Narrativity and violence as imperial discourse: the visual and textual culture of the state
November 8, 2007
"At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon [of parlimentary democracy]."
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 2005: 8.
"When in fact we speak of violence, and this is what bothers me about the notion, we always have in mind as a kind of connotation of physical power, of an unregulated, passionate power, an unbridled power, if I can put it like that. This notion seems to me to be dangerous because, on the one hand, picking out a power that is physical, unregulated etc, allows one to think that good power, or just simply power, power not permeated by violence, is not physical power. It seems to be rather that what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body. All power is physical, and there is a direct connection between the body and political power"
Michel Foucault, 7 November 1973 Lecture at College de France. Published in Psychiatric Power, Jacques Lagrange (ed.) (palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 14..
"... (21) Assurnasirpal (22) the king whose strength is glory because of/in consequence of my remembrance of the heart (23) which the god Ea king of apsu the deep wisdom (awareness) gave me. The city Kalhu I took for newness, I demolished the old mound (24) I dug deep down to the water level. From the water level to the very top 120 brick-layer courses of terrace I filled up (25) a palace of boxwood, palace of meskannu-wood, palace of cedar, palace of cypress, palace of (26) terebinth, palace of tamarisk, palace of mehru-wood, eight palaces for the dwelling of my kingship (my royal seat) (27) for the leisure of my lordship I laid down I adorned (wasamu: build according to the appropriate, accepted decorum) I made splendid. (28) Doors of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, meskannu-wood, with bronze frames (29) I constructed. To its gateways I installed them. With bronze knob pegs I surrounded them. (30) The praises of my warriorhood at the frontiers, mountains, lands and seas that I have frequented/roamed about (31) the conquest of the totality of the lands, I depicted in color glaze onto walls of brickwork. (32) I fired baked bricks into blue-glazed bricks and installed them over its gates (33) peoples of the lands, which my hands had gained dominion of, that of the city Suhu and Kaprabu, (34) Zamua to the entirity of the districts of Bit Zamani and the land of Subri, Sirqu city at the crossing (35) of the Euphrates and the numerous people of Laqu and of Hatti and Lubarna of Patinu I carried off. (36) I settled them therein..."
Assurnasirpal II's "Banquet Stele" from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (Kalhu). Translation: Harmansah.
- The challenge of this week is to explore the questions of narrativity and violence in the representational world of the state and its official ideologies. I use representation here as to refer to the material, durable representations in the public realm, which attempt to present the society a particular version of social reality or collectively shared history. One could easily expand these modes of representations as durable dispositions to architecture and configuration of urban space and landscape as well. However I am hoping that we will focus particularly on the commemorative monuments that encompass pictorial and textual narratives of the official discourse. I selected to take a look at Assyrian Empire simply because of the richness of these narratives, and the way they implemented state ideologies in the public realm.
- The use of violence in these Assyrian narrative accounts, admittedly quite gruesome at times, are frequently read very literally and uncritically- usually explained away as a "propagandistic" and "terror-based" state discourses, as if these textual and pictorial representations were transparent accounts of historical events and therefore state practices. Instead, I am hoping that we approach on Thursday the question of violence in context of a problematization of the question of representation (all social sciences and humanities implied here), and locate violence as part of the disparate practices, performances, discourses of the Assyrian state. In doing this, I think that Giorgio Agamben's concept of "state of exception" is particularly useful in theorizing the state sponsored violence and its legitimation, and even its institutionalization. No need to be anachronistic here, this is a discussion that revolves around the modern (and post-modern) nation state, especially useful in understanding "states of emergency" of the White House, or what is happening at the borders between Turkey and Iraq these days. A color-coded state of emergency is announced by the state to suspend the laws that safeguard individual freedoms and civil rights of its citizens, and give the military apparatus a legitimization to use violence, despite a striking contradiction with its own constitution. Literally the state gains the monopoly over acting unconstitutionally and breaking the legal system that has been established. Agamben's work (2005) is significant in the sense that, while state discourses single out these sitautions as if they were "exceptional" and "extraordinary", he has convincingly shown that this in fact is one of the primary techniques of government that has always been with us throughout history. There is nothing exceptional about states of exception.
- I was reading a fascinating article that compared Ottoman waqf institutions and ancient Greek euergetism this week, spaeking of "pious foundations" and the social construction of urban space (Engin F. Isin and Alexandre Lefebvre The Gift of Law: Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf European Journal of Social Theory 8/1 (2005) 5-23). There the authors there courageously make an effective cross-cutting comparison between ancient Greece and Early Modern Middle East saying that they "examine these institutions to provoke the creation of a new conceptual apparatus by which questions of politics, law and citizenship are approached differently. As Deleuze and Guattari might put it, the historical field is the potentiality for new concepts and new theoretical insights" (6). In this way, I think Agamben's "states of exception" might provoke new questions about the Assyrian empire's use of violence and the treatment of violence in the construction of the narratives of the state discourse.
- Please explore the following website as a resource for Assyrian things:
Posted at Nov 08/2007 03:32PM:
keffie: NPR recently (this morning) covered a story about AT&T being complicit with the National Security Agency in illegally collecting information on its clients after 911. Read about it here:
http://www.eff.org/cases/att
It seems a propos given Agamben's discussion of Bush and his declaration of a "state of exception". This is a prime (and contemporary) example of the very behaviors Agamben describes!
