Desire beyond Narcissism

The question of desire in relation to video technology is the question of the living together with technology. It is the question of living entities sharing modes of existence with and within technological platforms of relation. What draws me to desire in this chapter is the performative dimension of image technology and its capacity to act on the milieu in which images are seen. Specifically, I am interested in the performative dimension of video images because in that dimension I see the power of technology to shape the psychic and collective environment we inhabit. In that context the psychological model applied to visual studies has been central to interrogating the relationship between video-image technology, intimacy, and identity. This psychological model, applied to video art, was introduced in Rosalind Krauss's seminal article “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” in 1976. In the article, Krauss generalized the image of self-regard, namely narcissism, as “the condition of the entire genre.”

Where Darkness Matters

It is July 1991 in New York. You enter a dark, wide, shallow space at the Museum of Modern Art and see three mural-sized video projections along one wall. Confronted with the large scale of the installation (each image is ten feet high by seven feet wide), you stand against the opposite side of the room, attempting to grasp what is being presented at once. The three videos begin simultaneously with a saturated white light that gradually fills the space of the room. Slowly, the central panel, which functions independently from the two others, reveals shades of grey that give shape to a figure. The camera goes back and forth above the central figure in a regular and continuous fashion, following a path that gradually expands the field of vision, creating a scanning and electronically programmed quality to the image.

Transductive Operations

With the advent of video technology in the early 1970s, the relationship between technique and time began to raise critical questions concerning processes of memorization and historicization. This relationship changed according to a long genealogy of accumulated technological supports, such as writing, photography, radio, cinema, and television. These supports, often understood as prosthetic supports, have shaped our modes of knowledge retention and information transmission. Much like machine memory, human memory relies on input (experience), storage (the faculty to recall and remember experience), and processing (the conscious or unconscious act of processing experience). In this sense, both prosthetic and human memory offers a conception of time that is anchored in the layering and intermittence of these three concomitant functions. Central to input, storage, and processing is the retention of information by different means. We remember an event differently depending upon whether it is experienced live, mediated and shot on camera, written on a piece of paper, or shared orally with us. In other words, the means of memory retention are as important as the capacity to process experience; they structure the possibility of processing this information at a later stage.

Video Practices of Knowledge and Technology

You are on the C train near Paris—the yellow line. You know you are going to a wealthy suburb because the train is here on time and there are still covers on the chairs and see-through windows to contemplate nature while you ride. You hold on to your train ticket and your professional invitation. You also have your self-written authorization explaining why you are on this trip. If some surveillance agent asks, you have a speech ready in your head. You can explain why it is an essential activity to go see Kitso Lynn Lelliott's video installations in Chamarande. It is March 2021, and the French government is prescribing what counts as an essential activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. You are on your way nevertheless, and an hour into the ride you arrive and walk the village-like streets. You enter the Domaine Départemental de Chamarande—a park with a seventeenth-century castle. A sign on the Orangerie cottage building and an open door invites you into a dark room. A woman sitting at her desk is expecting you and asks to scan your QR-code. You observe the space while she reminds you of the sanitary measures.

May I call your attention to space in relation to video technologies, not only their pervasive proliferation in our environment but the performative potential they manifest? First, the aesthetic connection between the historical realities they can capture: their capacity to retain and transmit information outside of mainstream channels. Second, the relation between the space where the images are taken and the places where these images are transmitted: their capacity to activate significations and create spatial resonances. I take these two modalities of capture and transmission as central to the performative potential of video technologies. It is this potential and the subversive nature of video works that gives shape to a new cartography of meaning, where power dynamics can be regarded anew. Here, I make use of Chela Sandoval's notion of the “topography of consciousness in opposition” because she allows us to think about space as a transformative position: to establish it as a modality to reinvent psychic and material realities and to constitute resistant subjects to orders of domination and oppression. Sandoval's new cartography maps a rhetoric of resistance to focus on a “hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world.”

Analyses of imitatio imperii commonly focus on the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of the Roman empire—victory celebrations, creation of a capital, ceremonial dress and language, imagery on coins, and legal pronouncements— not ethnicity. Perhaps one reason is that in modern English, ‘imitation’ carries derogatory connotations of uninspired copying that remove the agency and creativity of the imitator. Imitated items and practices are seen as poor copies of originals, the latter of which are much more worthy of attention. Under this definition, one would expect an imitator of Rome to claim to be Roman, resembling Athaulf's claim that Goths were unable to submit to law and so should join and revive Rome, not replace Romania with Gothia. Following this logic, the Visigoths may be considered imperfect imitators of Roman ethnic concepts since the identity they claimed was not ‘Roman’ but ‘Gothic’, a poor copy of the original.

