Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards a radical aesthetic of ruins

Abstract

This paper considers two ancient instances of engagement with the ruin: resonant descriptions of Troy in the second-century historian Tacitus and in the Neronian poet Lucan. Both represent the encounter with the ruin as alienating, which provokes interpretations corresponding to those of modern engagements with ruins. These instances undermine the particularity of the modern experience of ruins and instead introduce a dialectic between the ruin and the imperial state. Although one might assume that the ruin as a symbol of times past offers a locus outside Modernity or the (Roman) imperial state from where an oppositional perspective becomes possible, this alienation works instead to reinforce political norms. The ruin operates as an illusion of opposition. Although totalitarian systems operate with monological visions of history and unitary imaginaries, and the ruin would seem to encourage plurality, imperial time operates in more complex ways, which allow different historical periods to be enfolded in and subordinated to the imperial dialectic. Collective memory in the imperial society is critically ambivalent and that ambivalence imbues imperial society with a pervasive sorrow.

Keywords:

• Lucan
• Tacitus
• Troy
• city
• postcolony
• historiography

Notes

 1. Annales II, 53.

 2. Annales II, 54.

 3. Annales II, 59–60.

 4. Annales I, 16–49.

 5. Tacitean historiography and, indeed, much ancient historiography, worked with materials already widely known. The skills of the historian were literary rather than archival. Given that Germanicus remained a figure of veneration for at least two centuries after his death, Tacitus' contemporary audience will have been fully aware of the outcome of the story.

 6. Annales II, 55.

 7. Annales II, 59.

 8. One could draw parallels between this Tacitean text and the roughly contemporary description of the fall of Carthage in Appian, Roman History, 8.132, which has Scipio weeping at the destruction of the city as both a signifier of the inevitable fall of empires and as an omen for Rome's fate. In this view of Carthage there is a similar compression of historical times and places, that is, ultimately, imperial. The fall of Carthage in 146 BC can be seen as a moment of transition between Rome the conqueror of Italy and Rome the imperial power. There is a further resonance between Troy as read by Germanicus and Rome as read by Freud. See Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” esp. 725–6.

 9. Lucan, Pharsalia 9. 961–999.

10. It is probable that the sources exploited by Tacitus for Germanicus at Troy were also available to Lucan. Tacitus' account is clearly novelistic: we can see into Germanicus' head. Although we cannot know whether these insights were entirely Tacitean or were partially derived from his source, Tacitus does not seem to depart radically from the practices of contemporary historians and it seems likely that Lucan would have been aware of at least some of the issues that arise in Tacitus' discussion of Germanicus' visit to Troy. Tacitus would certainly have been aware of Caesar's visit to Troy and Lucan's treatment of it.

11. See Gowing, Empire and Memory, 89–92 on the Trojan episode, arguing that Lucan produces an anti-Virgilian reading of Troy to undercut the ideology of the imperial regime. For the Virgilian episode see Aeneid VIII 97–369.

12. I am very grateful to Shreyaa Patel who brought this layering of personalities to my attention and discussed with me the psychological implications of this passage.

13. Annales IV, 34–5.

14. See Alston, “History and Memory in the Construction of Identity in imperial Rome,” 147–60. Tacitus, Annales IV, 35: sequentis aevi memoriam.

15. Tacitus, Agricola 2: Memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra potestate oblivisci quam tacere.

16. See Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, for the association of community and memory. See also Ricoeur in History, Memory, Forgetting, who argues that all memory is social.

17. See, for example, Tacitus, Agricola, 1; Histories I, 1–3; Annales IV, 32–3; Livy, Ab urbe condita, praefatio; Sallust, Bellum Catiliane 1–4; Bellum Iugurthium 1–5.

18. Annales II, 53 makes reference to the “imago tristium laetorumque” of Actium that Germanicus recalls, suggesting a summoning of a world of memory. The summoning is in itself an irruption into the present and gives rise to ontological ambivalence. See Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting (Part I) on the imperfect mimesis of memory.

