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Keffie Feldman Weiss (Brown University)
Where is the Colosseum? The answer to this question seems obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable icon for the "Roman past-as-glorious," for "Roman present-as-tourist destination," the Colosseum is a prominent feature both in the Roman cityscape and the contemporary collective imagination. However, since its construction, the Colosseum has been translated into numerous media (coins, maps, books, photographs, video games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena, as mere representations of an "original." If however, as Law suggests, we consider media as modes which translate something of the material world, they are thereby able to circulate the world at a distance (Law 2002, Witmore 2006). From this perspective, the ever-increasing collection of media that address and translate some aspect of the Colosseum play as active a role in shaping it and our understanding of it as do the limestone blocks, bricks, and concrete standing in a valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills. If we recognize the Colosseum to be distributed through these translations then the prospect of identifying any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more complicated.
But I must take one step back because the nature of the thing itself needs to be called into question. Even though as a building-in-itself we seem to be dealing with a singular entity, a bounded object, the Colosseum is also a heterogeneous ensemble. It is implicated in a complex network of materials, interactions, actions, pasts, and presents (Latour 1986, 2005; along with other proponents of actor-network-theory, particularly as applicable to archaeology: Olsen 2003, Witmore 2004). Not only is the building a multiplicity, but through its translation in various media, the possible modes of accessing and engaging with it become exponential in scope. Indeed, the Colosseum is distributed two-fold: as a gathering of materials and relations and as it is translated into various media. In this paper I investigate some of the ways in which the Colosseum is distributed and translated beyond the building-in-itself and argue that these actions allow for it to be in Rome and in many other places simultaneously. Using the Colosseum as a case study, I argue for a broader methodological shift in the way archaeologists approach the buildings, monuments, objects, etc. that have long been our object of study. I suggest we begin to move away from a perspective that focuses on architecture as bounded entities to one that approaches them at things.
Routledge (2004) critiques the concept of “thingness” in relation to the conceptual concretization of the state as a “thing” with its own agency. Following from this rejection of thingness as bounded and concrete, then even though as a building-in-itself we seem to be dealing with a singular entity the Colosseum is also implicated in complex networks of relations and materials. In Heidegger’s (1996) well-known articulation of things, he describes das ding, a thing, as a gathering. A thing is centripetal in its gathering of relations and materials into itself and also centrifugal as it pushes beyond its material borders as it is translated and distributed extensively beyond itself. As a thing the Colosseum gathers together materials, technologies, knowledges, social relations, pasts and presents in an intricate network of relations. Through its translation in media the Colosseum is in libraries, movie theaters, on propaganda posters, pasted in photo albums, projected in lectures or redeployed in the design of sports stadiums. It is not necessary to be in Rome to engage with this monument, but rather simply entering ‘colosseum’ into a Google search, opening a book, gambling at Caesar’s palace, or watching Gladiator, yields multiple opportunities for accessing something of it. In this way, different aspects of the Colosseum are widely and variously disseminated beyond the building-in-itself – it is, in effect, multi-sited (Witmore 2004). Through the process of becoming multiply sited, the thing takes on new associations and engenders new relations which, in equal parts, expand the possibilities and localities of engaging with it, and as something (but not everything) of the thing is translated into these media it is reduced by these very media/translations that widely distribute it.
