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Introduction: Surveying the Political Landscape
- University of California Press
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Introduction Surveying the Political Landscape Perhaps never in two thousand years has the reality of the state been so dim in men’s minds. Richard Wright, “Two Letters to Dorothy Norman” In 1928, the Illustrated London News published a sensational pair of images based on C. Leonard Woolley’s excavations at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur that seemed to capture political authority at the very instant of its reproduction.1 The precociously cinematic illustrations depicted the tomb of Queen Puabi at a moment in the mid-third millennium b.c. when the retainers of the recently dead royal were assembled in the “Great Death Pit,” preparing to accompany the queen into the afterlife .2 In the first image, guards, servants, oxen, and carts are set in place around the vaulted chamber of the interred queen (fig. 1a). Although the individual figures in the scene appear rather stiª, the eªect of the tableau is one of anticipation; the lack of movement presages a dramatic denouement . The grisly succeeding image portrays the climactic resolution of the scene (fig. 1b). Woolley’s excavations revealed slaughtered animals 1 1. The Illustrated London News ran no fewer than 30 reports on Woolley’s excavations at Ur over years of active excavations at the site (Zettler 1998: 9). 2. Several texts believed to bear directly upon third millennium b.c. Mesopotamian burial practices, such as The Death of Gilgamesh and The Death of Ur-Namma, indicate that deities and rulers could have palaces in the afterlife and that the burial of the retinue was to enable the departed to “continue living in the style to which he [or she] was accustomed” (Tinney 1998: 28). and poisoned attendants littering the floor of Puabi’s antechamber, a spectacle of consumption that reinforced the power of the royal regime to command and the dedication of Ur’s civil community to the existing political order. Although the violence of the scene gives the illustrations a voyeuristic quality, what is most intriguing about Puabi’s tomb is not the brutality of political authority at work. Rather, Woolley’s excavations in the Royal Cemetery at Ur revealed a vision of political authority that was firmly located in the persons and apparatus of the royal regime, a spatial immediacy conveyed in the illustrations by the backgrounded tomb. Politics in ancient Ur, the tomb of Puabi indicates, was set firmly in place. A more chilling vision of the physical sacrifice of political subjects at the hands of ruling authority is found in Andy Warhol’s (1965) silk screens of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison (fig. 2). Here we find a modernist vision of authority established by the absence both of the condemned (creating an ominous sense of the potential insertion of the viewer) and of authorities (present only as the mechanized apparatus of capital punishment). 2 INTRODUCTION figure 1. The death pit of Queen Puabi of Ur as reconstructed by A. Forestier of the Illustrated London News (June 23, 1928). a. In the pit, attendants, oxen, and carts are arrayed in front of the vaulted tomb of the dead queen. b. (opposite) After the sacrifice, the arrayed bodies of humans and animals litter the pit while a cutaway of the tomb reveals the interred royal. (Courtesy of the Illustrated London News picture library.) [3.236.214.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:48 GMT) The sign on the wall demanding silence accomplishes the final eªacement of both the political subject (rendered mute even at the final moment) and the political regime itself, which vanishes behind the instruments of routinization .The series of silk screens works most powerfully in the dramatic repetition of the same image, washed with shifting color tones. In this repetition , Warhol created a powerful image of the modernist State’s relation to its subjects—possessed of the same authority to command the ultimate sacrifice of political subjects as the kings and queens of Ur, yet profoundly unlocatable, simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. INTRODUCTION 3 The death pit of Queen Puabi and Warhol’s electric chair present images of the reproduction of political authority through the sacrifice of what Michel Foucault (1979a: 138) called the “docile bodies” of subjects. In the former, authority is quite close at hand, locatable in the present body of the royal contained within the architecture of her tomb. In the latter, power is vested in a technology of execution, but the place of authority is entirely obscured. The...