19. There seems little reason to believe that collective memory must always be unitary and simplifying, contra Halbwachs The Collective Memory, 1: “Society obligates people not just to reproduce previous events but also to ‘touch them up,’ shorten them, complete them … give them a prestige that reality did not possess.” See Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering and Nora, “Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire,” for the elitist and ultimately implausible view of collective memory as simplifying (and inherently false) and historiography as complexifying (and thus true). In the relationship to the event, collective memory, as shown here, since it is inherently more individualistic (but not individual), can be more nuanced and sensitive than much historiography.

20. This is the Holocaust question. An ambivalence about the narrative(s) of the Holocaust does not undermine the historical reality of the event. Indeed, the impoverishment of the event that comes with narrative raises an ethical dilemma when talking about the Holocaust. Part of the process of understanding such events of horror is the realisation that the narrative can never, thankfully, do justice to the event. On this, see below and , Handbook of Inaesthetics and Ethics: An Understanding of Evil.

21. Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, esp., Part 1.

22. There is an analogy (to put it no more strongly) with the mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis since the (mis)recognition is a fundamental source of discontent, but in this instance (mis)recognition is carried into the symbolic through its association with the polis. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

23. Žižek, On Violence, 34–62 and 119–50 suggests that the most real version of the world can only exist in those emotional aspects of the self that are freed from the conventions of the Symbolic Order.

24. Since we are integrated into political structures through the operation of collective identities, such a disjuncture with a monological imperial narrative and the resulting destabilisation of memories questions the operation and meaning of the political body, and especially its relationship to the individual. Hence Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.

25. The ruin is thus porous in that boundaries are perceptible, but continually crossed by sight, time is never fixed, being always filled with the festival that has gone and is to come, and the past is everywhere present. See Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” 167–76, for the notion of the porous city as derived from their experience of Naples. In their account, they preserve an anecdote of a visit to San Gennaro dei Poveri to see the early Christian frescoes, which are described to them as “Pompeii”, an example of the layering of time upon time in the present ruin.

26. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space for space as produced by particular social formations and reproducing the individual through the operation of that space.

27. Examples abound, from Mussolini's restorative programmes in central Rome, clearly designed to establish a “living” connection between Ancient and Fascist Rome, to the “complete” restorations of Classical monuments in contemporary Greece. As Mussolini's restoration ignored the Medieval heritage of Rome since it inconveniently referred to a period when Italy was divided and Rome itself under Papal control, so restorations of Classical Greek sites have frequently been at the expense of the Ottoman heritage.

28. A similar process occurs in the picturesque, managed landscapes of the country estates of English gentlemen, subtly decorated with “follies”. In these, there is an assertion of an invented connection to Medieval and Classical histories that hardly threatened the ontological status of the gentlemen. See Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 1–11. For Italian parallels, see Cosgrove “The Geometry of Landscape.”

29. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

30. There is an imperial aesthetic in these constructions that can be seen not just in the ruins built for the display of the wealth and culture of the elite, but in the “Indian pavilions” (most famously at Brighton), the collections of art and artefacts pillaged especially but not exclusively from Egypt, Greece and Italy, and in the “borrowing” of architectural styles from other cultures and ages. This artistic promiscuity is a feature of Roman and European imperial cultures.

31. De Certeau, The Writing of History, 2. De Certeau is, in fact, not particularly thinking of the non-European in this image, but the reference allows a connection to colonial constructions.

32. De Certeau, The Writing of History, 5.

33. This would appear to be a major strand of Nietzsche's opposition to Hegelian politics. For a discussion of the complexity and anti-liberalism of Nietzsche's politics, see Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism.

34. See n. 40, below.

35. Badiou, Being and Event.

36. See duBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 7–11, on “derealisation” in the Freudian encounter with the ruins of the Acropolis. On Freud's Classical archaeology of the self, see Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity.

37. The restoration of Republican values was the foundational claim of the Empire. It is written throughout the Res Gestae Divi Augusti from the first chapter in which Augustus claimed that his violent coup of 43 BC was the overthrow of a tyrannous faction and a restoration of liberty, to the last in which the culmination of his achievements is the return of power to the Roman people in 28–27 BC. One might object that modern empires offer no such “restorative” agendas, but British, French and Italian Empires normalised their authority by reference to classical imperial “burdens” that had in some way returned to the Europeans.

