Political Performance: A Theory Response (2024)

isac.uchicago.edu 15 Political Performance: A Theory Response Seth Richardson University of Chicago POLITICAL “PERFORMANCE”: POTENTIAL AND PERIL By framing politics as performative and performance as political, this volume has the advantage of beginning beyond the usual no-man’s-land where the existence of a politics in the ancient Near East must be argued for in the first place. We can skip the bombed-out terrain where we usually have to dispute fantasies about Oriental despotism, religious thrall, or other ideas about these societies as pre- or apolitical. Such fantasies only enable the intellectual laziness of assuming that the institutions and actors we see in our evidence operated in some uniquely frictionless world such that we can arrange them like little figures in a tableau to “explain” how power and politics worked—and that all that needs to be explained is what is documented. But if we begin by understanding our evidence to speak for a multilogue between the rulers, the ruled, and those who mediate, we have a whole new ball game. Performance necessarily implies audience, authorship implies reception, and agents imply subjects—an interplay that is not merely illustrative but generative of political authority. What we can really study, then, are not only historically particular instances of authorities and subjects but also discourses of authorization and subjectivity. This line of analysis responds both to a social-history approach to read history-from-below, drawing a much wider circumference for the political arena than just a ruling class and its elites, as well as to a postmodern imperative to “read” political displays as contingent truth claims that aim to bring political relations into being rather than as simply true-or-false propositions. But “performance” as a topic also carries unique theoretical perils, since disenchanted modernity has semantically booby-trapped the word with the buried potentiality of “falsehood.” A political performance is something we distinguish from the real—a simulacrum— something imitative and empty. The same overtone of falsity pertains for almost all the words we use to describe how political life is enacted, that is, when we call it “theater” (as Frangipane calls Arslantepe right away), a “drama,” a “show,” an “act,” “staging,” “narrative,” “spectacle,” “appearance,” and so forth. The deeply ambivalent coding of performance as simultaneously descriptive of practice and objectively false means that we miss all the senses in which performance—and, indeed, only performance—produces all political relations and communities, including those of antiquity. A presumption of falsity is all the 389 isac.uchicago.edu 390 SETH RICHARDSON more problematic given that our own experience of modern political performance is such a highly mediated and passive one. Primarily because up-to-the-minute news keeps us more quickly and directly engaged with facts and events than ever before, this presumption is false even though we may be convinced that the democratic societies we inhabit are inherently participatory. This paradox produces a deep cognitive dissonance: we imagine the nature of politics to be something substantially other than the performances we see and the modern, lived, civil-society experience as profoundly more engaged than that of impoverished antiquity; yet much of what we see of politics is perceived to be fake. On these grounds, we moderns are poorly positioned to appreciate and evaluate the ancient performance of politics as impactful, immediate, personal, and real—enacted by and before participants in vivo and in loco. We ought to proceed, therefore, with some humility about our ability to analyze and understand this ancient world. But analyze is what I have been asked to do: to reflect on the essays presented in this volume and to throw some analytic light on them as a whole. I address four theoretical issues the papers excite, namely, the capacity of performances to distribute and ground political authority and subjectivity spatially; leverage political authority through the ambiguation and sublimation of other authoritative domains (e.g., religion, class, scholarship, community); create and police relations of power through didacticism, role-play, and shared experience; and produce and maintain differences in status and access to power. These issues are not always the main or exclusive interests of the essays as they are conceived and voiced, either individually or as a group, nor are the themes evenly distributed; but they are issues that assert themselves throughout. And it seems more profitable to assess them through this kind of theoretical lens than to thematize the disparate and distinct ritual, archaeological, and historical evidence from which the essays argue. As a “reaction” response, this essay is written from an unavoidably individual perspective, and I expect others will make different connections. TO MARCH AND TO STAND: PERFORMATIVE SPACE I hardly understood how felicitous the title of this conference was when I agreed to participate, because the words “pomp” and “circumstance” turn out to answer to the paramount theoretical concern the essays show for the spatial dimension of political performance. The former term derives from the Greek ποµπή (pompḗ), “procession,” and the latter from the Latin circumstare, “to encircle” (literally circum “around” + stō, “to stop, to stand”1)— thus together roughly “marching and standing.” The first connotes translative movement across space, the bringing of political messaging from one place to another, and the latter, the boundary-making that defines authoritative space. If “going” and “not going” is 1 The meanings of “procession” for “pomp” and “encirclement” for “circumstance” are archaic meanings in English. The Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com, accessed August 2019) gives meanings for “pomp” as a procession (meaning 2a–b) for the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, excepting a few early twentieth-century uses that were deliberately archaizing (e.g., by J. R. R. Tolkien). The senses in which “circumstance” connotes that which ceremonially “stands in surround” are similarly restricted to pre-twentieth-century uses (meanings 1a, 2a, and 7a); its necessary and constitutive meaning for ceremonial performance stands in stark contrast to the opposite, present-day sense of a “circumstance” as an accidental or nonessential detail. