The “Something Else” of Written Words

In the chapter on the “Wonders of Shapes Drawn and Carved” of the 12th century Persian encyclopedia of extraordinary creatures and strange things, Ajayeb al-Makhlughat, the author, Muhammad ibn Mahmud Tusi, tells the story of a house guarded by Christian deacons, somewhere in Andalusia. When Tariq ibn Ziyad arrived in the town where the house was located, he resolved to open the house’s door secured by 24 locks. The guardian deacons swore there was nothing inside. The Berber commander trusted their word and forsook the house. When Roderic, Tariq’s counterpart, came upon the same house, he alike decided to unlock the door to appropriate the treasure he thought should be inside and therefore so dearly protected. Promising the house was empty, the guardians pleaded with the Visigothic king of Hispania not to open the door and to instead name what he thought the supposed treasure was worth so they could pay him in cash in its place. Roderic declined the offer and unlocked the door, seeing inside the empty house a drawing of an Arab riding a camel holding a spear. Above the drawing was put in writing “Once this house is opened, the army of Arabs conquers Andalusia” (Tusi, 1382 [2003], p. 333). The rest is history: Arabs triumphed over the entire Andalusia and killed Roderic.

The encyclopedic entry is very short, lacking any extraneous details, including the name of the city, except for one detail: the number of locks on the door. Why, one would naturally ask, was this particular detail included in the story? Why 24 locks?

First, the too many locks on the door indicate that the drawing on the wall inside the house and the accompanying epigraph were there for many several decades. Tusi makes this point clear by quoting the sobbing deacons telling the already regretful, incensed Roderic: “Every king before you who came upon the house added a lock. You opened them all” (Tusi, 1382 [2003], p. 333). So, the history of the epigraph on the wall went back at least 24 generations of kings. This temporal detail is included to ensure the reader that the epigraph and the drawing did not, as it is common, commemorate what had already taken place in the past. Quite the opposite, what eventually happened in the future followed the knowledge of epigraph’s words written far back in the past. The 24 locks added by the 24 preceding kings therefore signal a far past wondrously dictating the events of a future — a future that recreated the epigraph’s message. The event in the future — the ultimate Arab conquest of Andalusia — retroactively revealed the true meaning of the figures on the wall by showing the direct relations, in terms of similitudes (Foucault, 1989, p. 19), between the sign and what it, in hindsight, signified. Without the ensuing Arab conquest after the unlocking of the house, the epigraph and the accompanying drawing did not really make sense. The relation between the epigraph and the event it prophesied is not thus a simple relation between a signifier and a signified (Foucault, 2002, p. 100). The figures and the epigraph are instead signatures that “always already slide into the position of the signified”(Agamben, 2009, p. 37). As a signature the epigraph guaranteed an event in the future. In other words, the unlocking of the house and the Arab conquest of Andalusia, as the epigraph’s message clearly stated, were the same: the exposure of the epigraph was the same as the fate of the war. The signified and the signifier are not clearly separate as the house guarded by the deacons and the Christian land were the same thing: exposing the former makes the latter defenseless. The epigraph thus uses the same verb — gošūdan — for both opening (of the house’s door) and conquering (of Andalusia). In other words, the house was Andalusia, folded in upon itself (Foucault, 1989, p. 29). Keeping information and matter on the same level, the epigraph did not simply signify the event of conquest, but moreover granted the future event it signified.

Secondly, given the power it had in allowing events, the too many locks on the door were there to restrain and remand the force of the signature. The epigraph, like any actual signature verifying the authority it carries, had a force — a force that needed to be carefully sealed not by a single but 24 locks. The locks kept the two similar worlds of different nature — the marks and signs on the wall and the actual event — separate so the force of the former would not make the latter to imitate the information in the former. But once the seal was broken, the epigraph’s force made the events echo its message in a concrete emulation and made its meaning a reality. By concretizing its meaning, the force in the marks on the wall moved them from the domain of graphical signs to the domain of political transformation. In other words, the epigraph’s force made the marks on the wall effective as the conquest would not have been complete, if Roderic had not unlocked the door. The excessive number of locks therefore indicates an excess in the marks on the wall — i.e., the force and its efficacy. In the absence of a horizontal plane on which both information and matter can be placed, this excess cannot be accounted for. The wonder of the epigraph — that it was decisive in the conquest — is due to the fact that it is “a sign that exceeds the sign” and marks “the irreducible excess of efficacy over signification” (Agamben, 2009, p. 50). The excessive number of locks denoted the efficacy of the words and marks on the wall. The excess in the marks that was secured by an excessive number of locks could not be reduced to the meaning of the marks and the meaning of the marks would not have been materially realized without that excess. That excess, in other words, is “something else” (Foucault, 2002, p. 100): although it is an “else,” without it no “something” would exist. It is the outside that constitutes the inside.

The tale from Ajayeb al-Makhlughat is thus an account of a peculiar relationship between the event and its material expression in that the event follows its expression. It is an account of an animated force that is in excess of the sign and actualizes its meaning. But does the force of the written words on the walls of a house in an unnamed city guaranteeing what happened in 712, that enigmatic “something else,” reflect an archaic nature of language? Or it is still felt by writers in their mundane practices of writing? I think it is, has always been, a contemporary nature of language. However, the dominant regime of writing has bracketed this “something else” for the fear of falling into an irrational view of the world in which written words do not conform to the pre-thought ideas of the human thinking subject — a world in which the nonhuman words in their materiality are immanent to the human.