However, this is not how the classical rhetorical tradition understood imitatio. Students learned Latin grammar and rhetoric by replicating styles and forms, but this required careful selection of appropriate material to emulate as they wrote on new topics in new ways to rival rather than parrot the original. Aemulatio was such a central part of imitatio that texts regularly paired the terms. Using this definition, Visigothic authors did not just imitate; they borrowed Roman ethnic concepts, adapted their stories of Gothic origins, and asserted their legitimacy within Hispania in order to supersede the empire, not to become it.

In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Mediterranean world witnessed a contest of Christian orthodoxy. Following the fifth-century collapse of western imperial administration, multiple kingdoms claimed to be the rightful heirs of imperial Christianity. The Suevic and Visigothic kingdoms of the 500s and 600s were among these contenders, and Visigothic rulers and intellectuals in particular promoted themselves as the true standard-bearers of Christian orthodoxy in the post-Roman world. Their claim, however, was not without challenge. Those who wished to portray themselves as the heirs of Roman tradition had to grapple not only with other ‘barbarian’ kingdoms with similar pretensions, but also with other states and churches who still proudly called themselves Romans. The continued existence of the eastern Roman empire forced Visigothic authors to articulate why their kingdom was religiously superior and why eastern Christianity might be considered heretical. The popes of Rome also presented a challenge, and alternately conciliatory and testy exchanges reveal a complicated relationship between the Iberian kingdoms and the papacy.

In this ideological battle, the liturgy (broadly defined as the rites and worship of Christian churches) was an important medium through which Iberian kingdoms sought to claim Christian orthodoxy. Correct ritual and worship were a means to create orthodox churches, to integrate kingdoms, and to construct ecclesiology, and as they pursued these goals, Visigothic and Suevic elites continuously and self-consciously evaluated their own liturgical traditions. In doing so, they were forced to confront the relationship between their own rites and those of other Christian traditions.

As western Roman society refashioned itself into multiple ‘little Romes’ in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the Visigothic kingdoms of Toulouse and Toledo actively preserved and transformed much of the Roman world that preceded them. They were not alone in this, as several other kingdoms, including the eastern Roman empire, explored the legacy of Rome while navigating the social, political, and economic shifts that accompanied the transition to the early medieval period. The ‘Romanness’ of such kingdoms, as well as what being Roman actually meant in the post-Roman west, frequently plays a pivotal role in debates about the ‘transformation’ of the Roman world, functioning for some scholars as a key marker of continuity and change across the period.

In post-Roman Iberia and southern Gaul, scholarly debate over the legacy of Rome in the Visigothic kingdom has long grappled with the survival of Roman (or so-called Germanic) identities and practices and with the importation of Roman traditions from other polities. To a large extent, the modern origins of this debate trace back to discussions of the nature of Visigothic institutions, particularly the controversy over the putative Roman or Germanic origins of Visigothic law. Those who stressed the Visigoths’ romanitas were also particularly interested in Visigothic relations with the empire in the east. As Céline Martin explores in her contribution to this volume, art historians and archaeologists have long spoken of a ‘Byzantine imprint’ on Iberian evidence, a characterization which scholars eventually extended to political culture as well. In the twentieth century, the political and diplomatic policies of the Francoist regime strongly shaped Spanish scholarly insistence on Iberian uniqueness within the western Mediterranean and on the markedly ‘imperial’ influences on Visigothic art, culture, and institutions. Outside of Spain, many Anglophone scholars argued for a strong imperial presence within the Iberian peninsula as well, such as P. D. King's statement that there are ‘plenty of examples […] of the constant Byzantine influence in practically every walk of Visigothic life’. For those advocating for imperial models, however, the source of these models was far less clear, and scholars debated whether the Visigoths drew on the late Roman empire, the Byzantine political centre of Constantinople, the ‘East’ more generally, or closer Byzantine societies such as Ravenna, southern Iberia, or northern Africa.