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 391 something of a truistic merism for performances and rituals—descriptive of all and exclusive of none—it is nevertheless illustrative of their spatial mechanics: they transform the ground across which they move and demarcate the loci where power abides. Their movement was thus not merely the covering of this or that ground, or the drawing of any specific circle; performance produced belief in an inseparable holism of space and authority. This holism was the consonance of political validity and ground—the essential territorial sovereignty that early states had to work ceaselessly to produce because it was hardly an obvious or given condition.2 Two separate but related arguments should be given prominence. First, there is the distinction between “spectacles” and “rituals” made by Feinman and Nicholas as performances having substantially different purposes: “spectacles” enact nonnegotiated legitimation of authority; “rituals” allow for more mediative processes and collective expression. Second, McMahon draws a contrast between the display emphasis of movable spectacles with stationary audiences—where authority presents itself and subjects are relatively passive— and the more participatory nature of stationary performances in spaces designed to hold rather than control.3 Though the authors do not necessarily argue to the same point, these observations show that it is possible to “read” and distinguish performances for very different kinds of political cultures and intentions depending on the type of space, forms of movement, and roles of participation. Thus, in essays leading us from Ur to Teotihuacan to Rome to Crete, we find performance credited as “a reminder of hierarchy and exclusion” (McMahon); variably keyed to “the degree of governance collectivity” (Feinman and Nicholas); a “means of claiming urban space” and “a new sense of imperial unity with . . . divine protection” (Andrews); and “asserting similarity and sharedness at formative regional scales” (Anderson). In short, structured attention to the formal aspects of performances is crucial to analysis, because performances, like the political cultures in which they take place, are not all the same.4 Two other essays then follow on this point: Osborne’s, which considers the paradox of an unobservable but indubitable political experience in nonelite contexts (what we might call the “Osborne Paradox”), and Frangipane’s, which proposes two radically different political cultures in quick succession (an astonishing contrast even if she is only half right). It is thus both the inescapable fact of politics as a dimension of social life and the unavoidable differences politics entail and reproduce (since it exists precisely to mediate difference) that make the topic so worthwhile. Most of the essays here deal with spatial concerns in one way or another, if at three different scales: whole polities, local landscapes, and specific spaces.5 Two essays deal with the larger spaces of whole state or even imperial territories, between centers and subject 2 On this concept of “consonance” as “an identity between authority and territory,” see Richardson 2021, 45–47. 3 Note also Osborne’s attention to the social effects of the symmetry/asymmetry and distributedness/ nondistributedness of built spaces (Osborne, this volume). 4 As Feinman and Nicholas (this volume) put it, these outcomes are of “a specific array of structural conditions and socioeconomic mechanisms.” 5 The essays and sources discussing imperial settings engage issues of space to some lesser degree: the Hittite and Egyptian rituals that are the topics for Mouton, Gilan, and Goebs are more concerned with temporality and personnel than with the places in which performances are to be set. isac.uchicago.edu 392 SETH RICHARDSON communities, where central authority was disseminated by homologous rituals, symbols, and messages—what we might call distributive performance. The geographic representation of territories/peripheries by centers is already well recognized in, for example, the “gazetteer” of cities in the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the Egyptian heb-sed festival, and Neo-Assyrian display campaigns and boundary stelae.6 But here we are speaking of something else: the reproduction of the center in the periphery. The essays of Ristvet and Kearns take this larger framework into consideration, while also putting state ideology into dialogue with local identity in its performance at (in Kearns’s words) “locally salient scales.” This tension, ambivalence, and blending of core/ periphery identities, sometimes at cross-purposes, will be familiar to scholars of colonialism or borderlands studies, where the dialogues produced by states, mediating elites, and subjects could produce dissonant and confusing signals.7 What is most striking from Kearns’s discussion is that not only does politics happen “even” in very small and far-away places but also that it must happen there: it is precisely to less-controlled spaces that it is so essential for centers to communicate power. Places we may think of as “border(land)s” most of all required the construction and reinforcement of political norms and community, both for their own conceptual autonomy and to become the governable places knowable to centers. Notably, Kearns asserts that the corollary must also be true: because of the preponderance of heterodox peripheries such as Kalavasos Skourka, there could be no entirely hegemonic central-state messaging in premodern times. Much the same disparities and ambiguities are noted by Ristvet, though she deals with a more complete historical record. Comparing the kinds of performances conducted in the imperial Assyrian center with those of its peripheries,8 she can on the one hand contrast their differing degrees of and grounds for political subscription—buy-in, understanding, and belief—yet on the other hand point to examples of variance with state forms in those places—yet on the third hand posit that “simply participating in the [state] cult made citizens complicit.” That is, materiality and performativity need not be indexes of political subscription when they are facts of engagement and daily life; state peripheries are places where hegemony and autonomy may (must?) coexist.9 We are again reminded of how performance in space fuses political authority with the terrain over which it proposes operable sovereignty. But we are also shown how a decentered landscape is an equally unavoidable and permanent fact of the state fabric, since ritual sites of performance grounded and defined even the smallest communities. At this level, it matters less what, exactly, was being done at the “shrine of the slag” and more that it was being done—just as a Veterans’ Day parade in the smallest town takes on a significance for local identity outsized to its population because it ties it all the way up to 6 See also Corti 2018. 