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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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• Early Mesopotamian monuments have an unusual sense of historicity, often presenting specific historical events or sequences of events, accompanied or not with texts. The telling of historical events where historical actors are hard at work (the king, the deities, the soldiers, the officials, ferocious animals, the always losing the battle enemies) Have common place in commemorative monuments of 3rd millennium (Early Bronze Age) Mesopotamia. Earlier in the semester, you will remember that I characterized narrative as one of the problems of representation that we need to engage with in this seminar. So, what is pictorial narrative as a convention or technology of representing the past? How does it differ, overlap with or relate to textual narratives, those texts that are either put on monuments themselves along with images or those editions that are recovered from different contexts? How are time and space represented in visual narratives? What is the role of state ideology and the use and abuse of violence in these narratives? How do these sublime stories relate to cultural imagination and collective memory? What is the role of performance and performativity in the construction of narrative images? I would like us to pursue these questions this week, and please be on the look out for answers in the readings. (Omur)
• W.J.T Mitchell reminds us that images are not "perfect, transparent media through which reality may be represented..." but they should be considered something more akin to "an actor in the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with a legendary status..." Moving from Alfred Gell's theory of art an agency to Mitchell's ontologically well-grounded notion of the image as a forceful physical reality is interesting and I would love to focus some of our discussion on this idea.
• A comparison of the two monuments at hand: Stele of Naram Sin (Bahrani) and Stele of Eannatum (Winter) in terms of the representation of time, space, violence and narrative would be excellent for our discussion. How does Mitchell's discussion of the image impact our reading of these monuments? Does it? In what ways can we relate these two monuments to G. Agamben's notion of the creation of the biopolitical body in official discourse? (Omur)
• How are the images in the Bahrani and Winter articles related to the idea of “inscribed memory practices” (visible and repeated) vs. “incorporated memory practices” (for a restricted audience and tending towards secrecy)? (Jen)