Introduction: Martyrs and Confessors

No texts from the Visigothic period were more consistently engaged with the memory of the Roman past than the martyr passions. Though redacted mainly in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Iberian passions vividly evoked the world of the Roman persecutions over two centuries earlier. Modern historians put little faith in their historical veracity—only the Passio Fructuosi, Augurii et Eulogii, known to Augustine of Hippo, appears in corpora of ‘genuine’ ancient passions—but what they do reveal is the cultivation of a useful Roman past by post-Roman Christians. This past was presented to a wide audience through liturgical reading. In Robert Markus's words, ‘on a large number of the year's days, a Christian who attended a church service would be liturgically thrust back into the age of the martyrs’. Historians, however, have been more inclined to think about the other side of the equation—how the martyrs, in relics or legendary retellings, were brought into a new medieval world. Markus's insight has not been sufficiently appreciated.

It is frequently suggested that the figure of the bloody martyr was superseded by new modes of sanctity, particularly that of the ascetic ‘confessor’ saint. This assertion rests on a strand of argument advanced by late antique Christian authorities themselves. The idea of martyrdom and the genre of the martyr passion were deeply embedded in the violence of the Roman persecutions and the distinctive Roman cultural world of judicial tortures and spectacular entertainments.

In one of his last articles, the late Gilbert Dagron pointed out how Byzantium was purposely ‘forgotten’ in historiographical constructions of Europe stretching back to the First World War and continuing through the Annales school. The racist myth that Europe was produced by a merger between an exhausted Romanity and a young and vital Germanity was then replaced by the idea that Europe had emerged out of the mosaic of peoples in Charlemagne's empire. Significantly, in this new narrative, Charlemagne's Europe had moved to the north, away from the Mediterranean area, and Byzantium had no further role in European memory. This historiographical perspective left aside not only Mediterranean Byzantium, but also the Iberian peninsula, which had entered the European community fairly late, just as, centuries before, it stood on the margins of the Carolingian sphere of influence. It should hardly be surprising that, whereas the rest of Europe built a collective memory by deliberately forgetting Byzantium and the Mediterranean, Spain used Byzantium to work out parts of its own memory.

Still, such diverging paths do not account enough for the fact that, for several decades, many historians of the Visigothic kingdom were seemingly so fascinated by the Byzantine empire that they strove to uncover similarities between both polities, or even the imitation of the latter by the former—an obsession we will call ‘Byzantinism’.

Introduction

Around the year 508 CE, Bishop Avitus of Vienne wrote to his brother Bishop Apollinaris of Valence asking for a gold monogrammed ring, whose features he described in detail. He asked Apollinaris to ensure that the ring was not made from a ‘corrupted mixture of gold’ that was of the same debased metal content that the ‘King of the Visigoths had commanded to the public mint’. Avitus's letter offers a tantalizing hint that this Visigothic ruler, Alaric II (r. 484–507 CE), was reducing the fineness of his gold, which people including Avitus had noticed. A clause in the Burgundian law code, the Liber Constitutionum issued around a decade after Avitus's letter, corroborates that Alaric had apparently minted adulterated coinage, since the clause banned coins that ‘had been debased at the time of king Alaric’. Several other stories about the last few years of Alaric's reign discuss Visigothic money as well. The Chronicle of Fredegar, for example, recounts that Alaric II owed tribute to the ruler of the Merovingians, Clovis (d. 511). Alaric was required to pay Clovis the amount of gold required to cover a mounted Merovingian envoy and his spear. When Alaric could not fulfil this impossible demand, conflict broke out between the two rulers, with Clovis eventually victorious. Likewise, both Gregory of Tours and Procopius of Caesarea explicitly mention that Clovis carried off Alaric's treasure at the end of the conflict.

Introduction

Studies that examine Byzantine influence or presence in Hispania tend to focus on two locations: the nascent Visigothic court at Toledo that developed from the mid-sixth century onwards, and the province that was established under Justinian on the southern coast of Hispania in the mid-sixth century, the capital of which lay at Cartagena. Historical and art historical scholarship has tended to focus geographically on the imperial presence in the south-east of the Iberian peninsula, on elite-level religious and political interactions, and on the ‘influence’ that Byzantine culture and theology exerted on the Visigothic kingdom. Archaeologists, meanwhile, have tended to address economic issues. The roles of what are assumed to be peripheral regions and the people that inhabited them have, in general, been overlooked in favour of examples of imperial-royal interactivity.

This approach to relations between the Byzantine world and post-Roman Hispania is at odds with much recent work on the Iberian peninsula, which has adopted a regional perspective. Many scholars, often drawing more directly on material evidence, have sought to move beyond centralizing sources and the Toledo-focused narratives that they propagated. This chapter focuses on connectivity (evidence for linkages to the eastern Mediterranean and the north of Africa) and interactivity (cases in which we can see active engagement and/or reciprocal exchange with such regions) on a micro-regional level.