7 Compare with Porter (this volume), who writes of a more local-scale case that the White Monument is “a powerful source of attraction—for the powerless because it is a place they can see, and be, without power’s control; for the elite because it is a symbol that echoes the center, asserting likeness, and thereby offering all the center can offer, while yet asserting its innate superiority.” 8 Here one can compare with Gilan’s discussion of Hittite rituals to be carried out in Kizzuwatna and Kummanni and at the Māla River, where it was crucial for the king to appear in person. 9 The question is closely related to the concept of “active nonparticipation” examined by Osborne. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 393 the national political category. To pay attention to the perpetual animation of performative politics distributed across the whole landscape, and not only at the center, complicates in very welcome ways the policentric model of de Polignac: in Kearns’s words, to “challenge assumptions about sacred spaces outside the city.” Other essays engage with “dialogic monuments” (Porter’s term) in medium-scale landscapes, where the spatial positioning of symbols of conflict, comparison, and consensus come into play across large and urban (but withal and importantly, visible) landscapes: they are regulative political spaces. The essays of Morgan, Andrews, Porter, Smith, Mouton, and Feinman and Nicholas all engage this cross-site scope of space. The processions discussed by Andrews recoded nodes of the old Roman imperial city with new religioushistorical meaning; Smith follows her subjects through complex cityscapes, where individual knowledge of space allows agents to refashion their own cosmopolitan identities; Mouton notes the “festival of haste” in which the king and military personnel enter Hattuša from without. Feinman and Nicholas make a comparison between the role of performance in different Mesoamerican polities. The rituals at the “site core” of Teotihuacan were “to be followed, copied, and synchronized at dispersed locales across the site”; by contrast, ritual spaces within the less integrated layouts of Classic Maya cities were “limited and restricted,” where performance was unlikely to be reproduced elsewhere unless it was organized from the top down. The studies of Porter and Morgan both find not only competing monuments within the landscapes they examine at Tell Banat and Gordion (respectively) but also significant variances in the kinds of political communications they seem to invoke—different constituencies or kinds of community appealing to separate bases of social power within the same urban area. At Banat, Porter examines major mortuary monuments that differed in their appeal to historical memory, degree of visibility/access, and emphasis on corporate versus individual focus as a community value. The specific nature of the contrasts between these monuments is unclear: were these multiple communities within cities in competition, conflict, or simply different? Elites and a general population? Two factions of elites? Two lineage groups? The answer is probably lost forever, but (as Porter puts it) “when two such claims are monumentalized . . . it is inherently conflictual.” Yet the fact of distinction alone, and the reenactment of funerary performance at these sites over many generations in a “descent-scape,” show the intentionality of that dialogue; even its gnomic quality allows us to focus on the principle that political differences, in the abstract and materialized in their lieux de discorde, were and remain unavoidable consequences of humans-living-in-cities. Morgan carries this notion further to analyze the array of megarons and other monuments at Gordion, where the decades-long search for the central palace from which “power-witha-face” would project authority has been complicated by the multiplicity of gathering and work spaces (cf. Kearns’s “small-scale ritual activities” as “placemaking practices”). Rather than assuming the presence of an autocratic ruler with an as-yet-unlocated palace, what seems possible is that the city’s spaces were affordances for a diverse constituency of actors, all of whom played a role in exercising political power, both constrained and enabled by the places that communicated social boundaries. Still other essays pay attention to specific, circumscribed ritual spaces defined by performance, partly through operations of inclusion and exclusion (whatever the size of the audience), and constitutive of authoritative space: the studies of Anderson, McMahon, and isac.uchicago.edu 394 SETH RICHARDSON Frangipane. Anderson’s essay deals with what she calls “sociospatial” contexts: the discursive generation of social space through the “active relations” of objects and users in “their character and realization over time,” in tombs and other family and community spaces. In this, she seeks to pry open the kinds of private social worlds that Osborne intuits. The latter two essays deal with performances and processions that might include hundreds or even thousands of people—where the defined space was not necessarily intimate or hidden but a singular place where admission and participation were controlled (which situation points directly to the fourth theme I deal with below: differences in access to status and power). But for Frangipane, it is more the degree of participation than the scale of the performance that is important for understanding the change from Arslantepe Period VII to Period VIA: not so much the shift from a temple to a “secular” authority and the concomitant changes in the central public spaces, but the reconfigurations of access, separation, and visibility that created a less inclusive space “in which people were welcomed but kept at a distance and excluded from any real participation in the performances of the new political reality.” McMahon pays the most direct attention of all to space by quantifying audibility, audience capacity, viewsheds, and the staged approach to performative space at Ur. Her conclusion is a bit startling, but persuasive: despite what we might assume of the monumental ziggurat of the Nanna temple at Ur and its equally monumental surrounding courtyard spaces, it is unlikely that the space was meant to be filled to capacity or allow every audience member direct access. The visibility of the ziggurat was limited within the city until one actually entered the courtyard space, and limits