The same multiplicity in relation to its spatial diversity also holds true for the temporal realities of the Colosseum. Freud, began Civilization and its Discontents by urging the reader to try to envision a Rome in which, on the site “where the Colosseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House (1929).” However, Freud dismisses this thought experiment on the supposition that: “to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space; the space cannot have two different contents.” In direct conversation with Freud (in print, though not in person), is Kurt Vonnegut. In his book Slaughterhouse Five, he describes the way in which the Tralfamadorians, the exra-terrestrial captors of the nebbish and time-travelling protagonist Billy Pilgrim, see time. At one point in the book Billy Pilgrim writes about the lessons he learned from his abduction:
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at a funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” (p. 26-27)
For too long the objects of archaeological inquiry have been viewed with such a post-Enlightenment conception of time – one that champions the belief that there is a distinct separation between the past and the present (Latour 1993, Serres with Latour 1995, Witmore 2006). In this conception, the flow of time is unflaggingly unidirectional – time moves from one monolithic moment to the next in which pasts are neither simultaneous nor blended. Billy Pilgrim illustrates this in his description of beads on a string. For the Colosseum this thinking is exemplified in the book Rome: Past and Present (Staccioli 2001) in which you can overlay a recreation of how the Colosseum looked in the ‘past’ over an image of it in the ‘present.’ Yet, if we look at the history of the Colosseum as through the Tralfamadorians eyes (or eye, I think they may have only one) as a continuous stretch of relations flowing from the past to the present, then we should conceive of the Colosseum as always in a state of becoming. As purveyors of the past, as archaeologists, we can look at any moment in the Colosseum’s long and diverse history but we should do this with an understanding that all these moments and the relations they engender have a stake in what and where the Colosseum is today.
The city of Rome is a mixed-up, polychronic ensemble where vestiges of the past are nonetheless mixed into the contemporary fabric of the city. As a complex feature of the Roman cityscape, the Colosseum is also an entanglement of pasts and presents. A post-Enlightenment metaphysics rejects this categorical separation between past and present and tacitly understands that the beginning of an engagement with the past must necessarily begin from a contemporary perspective. The past is not wholly distant or distinct from the present, but rather there is always something of the past that is carried into our contemporary interactions with it (Witmore 2006, 2007).
Because it is always through our immediate engagements that we approach the material past, it is best to begin, as Latour urges, in medias res – in the middle of the matter and in the middle of our relations with the thing. The following examples highlight the distributed nature of the Colosseum through its diverse translations and relationships:
War, Mussolini, Propaganda, Steven Dyson, and the Pope
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 8:00 pm: Stephen Dyson, a professor of Archaeology at SUNY Buffalo, gives the inaugural R. Ross Holloway lecture at Brown University:
The topic of discussion was archaeology and ideology in nineteenth and twentieth century Rome. Dyson focused his attention on the role that Fascist ideology championed by "Il Duce", Benito Mussolini, had on the treatment and use of ancient monuments in the Roman cityscape. Integral to the Fascist ideological message was an identification with ancient Rome and the use of ancient Roman art and archaeology to create a new sense of "discipline, militarism, and order in post-World War I Italy" (Dyson 2006: 175). One way in which this was accomplished was by what Mussolini referred to as "la parola al piccono" (the discourse of the pickaxe) in which both Roman monuments (and Christian churches) were cleared of the architectural elements that had gradually accreted over time, and were restored to their original, "pristine" condition.
What, however, is the original, pristine moment of the Colosseum’s beginning? We can trace the beginning of its architectural life, though I would argue that this is not the beginning of the events, relations, and materials that led to its existence as such, to the General cum Emperor Titus’s victory in the Jewish Revolt in 69 and 70 CE. The Colosseum was a victory monument built on the human and material spoils of war. In fact, by the main entrance there is a large marble block bearing the re-constructed inscription. ''The emperor Vespasian ordered this new amphitheater to be erected from his general's share of the booty... Claridge 1998).” The building was doubly a monument of victory as it was also an expression of Rome’s triumph over the tyranny of Nero’s rule. Its location over what was previously part of Nero’s sprawling private estate re-appropriated the land back to the populus Romani. As a manifestation of this act of generosity, Titus minted coins with an image of the monument which could be widely distributed at a distance.
