Balzac. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 196. [Chapter 4].

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004.

In the first chapter of part two of Grammatology, Derrida discusses a fascinating example from Lévi-Strauss’ “The Writing Lesson.” At present, I can comment only on Derrida’s discussion of this chapter of Triste Tropiques, but have nevertheless found this reading extremely useful for thinking about 1) the proper name and difference in Derrida and 2) presence in Gumbrecht, particularly his commentary of Heidegger’s idea of Being. I confronted all of this philosophy in more tangible form last night and this morning as I attempted to understand some of Alfonso’s Cantigas by means of a modern edition of 45 cantigas from the Códice Rico (CR) and black and white reproductions of their corresponding miniatures (Alfonso X. Cuarenta y cinco cantigas del códice rico de Alfonso el Sabio. Luis Beltrán ed. Oro Viejo: 1997.) I will return to the Cantigasand my roll of questions about them in the last paragraphs of this post.

Derrida tells us that the proper name is erased in what he calls “arche-writing,” within the play of difference (109). He says that the proper name is erased because: “…proper names are already no longer proper names, because their production is their obliteration, because the erasure and the imposition of the letter are originary, because they do not supervene upon a proper inscription; it is because the proper name has never been, as the unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being, etc.” (109).

It thus seems that any idea that the proper name can tell us anything about the “essence” of a person is already absent upon the pronouncement/articulation of the proper name: once the proper name is pronounced, we could say that there is a shift from difference [meaning: how a person is different from himself], to difference [meaning: how a person is different from someone else]. Upon the pronouncement of the proper name the person loses all possibility of actually being unique [different from themselves]: articulating the proper name functions to say how someone is not another, or different from another, placing them within a system of relationships or in a hierarchy. I do not recur here to Derridean différance since I think I am too set, probably unwisely, in separating, in order to define, difference for each of these two contexts or “events.” For the first idea of difference, [difference from themselves], I intend something that closely resembles what Barthes defines at the outset of S/Z:

This difference is not, obviously, some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation), it is not what designates the individuality of each text, what names, signs, finishes off each work with a flourish; on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of languages, of systems: a difference of which each text is the return (3).

The slip I see here between the idea of the proper name and what actually occurs once it is pronounced reminds me of the beginning of Gumbrecht’s discussion of Heidegger’s Being:

If we exclude the idea that Being might just be that which has no structure, the double movement of unconcealment and withdrawal could then be explained in the following way: Being will only be Being outside the networks of semantics and other cultural distinctions. For us to experience Being, however, it would, on the one hand, have to cross the threshold between a sphere (which we can at least imagine) free from the grids of any specific culture and, on the other hand, the well-structured spheres of different cultures. Again, in order to be experienced, Being would have to become part of a culture. As soon, however, as Being crosses the threshold, it is, of course, no longer Being (70).

Whether or not I am emphasizing this parallelism simply because I am reading the essay from Grammatology and Gumbrecht’s text concurrently, both are pointing toward a similar slip: once the thing or name is incorporated into a system, either by being articulated or experienced, it can no longer just be, in itself.

I return to the Cantigas to comment a few of my first reactions, as well as pieces of all this philosophy in practice. Looking at the reproductions I have of some of folios of the CR, it becomes clear that the making of this manuscript was an immense and extremely complex project and process whose motivations, forms and relationships between all of these can no way be even minimally understood without at least looking at the facsimile. From what I can see from this selection and the black and white reproductions, there are song lyrics arranged in varying metrical schemes, all but one are illuminated, with some of the artwork for a particular song taking up two pages. All but the first miniature are divided into six panels, with some of the panels divided into two in order to depict two scenes. But the pictures are not just pictures, but rather pictures with captions. In certain cases, the captions are divided by the emblem of León, in others, the text enters the illustration or is divided by an element of the illustration. The pictures contain content related to their corresponding stanzas, but not necessarily the same content. For example, in the miniature for very first miracle cantiga in the CR, St. Ildefonso is shown redacting the book about Mary’s virginity, which is mentioned in the song text. The miniature depicts this scene of writing, but also establishes a fascinating link between the Saint’s (or Alfonso’s) writing of the book at his writing desk and the subsequent safekeeping of the written text. In the right-hand part of first section of the miniature (all the miniatures go left to right, top to bottom), there is an open cabinet, placed unusually close to the writing desk, ready to receive the new book.

Returning for a moment to Being, I have realized, finally, what I had begun to suspect (with a little patient encouragement) weeks ago: that I must revise my approach to illuminated manuscripts. In constantly attempting to theorize the relationship or system, as I have said above, of the elements of a particular manuscript, I have not appreciated the being of the individual elements which, actually, at least in some cases, may not necessarily have much to do with one another, at least in terms of function. I don’t mean to sound affected, but I need to come up with a way of getting at the individual elements pre-system and even, perhaps even more oddly, considering the other ideas on this page, trying to figure out the what each element is. When I say is here, I am thinking not in terms of what an image, for example, signifies, but more what the thing is in the process of representing. I say represents here thinking of a flat sheet of copy paper as opposed to Russian dolls.

I think about a codex stuffed with diverse texts, bits of a chronicle, a poem, a few stanzas of Berceo. Would I automatically think that these texts were intentionally copied in a certain order or related in some way? No. The form, however, particularly in the Cantigas, of compositions, songs, music notation, images, and titles, leads me to read each one in terms of lack: the picture is thus there because the text lacks, or the title is on the image because the image lacks, the title would be nothing without its corresponding miniature. Etc. I think that in order to correct my past inclinations, I’d be better off for the moment thinking of each part as its own whole, the miracle cantigas, the miniatures, the cantigas de loor as entities. Difference within before difference between.