of audibility suggest that audiences were kept substantially smaller than full capacity and/or ranked into partially obstructed positions. The vertical and horizontal dwarfing of relatively small crowds, in tandem with the hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that determined their makeup, created the political tension used by many an exclusive club: gratitude for inclusion mixed with anxiety about position. Coupled with this result is an aspect overtly considered only by Osborne, namely, the capacity that smaller-scale spaces lend to comparison and surveillance; hence the importance of the private house’s hermeticism.10 Though scalarity affects the kinds of politics entailed at these different places, with a wide range of possible messages and functions, the dialogic dimension of performative spaces is irreducible. Distributed, grounded, or bounded, the tombs, temples, courtyards, and cityscapes where performances were set materially conditioned the political conversations. THE AMBIGUATION OF AUTHORITATIVE DOMAINS A second core problem taken on by many of these essays is that the performances they describe implicate two ideational domains simultaneously. Often, the domain being blurred into political performance is that of religion, but we also see historical memory, community identity, or even concepts of administrative ideology entering the picture. Take, for instance, Mouton’s discussion of the “bread allotments” given to performers within a cultic 10 Note also Osborne’s attention to the surveillant position of upper towns over lower towns and then palaces over upper towns; this aspect extends even to the superficially beneficent passage in the Karatepe inscription, which de facto admits that the authorities have knowledge over where men and women walk. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 395 context (excerpt 14). Bread is broken by the king and distributed to officials and officers. The ritual uses concepts from the administrative and commensal domains to further an essentially political end, such that Mouton concludes: “Sharing bread makes these people equals; it also makes them closer to the Hittite sovereign.” In these cases, the domains of performance are not made clear. But are these acts essentially religious or political? Indeed, it is not entirely clear what a “purely” political performance might be anyway. We could dispose of this question by insisting that this question is a modern one that has no relevance to an ancient world in which such domains were by nature inseparable. But I don’t buy it. The uses of religious and other elements in political performances were deliberate maneuvers and show an awareness of their categorical distinctiveness. When, for instance, the Hittite king is dressed in the clothes of a deity, whereby (as Mouton puts it) “the king and the god become one and the same body,” something specific, different, and deliberate is being done; the ritual requires the recognition that both categories had autonomous and distinct natures. So a better question than asking how to define or explode the classifications altogether is asking how the mixing of domains was thought to work—what it hoped to achieve. Gilan presents these issues with great clarity. We may think we know what processions, audiences, and spaces do—the theater is built, as it were—but he brings us up closer to the question of what, exactly, spectators were being asked to do by performers. Answering this question is challenging enough when one must fight through both cuneiform and Hittite to grasp the basic description. But we also come face to face with the essentially mysterious content of what is being performed. We are confronted with the perennial question of whether ritual performances were thought effective for the religious and theological premises on which they were based, or more indirectly, for the enactment of the procedures themselves—whether religion was something in which people “believed” or something they “did.”11 Gilan calls our attention to what is contradictory between the religious and the political domains, with their sometimes competing or conflicting goals (what he calls the “Šuppiluliuma conundrum”). I may think too cynically that political authority gains when it ambiguates its power by suggesting a religious basis in unspecific terms. The ambiguation works not only on the thematic level but on an epistemological one as well: whereas politics may have been about “validity” and effectiveness, the method of ritual was all about rules and correctness.12 Thus, blending religion and politics persuaded not only via misdirection (to put it crudely) but also by suggesting there were justified premises for 11 This question is a common one asked about religions of the ancient Near East, especially in comparison to the confessional “religions of faith” of later antiquity and the medieval period. Yet the literal sense of “religion” was originally a distinctly performative idea in Christian thinking, though it is unclear whether “religion” derives from relegere (“to go through again,” in reading, thinking, praying, etc.) or religare (“to bind fast [an obligation],” in the sense of vows), both senses describing acts to perform, not thoughts to “believe.” Thus the exclusive distinction we often think we can impose between ancient Near Eastern religions of action and later religions of “belief” is to some extent unwarranted until historical arguments theologically foregrounded and juxtaposed faith versus action. 12 In Roman usage, the effectiveness of a rite (ritus) could be proven or determined to be correct; see Richardson 2020a. isac.uchicago.edu 396 SETH RICHARDSON how a spectator could believe a performance to be “true”: both because it satisfied and because it was “right.” Such questions are posed in myriad ways by other essays. The visible proximity of the Hittite king to both the gods and martial force was core to the performances Mouton analyzes; Ristvet shows how Assyrian ideology “directed different messages to different populations,” especially in the restriction of military themes to propaganda in the heartland; Andrews writes on “fear of god” as a religious concept being repurposed and “required for political success.” The zoomorphic(?) vessels considered by Anderson have nothing, in her opinion, if not protean abilities to “hover across identities,” across domains of religious, community, and domestic life. As noted above, Kearns disambiguates the functionality of performances and messages by noting how even “shared cultic practices and norms” might “stitch hinterlands to the state” while at the same