As the building was originally intended to be an expression of the glory of the Roman Empire, Mussolini drew on its past associations in order to communicate the strength and order of his Fascist government. The Fascist relationship with Roman antiquities was not limited to excavation and isolation, but also included building projects that coordinated archaeology with new construction. One such project was the creation of the parade route, the via dell'Impero (Street of the Empire), now called Via dei Fori Imperali. The route ran between Mussolini's residence in the Palazzo Venezia and the Colosseum. The ancient monuments in the fora of Augustus, Julius Caesar, and Trajan – monuments that had been buried by centuries of building and occupation but were cleared down to their imperial levels – provided a grand stage for large-scale state spectacle (Dyson 2006). The urban environment of Rome was reshaped by Mussolini so that the Colossuem could serve as the monumental scena frons for his political theater. He staged parades down the ceremonial route so that when these events were captured on film, the Colosseum would serve as the monumental backdrop framing the action. Even Mussolini took advantage of the translations of the Colosseum into media.
The Fascist relationship with Roman antiquities was greatly influenced by Napoleonic policies regarding Rome's classical heritage (Dyson 2006). With Napoleon there was a shift in attitude during the nineteenth century from one that focused on quarrying the monuments of antiquity for building material to conservation and consolidation. One of the previous popes, Pope Alexander VII (1655-67), was more concerned with glorifying the Papacy than preserving the Imperial Roman past. He commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design and execute the Piazza of Saint Peter's Church. Bernini conceived of the piazza so that it resembles two curving arms extending from the church as if to welcome visitors with a warm embrace. The square is 240 meters across, surrounded by a colonnade composed of 284 columns and 88 pilasters and was designed to be big enough to fit the Colosseum inside (Masson 2003). This, ironically, happened quite literally because Bernini was given permission by the Pope to use the pre-quarried limestone of the Colosseum. In this way the Colosseum is a distributed object with pieces of its “thingness” now performing in other relationships. The picture I took on my trip to Rome in the summer of 2006 brings the Colosseum cum Bernini’s Colonnade to you all, here in California.
This exercise could be continued ad infinitum. Here is a short, but by no means extensive, list of other places in which the Colosseum can be encountered beyond blocks of stone, metal clamps, marble, and concrete:
Through the translations the Colosseum is – quite literally – all over the place. These translations are also things and demand our engagement with them as such—their material qualities play a role in the way in which we engage with them, how they mediate between the world and our understanding of it, how they translate the world into various forms. Media are not merely vessels with which we are able to transport ourselves to different times and places.
John Law (2002) suggests that telling stories about the world actively helps to perform that world. In talking about the Colosseum, this performance (and all texts, images, lectures, movies, etc.) participates in the shaping of the Colosseum itself. This event then renders the thing more “obdurate, more solid, more real than it might otherwise have been (Law 2002: 6)” and thus carries something of the present into the future. This perspective suggests that we are all mixed up in the things we are describing; there is no innocent act of description but that all means of description of the world are, by nature, acts of participation in that world. The works that describe the Colosseum not only perform its reality, but also alter it.
References
Claridge, A.1998. Rome: Oxford Archaeological Guides. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
Dyson, S. 2006. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts. New Haven: Yale University Press
Freud, S. 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents. W. W. Norton & Company; Re-issue edition
Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Latour, B., 1986: Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands, in H. Kuklick, and E. Long (eds), Knowledge and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present Vol. 6, 1-40.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. (trans. C. Porter). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2005: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press.
Masson, Georgina, revised by J. Fort. 2003 (1965). The Companion Guide to Rome. The Society of Authors.
Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review 36(2), 87-104.
Routledge, B. 2004. “The thingness of the state” in Moab in the Iron Age: hegemony, polity, archaeology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Serres, M. with Latour, B. 1995. Conversations of Science, Culture, and Time (trans. R. Lapidus). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Staccioli, R. 2001. Rome: Past and Present. Tipolitografica CS.
Witmore, C.L. 2004. ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece,’ Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64.
Witmore, C.L. 2006. ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time. Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World.’ Journal of Material Culture 11(3), pp. 267-292
Witmore, C.L. 2007. “Landscape, time, topology: An archaeological account to the southern Argolid, Greece” In Hicks, D., Fariclough, G. and McAtackney, L. (eds.), Envisioning Landscape. Routledge.