38. The tensions between Chronos and Aion run through Deleuze's The Logic of Sense.

39. Negri, in “The Constitution of Time”, argues that capitalistic time is universal, not allowing an outside to that time, but is also in contradiction, measured and lived, divided and unified. The subject of ontological time is positioned in capitalistic universal time and can never be outside that time. I argue that an “outside” to capitalistic, universal time is an essential element of an imperial construction of time that enfolds the capitalistic and other temporal regimes.

40. Although it is almost obvious that modern totalitarianism grew from the Enlightenment as much as modern Liberalism, and it seems that elements of the philosophical discourse overlap so that totalitarianism remains latent within Liberalism, it is the flexibility of capitalist ideology (perhaps even its self-proclaimed absence) that allows it to enfold but not destroy other historical perspectives, and which differentiates it fundamentally from totalitarianism. Contra Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Agamben, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, argues that the state of exception is formative for the production of the law, and this is written throughout Western politics. He sees “bare life” of the individual as not exceptional (not just a feature of the camps), but as pervasive (p. 114). I would see the “enfolding” and maintaining of the potentiality of reduction to “bare life” in a “suspended” state of exception as offering a way of understanding modern non-totalitarian states.

41. There are various ways in which one could substantiate this argument. Chadhauri, in “Cosmopolitanism's Alien Face,” argues that the reinvention of the “ethnic” is an invention of modernism. Massey, in “A Global Sense of Place,” critiques Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, by arguing that the global perspective offered by Harvey ignores the experience within localities, where most of us live, most of the time. One could interpret this as an argument for a disjunction between the imperial (global) context, and the local experience, and as characteristic of imperial culture.

42. On restructuring for growth, see Davis, Planet of Slums.

43. For a succinct paean of praise for this policy, see Wolf, Why Globalization Works. The classic relatively recent statement of such views is Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, with its emphasis on a limited state and economic inequality as the drivers of progress. Whereas neo-conservatives were the political inheritors of this doctrine, the economic-historical inheritance was North's neo-institutionalism, outlined in Structure and Change in Economic History, in which it was argued that transaction costs were the single drag on economic growth and reducing transaction costs to a minimum would make and had made the world rich. It was this view that drove globalisation policy and the restructuring of African economies.

44. See North, Structure and Change.

45. See n. 47.

46. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

47. Venturi and Brown, Learning from Las Vegas; Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

48. See the classic critique by Davis, City of Quartz. Yet, the polis with its unified system of signs would seem to have more in common with the totalitarian city.

49. See Said, Orientalism, on the fantasies of the East, and Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, on the “discovery” of the East.

50. See, for example, , “God and Philosophy” and “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition”, in which divine transcendence offers an escape from the Greek ideals of the polis.

51. Agamben, Infancy and History.

52. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 245–55. Negri, in “The Constitution of Time”, argues that the still-point of no-time is a moment outside history and as such an impossibility that abandons the Marxist notion of time. Negri's commitment to a revolutionary break with capitalist time emerging from within the extremes of advanced capitalism itself is perhaps somewhat more in tune with the argument offered here.

53. See Leonard, Athens in Paris and Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices, for this building of Classicism into the post-modern.

54. See, for example, de Boeck, “The Apocalyptical Interlude”, on the Book of Revelation as a doctrine of hope in Kinshasa.

55. See Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in Subaltern Studies.

56. For Messianic feeling, see the much-debated Eclogue IV of Virgil. For an equivalent of the epoch of pleasure see Tacitus, Annales I 2 who describes Augustus “seducing all with the sweetness of leisure” (cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit). Religious experimentation is a notable feature of the imperial regime with the development of imperial cult, the transformation of previously local cults (such as those of Isis and Mithras). The chronological parallel of emergence of Christianity and the creation of the Roman Empire is not coincidental.

57. Agamben, States of Exception.

58. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 245–5.