time “reproducing independent networks of community.” For Anderson and Kearns, apparent similarities of form can be chimerical, or at least multivalent, because different audiences will read performances in different ways. Three essays stand out for their very direct attention to domain ambiguation. Goebs tackles it through the topic of ritual error, wherein the ruler acts as an arbiter or manager precisely because he is above and outside the authoritative domains invoked (see further discussion below).13 Morgan, following Hayward, sees power mechanisms as spheres of action that “constrain and enable action for all actors” rather than as instruments used by exclusive agents. In this sense, authoritative domains of political, religious, and social power exist partly as delimiters but also as semipermeable membranes through which performers could borrow, refashion, and repurpose symbols. And Frangipane emphasizes the importance of domain ambiguation in performance by pointing to the apparent exception found at Arslantepe Period VIA, where rulers were able “to gain consensus without the mediation of sacred or cultic practices and without any explicit reference to the religious sphere in their political acts” (emphasis mine). This degree of consent is all the more remarkable given that both “law and military apparatus were probably still embryonic” in archaic times and that a sudden, perhaps shocking,14 political “distance” was established between elites and subjects—a rare and important moment of hypercoherence, when the transparency of the “purely political” was the crucial message to be communicated within state society. In both cases, what is striking is the need for political authority not merely to draw on different strands of authoritative discourse to consolidate and effect its power but even to suggest that it supervised, regulated, or even created those domains. At this most apical point in the discourse of power, the king shows that if he “ambiguates” or blurs the boundaries of different forms of social power, 13 Goebs’s analysis reminds me of my own conclusion about the jurisdictional role of the Babylonian king as seen from the Code of Hammurabi: “Situated thusly, the king’s legal powers need not have been paramount (jurisdictionally, hierarchically, or on appeal), because they were not mere rule-making. The king was categorically different: he was the entire domain generating the discourse of law in the first place, permitting it to exist. He was responsible for the order that made rule-making possible, a position that was, as it was with his claims to universal power and divine favor, unassailable partly because it was unfalsifiable” (Richardson 2017, 40). 14 On this kind of shocking interruption of authoritative domains in archaic states (via, e.g., the mass inhumations at Ur and retainer sacrifice in First Dynasty Egypt), see especially Smith 2003. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 397 it is because—above and beyond his various rhetorical and tactical maneuvers—he makes the metaclaim that he is the generative source of them all. This move is most successful when, as Mouton quotes from Catherine Bell, “the values and forms of social organization to which the ritual testifies are neither arbitrary nor temporary but follow naturally from the way the world is organized.” This processual chain will continually test our ability to understand what in the social world of the ancients was emically understood as “natural.” But it also leads us to see that ambiguation (or integration) works most powerfully when it achieves the naturalizing effect of discourse. DIDACTICISM: EMULATION, ROLE-PLAY, AND SHARED EXPERIENCE Here I begin by focusing on Andrews’s discussion of audience as a way to vivify how performative role-play and shared experience impart didacticism and inclusivity. Andrews insists on both “spectators” and “participants” as the audience for the Marian processions, even sometimes (as with the account of Stephen II) comprising “the entire people.” Here we have another dynamic, namely, that participants must be counted among the recipients of the messages they themselves disseminate. Indeed, distinguishing between spectators and participants can be a rather artificial exercise, since each actively engages in performance as a whole. Were spectators really so passive as the name “audience” suggests? We should better call them, for all their muteness in the sources, “witnesses” rather than “spectators.” But what are witnesses doing when they witness? We often read (including in these essays) that what performances and displays do is “legitimate” political authority. But if that statement is not already semantically circular,15 it would be better to say that what witnesses do (conventionally as well as technically) is “validate” rather than “legitimate.” What is the difference? In semantic terms, what is “legitimate” is lawful; what has been “validated” is effective. Few ancient cultures grounded their political legitimacy in law; rather, performance appealed to the sense of validity (from valeo, “to be efficacious”), which can emerge only from serial demonstrations of authority that are satisfying as narratives, where subjects subscribe more to the discourse of the story-world than to any coherent system of rule-making and rule-following.16 That which is “valid” requires demonstration and display. And politics (as we might sense from experience) is a matter of persuasive effectiveness rather than the maintenance of normativity (see below, however, on the discursive power of rules in the operation of “ritual”). Indeed, “to perform” has two separate but related core senses in English: “to present (to an audience)” and “to effect (actions, work, duties).” The semantic nature of both senses stems from an etymology that is difficult to intuit from the English “perform.” The word comes from an Old French root, fournir, “to provide, supply,” with par-, “thoroughly.” Thus, although “perform” was apparently altered by its near-homonym to forme (“form”), the word originally conveys the sense of “providing throughness”—not, as we might think, 15 For “authority” is that which has already been recognized; it is perhaps only “power” that might require “legitimation.” 16 In other words, that which is “legitimate” would be grounded (in Weberian terms) in some codified standards, thus proving the fidelity of authority to explicit and transparent laws; see Richardson 2020a. isac.uchicago.edu 398 SETH RICHARDSON of “giving shape to.” This sense is more in line with conceptual roots of validity than of rules. Politics is about senses of wholeness and homology, not about correct behavior. Andrews’s discussion of the Marian processions in Rome focuses on the features that make performativity so effective: plurimediality and seriality, animation of historical memory, and production of embodied experiences (and docile bodies) for witnesses and performers. By these means, staged performances inscribed and reinscribed social relationships through each evocation. There is a habituation to certain political roles, for which performance is role-play. In exposure to or participation in these roles, the assimilation of subjects to authorities is achieved through affective and embodied sympathies that were also shared experiences (praying together, hearing together, witnessing together, etc.). The cognitive-behavioral effects of participation even lived on beyond performances themselves insofar as emulative action carried over into other authority–subject interactions: the payment of taxes, participation in civil life, and the rendering and receipt of services; these acts, too, were kinds of performances.17 Even when performance is carried out with a complete lack of real belief, as Ristvet argues, the role that is emphasized is complicity despite a lack of subscription;18 thus, even passive complicity is a kind of political subjectivity. Or, in the case considered by Osborne, lack of participation still becomes a kind of engagement, revealing that the dyad of political compliance and noncompliance mooted by state ideologies is in fact a spectrum along which varying degrees of participation must have existed. So to observe only that performances are didactic and stop there seems inadequate: the instructional intent is clearly written into the DNA of such displays. It is the surface-level intent of many ancient politico-religious displays: royal processions at early Ebla, Amarna, and Hittite Anatolia, the akītu-festival at Babylon19—the list is almost endless. To call these moralizing, celebratory, and hortative performances “theatrical” could only be shorthand to explain that these festivals worked by activating and assimilating social relations, memories, bodies, senses, and narrative satisfaction. Through these channels, even the most passive spectating entails a degree of participation, through which clients, citizens, and dependents validate and reproduce authority’s prerogatives and their own subjectivity via role-play, emulation, awareness of shared experience, and the suggested harmony of performance’s operanda and recitanda. Behind this seeming paradox of “passive activity” is an imperative of inclusion: performances must invite subjects in and permit them to share and understand certain kinds and degrees of social knowledge with authority; this dimension is “positive,” what we often think about when we think of “audience.” But if this assertion seems surpassingly obvious, what is also fascinating is that these inclusive elements stand in tension with an equal and opposite “negative” imperative: that performance must simultaneously exclude in order to be effective. That is, at the same time that performances bind subject participants to authority, they must also draw boundaries, display hierarchies, and justify the superiority of that authority on the basis of exclusive 17 See Richardson 2018 on political subjectivity; 2020b on taxation as performance. 18 Ristvet (this volume): “It is not necessary for people to believe an ideological statement for it to work as ideology; what is necessary is participation.” 19 For Ebla, see Archi 2015; for Amarna, see Accetta 2013; for Anatolia, see Corti 2018; for Babylon, see Lambert 1997. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 399 criteria, whether by virtue of privileged knowledge, divine mandate, personal heroism, and/or more (on all of which, see the following section). Enacting both sets of messages at once can be a tricky balancing act. One might look at this challenge in one of two ways. On the one hand, we could take a zero-sum approach and try to evaluate the relative weight of the inclusivity/exclusivity imperatives to tell us about the types of state societies using them, as Feinman and Nicholas, McMahon, Porter, and Frangipane do. From this point of view, we see a wide range of performances on a sliding scale from broadly communal and consensual political relations, with a high degree of sharing and inclusion, all the way to the kind of social remoteness and political secrecy characteristic of imperial cultures. For Feinman and Nicholas, there is the contrast already drawn about “spectacles” and “rituals.” Spectacles involve “high levels of sensorial arousal . . . promoting emotional states that constrict the potential for rational thought”; rituals “stimulate evaluative thought” with “intervisibility, kinesthetic emulation, and public signaling that reaffirm commitment to a group’s collective goals.”20 On the other hand, at no point along the spectrum can any performance achieve pure exclusivity or inclusivity: one need only envision the impossibility of a performance with only performers or only an audience to obtain the absurdity of the idea.21 Accepting, then, that both imperatives were always in play, if in different measures, one might think about the functionality of this ambivalence, because a performance becomes a set of messages always winking and suggesting, never fully including or excluding but always hinting that everyone’s positions are endlessly contingent. In this eros of power, performance continually lures the audience in with promises of greater belonging and benefit made more potent by the threat of exclusion. Power must advertise itself as something people want and might possibly get, while simultaneously reminding them that they want it because they do not have it—and continually stand in danger of losing what little they do have. We always speak of political power in terms of carrots and sticks; one may prefer to think of the wink and the little smile—and then the brush-off and the cold shoulder. This ambivalence may be discerned in the discussion of Frangipane, who analyzes the change from a relatively “welcoming and inclusive ceremonial place” at Arslantepe to a place where people were “welcomed but kept at a distance and excluded from any real participation”; they were engaged, but with “a sense of detachment, which also expressed subservience.” McMahon, too, works within the framing of collective versus hierarchical signaling, contrasting gathering spaces with those that isolate and intimidate individuals. Her main contribution is to show us that such questions are empirically testable, and she proceeds to prosecute her case: the result is that, while models are helpful, the potential for partial audibility and limited visibility suggest both satisfaction of belonging and vulnerability to exclusion. To consider the aspect of instruction and didactics: every single one of the essays takes into account, in one way or another, questions of audience, performers, and the degree of their interaction; the evaluation of participation is a key to understanding potentially very 20 If the authors are clear in articulating the poles of the model, however, they also aver that a “volunteerism–coercion dichotomy” is ultimately “too restrictive.” 21 Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood Fourth of July parade, however, comes awfully close to the former situation: the running joke is that there are so many people in it that there’s nobody left to watch it. isac.uchicago.edu 400 SETH RICHARDSON different kinds of performances. Gilan’s essay is a nice place to start, because the rituals for temple personnel are quite literally called “instructions.” One may compare this case with the one discussed by Smith, for whom the kinds of modeling and role-playing involved are about a more diffuse kind of belonging, depending on standards of behavior and “subtle movements of the body” demonstrating knowledge of social space as a performance of self. The Neo-Assyrian political landscape detailed by Ristvet, meanwhile, is somewhat divided: different performances involved different audiences, with some in the heartland and others in the provinces. Priestly families and high officials were involved in some rituals; city inhabitants could view parts of triumphal parades; other messages were more tightly restricted to audiences of court officials and provincial admininstrators. Each circle of belonging was limited, but the didactics are fairly clear: the “mocking public” was taught to vilify political disloyalty and celebrate militarism; provincial officers were to emulate a distinctly textual and religious Assyrianism; soldiers were indoctrinated into violence as a virtue. Mouton similarly identifies smaller and larger audience circles, from “peaceful (crowds)” to elite collegia. One intriguing possibility here lies in how chains of authority may also have transmitted senses of inclusion: for each ritual in which a “chief” participated, his soldiers would have learned about his participation—and so forth. Some essays deal with performances that had relatively little inclusivity. For Porter, the distribution of evidence at Tell Banat seems to indicate belonging in groups, but in contrasting and competing ways, which makes performances more about distinctions between those groups. Morgan sees similar possibilities for “diverse constituencies,” which “fostered trust and promoted cooperation” at Gordion, and fewer of the radical power asymmetries long assumed for the place. Kearns cannot determine the answers to these questions at the ritual site she studies—“whether private and exclusive to outsiders or more public is difficult to discern without more evidence”—and what is observable has more to do with its local character. The rites studied by Goebs prima facie present perhaps the lowest quotient of inclusivity, but she masterfully resituates the relatively depopulated ritual texts by using the Tale of Sinuhe to illustrate how knowledge of even the most hermetic procedures could radiate out to larger segments of state society: to pharaoh’s advisers, “friends,” nobles, priests, family, and even beyond to “towns and villages throughout Egypt.”22 I return repeatedly to think about Osborne’s essay, because he turns the question on its head. By focusing on the contingent possibility of private household space—a world “deliberately closed from participating in elite political supervision and control,” its door firmly shut to political performance—he inverts the inclusivity/exclusivity paradigm altogether. We now must consider not only a one-way flow of power, in which individuals and groups continually try to gain access to centers of power (whether institutions, lineage groups, cities, etc.), but also where the centers of power are limited in their ability to reach into private spaces to demand fealty or recruit clientele. Set against the political backdrop of the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex, where “political authority does not seem to have extended far beyond the monumental temple into the lower city,” Osborne provides the 22 Goebs in full: “The audience of such accounts, be they the court or the wider literate elite, had to be convinced. As regards the significance, if any, of such inscriptions for the lower echelons of society we can only speculate. One possible scenario is that such texts were read out to illiterate visitors by priestly guides, another that copies were distributed on other media, which were perhaps read in towns and villages throughout Egypt.” isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 401 ground against which the figure of power dynamics takes place—a ground all too often invisible to us from an evidentiary point of view, and thus too often forgotten. As with Ristvet’s reluctant Soviet citizens, what is visible to us should be modeled against the “fifth voice” always absent from the record: the jokes, the kitchen-table talk, and the grumbling. They, too, are political voices, by definition unperformed because they must be hidden from power. THE PRODUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF DIFFERENTIAL STATUS AND ACCESS TO POWER Fourth and finally is the dimension corollary to the above discussion of inclusivity and teaching: one of the things authority must paradoxically “teach” (or at least suggest) is that it knows things that subjects do not (and sometimes cannot) know. Thus, at the same moment that power invites audiences in, it also must show that it holds privileged knowledge which may sometimes be partly seen or heard but may not be held, examined, or shared. As Frangipane succinctly says, “Look but don’t touch.” Since some of what is important about performance’s capacity can be inferred already from the foregoing discussion,23 I will keep this section relatively brief, with attention to just a few examples. But I think, for instance, of Gilan’s descriptions of the Hittite king’s indispensible role in many rituals and his unique access to many gods as structurally designed not to inform but to exclude or even intimidate. Andrews’s essay also touches on this point, namely, that contrition was the primary purpose of the Marian processions—or, put by Ristvet another way, that creating a sense of viewers’ inferiority and insignificance is itself a kind of political subjectivity. These observations reach out to Gilan’s point, insofar as the creation of subjectivity and sovereignty coincides with, or is even produced by, the subordination or even the intimidation of the individual and/or individualist ethos. Through such operations, the purpose of ambiguated domains becomes clear: subjects could not transparently perceive the basis on which they were subjected, or to whom, even as they themselves were required to be knowable to authority.24 It may sound overly suspicious to think of domain ambiguations as deliberate political maneuvers; for what it is worth, I believe there was little historical consciousness of those moves, because they were held to be “traditions,” but this paucity in no way reduced their effectiveness. This fourth theme of the essays thus highlights that part of the purpose of performances was to advertise that the actors/performers/ritualists had proprietary knowledge the audience was being told it could not possess, a fact to which it must acquiesce. Therein, the differential access to knowledge through the (rule-based) “correctness” of ritual denoted 23 For example, consider the points of McMahon, Morgan, and Mouton (among others) about performances as instantiations of hierarchy; Frangipane’s opinion that, even under the more inclusive templebased regime, “few authorized and privileged individuals would have been allowed entry” to the cultic room; issues of restricted access and visibility discussed by Feinman and Nicholas and by Porter; Ristvet’s argument about the Nineveh “library” as a claim of exclusive state knowledge; and so forth. 24 This principle is, of course, that of Bentham’s panopticon—namely, that subjects were made visible to observers who could not be seen by them; this motif, of course, became central to Foucault’s disciplinary state. For this sense of “being known” to power, see Scott 1998, passim; for an argument that “power likes ambiguity,” see Richardson 2014, 75–78. isac.uchicago.edu 402 SETH RICHARDSON the exclusive mark of validity to rule. What was only partly displayed or heard (see McMahon’s essay), what was explicitly secret or hidden, and what a priori distinguished privileged actors (whether religious or political) from mere subjects by dint of professional knowledge all constructed and maintained hierarchies by denial of access. So where Gilan speaks to the problem of “cultic neglect,” Goebs goes to an even stronger boundary, when privileged actors (in this case, pharaohs) put performative failure center stage—when audiences were invited to the edge of the ritual process and its open manipulation as a mode of convincing them of its validity and correctness in the hands of a privileged actor. Identifying the king’s power to intervene in the ritual arena emphasizes his unique agency; his unique possession of knowledge allows him to identify problems and act, emphasizing his power relative to other ritual actors. Correcting failed rituals proves the king to be the best politician and scholar, an indispensable intervenor and not an empty vessel. As Ute Hüsken has written, episodes of ritual failure and their correction are themselves narratives that “prove the existence of decisive norms for ritual actions,” shoring up the entire category of the theater.25 So to prove that performance belongs to the category of the real, we must be shown that it can fail—that something indeed was at stake and contingent on specific interventions. It is impossible to instruct and “prove” the validity of performers or performance without failures to correct; “political correction” takes on the additional didactic sense that positions the actor and audience asymmetrically as teacher and student, respectively. In this sense, the opportunities that ritual texts make to permit displays of distinctive professional expertise are functional: the ezib clauses of Neo-Assyrian oracles, the multiple alternative remedies of medical texts, even the cautionary tale about Naram-Sin in the Cuthean Legend, when he casts aside the oracle of the gods to trust in his own judgment. Such narrative and ritual mechanisms bear the subtext of not only this or that particular form of knowledge but also the metatruth that only a few people had it, and subjects did not; a condition of subjectivity is an acceptance of these premises. CONCLUDING A CONCLUSION I close with a call for future attention to ancient performance in three specific respects. First, and most briefly, is that the scholarly attention brought to this point should be continued in conversation with colleagues who work in and with bodies of theory related to theater. We will surely gain from them and not have to reinvent every wheel and rethink every thought. Second, like other forms of ideological messaging, performance is a persuasive mechanism. It may create power by any of the verbs we choose to describe it, but it does not dictate it: it is dialogic and negotiatory, and it requires assent. Like many other kinds of persuasion, it may entail representational strategies that make their own truth-claims and can themselves become objects of study. These claims may depart from theoretically objective understandings of what is represented in myriad ways—all of which we may dispute, document, and dissect—but which in all cases require influence to be effective; that part is not optional. 25 Hüsken 2007, esp. 337. isac.uchicago.edu POLITICAL PERFORMANCE: A THEORY RESPONSE 403 Third, and following closely, it is not only the discourses of meaning “behind” performances that may be explored but also the ambiguations performance itself deploys and depends on that may become subjects for our attention. The essays in this volume point to the domain confusion between religion and politics; the limited but significantly partial access of spectators to sight, sound, and venue; the asymmetrical access to knowledge of actors versus audience; the unsettling or uncanny positioning of subjects as spectators, participants, or witnesses vis-à-vis the “fourth wall.” In all such respects, subjectivity is created through an eros rather than a command of power; there is a luring in, then a boundary drawing, then a promise of more—if one participates, assents, bows the knee. As much as performance has the potential to confirm and reconfirm the efficacy of power through the satisfaction of its narrativity, together its seriality, repetition, and affectivity also creates and recreates subjects, continually suspending them between satisfaction and desire. 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