Here is the Prezi presentation for the paper I gave in Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall’s excellent “Worlds Otherwise” session during this weekend’s TAG at Brown University (click on the image above).
I left this year’s Theoretical Archaeology Group with a profound sense of enthusiasm and excitement for the work being presented in that venue. It is clear that many archaeologists are now pushing the envelope of some trans-disciplinary agendas (clear also from the steady numbers of non-archaeologists taking an interest in TAG).
This year there was more emphasis on discussion-oriented sessions. There was more of a willingness to press awkward questions and take risks. There were many exhibitions set up in the stunning new Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. And, do correct me if I am wrong, but this was the first time there has ever been an open bar for all participants at TAG (Michael Shanks did have an open bar at the Metamedia open house last year at TAG Stanford, with Doug Bailey making martinis). In many ways TAG 2010 was one of the best Theoretical Archaeology Groups yet.
4 thoughts on “Archaeology and the Speculative Turn”
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The speculative turn or OOO tries to get away from the subject-object relation but they still maintain the concept of object (which should imply that there still is a subject?). We could perhaps talk about object-object relations instead (but does not that still imply another form of correlation?).
Is there really a symmetry between all these objects in symmetrical archaeology? Humans are still singled out as more specific than other objects (or things if we do not mind the distinction between these two terms). This is still a slightly anthropocentric view, particularly when the symmetrical archaeological idea says that “humanity begins with things”. This is an image that relies on Aristotle’s general and specific. Things are lumped together as a general category (not the specific vessel or sword) and are just there to affect humans (a more specified, but still a coarse, category). Thus, humans are still picked out as more specific than the things and this is not an altogether symmetrical relation. The duality between human and non-human is maintained.
The ontology may be flat but our interest is still drawn toward the human or that manufactured by a human. Can we ever escape the trees growing up around the rhizomes?
Many thanks for your comments Johan. It is great to have the feedback.
There are, in fact many, many definitions of the term object floating around and, obviously, given the baggage that comes with the notion one needs to take care. This point is well taken.
I, however, disagree with the point about the speculative turn maintaining the concept of ‘object’ one finds in correlationalist philosophy. Admittedly, there are many different perspectives under this loose rubric. Still, Graham Harman, for example, has been very careful about the definition of object (have a look at Harman’s Intentional Objects for Non-Humans, 2008). I usually add the necessary proviso for object: “not to be construed as in opposition to the word of ‘subject’”—one needs to define their terms. So long as one thoroughly unhitches the concept of ‘object’ from any presumed privilege given to “‘objective’ matters in opposition to ‘subjective’ language, symbols, values, or feeling’” (Latour Reassembling the Social 2005, 76) the term can be very useful as a placeholder for the longer litanies I mention in the 10 minute Prezi presentation, in the least. Moreover, if we direct our critical acumen at language it won’t be long before we have thrown out many, many more concepts. Language routinely fails when dealing with ontological questions and so it pays to be utterly specific.
At the same time one can put too much explanatory weight in awkward terms such as symmetry. We have always been up front with this. And quite frankly I don’t follow your criticisms here. By stating that humans are singled out with symmetrical archaeology, you have not given due credit to the point that the very question of what it is to be human has been recomposed (Webmoor and Witmore, Things are Us, 2008).
So far, symmetrical archaeology has been deployed to address some interesting metaphysical questions but that does not mean that the notion of symmetry is limited to them. And while symmetry helps us to avoid the strife between intentional thinking subjects and passive inanimate objects, there is absolutely no reason that the term cannot also remind practitioners not to assume any privileged position between Greek poleis, arbitration texts, and piles of stone on a ridgeline. The point is to place all these entities on equal footing, walls and goats, priests and farmers, shepherds and boundary markers, whatever. From here, I believe we all are now better situated to follow associations wherever and whenever they may lead (see Auslander et al 2009). And this latter point, I believe we share as common concern in understanding notions of co-emergence as you specify in your recent piece “Involutions in Materiality”. Beyond this, I am not that bothered to defend the notion of symmetry, like so many other terms it is simply meant to help us, well me and a few other archaeologists, move on to what we see as some more interesting questions.
I agree that language is an obstacle in ontological discussions. Terminology is just a way to navigate between “objects”, “things”, “actual” or whatever we might call them (this is one of the reasons why Deleuze constantly changed his terminology). Bergson once pointed out that when we define an object we are not adding anything to that object, we are actually subtracting something from it. The object (or image as he would call it) is always more than our representations of it.
What I wished to point out that we group together walls, vessels, lithics, etc. as things or objects but still maintain far more specified terms for “humans”. There is probably no other way we can do it. Let’s take your example of “walls and goats, priests and farmers, shepherds and boundary markers”. Are they really on equal footing as a flat ontology suggests? The definition of goats is based on a species level, walls probably have a great variation in layout, style, etc. The human categories are far more differentiated and specified but still a bit generalized (priests, farmers and shepherds). The point here is that the traditional “objects” are more generalized and “subjects” more specified. This is the image of Deleuze and Guattari’s tree, a hierarchical view where we move from the general to the specific. The general defines the specific in a non-symmetrical fashion.
Of course, it is our language that groups these things together, it is our habit of thinking that freezes the spatiotemporal flow and create a static unit. However, in reality there are no such distinctions. We have this “goat” (not goats in general) and that goat can only be defined by what is mesh with and that is the assemblage(s) it is part of. These meshworks change in time and will affect the goat (when the relations changes from being herded to being slaughtered). Hence I see relations as more fundamental in defining the goat as “this goat” (a haecceity) than it being an object. What interests me is the “diagram” or “abstract machine” that unites these objects into a persistent assemblage. I believe that archaeology has a potential here to study “diagrams” rather than the objects themselves since they always escape our definitions anyway.
I do agree that the goat is ‘defined’ with respect to the web of relations it is caught up within or ‘meshes’ with. And it is precisely here that the notion of symmetry plays a role in helping us to understand how entities are continually figured within various assemblages. Placing all entities on equal footing simply provides an analytical starting point; a flat ontology is not necessarily the outcome. Obviously there are winners and losers—Ian Bogost has expressed this point well: “though all things equally exist they do not exist equally” (2010, Materialisms, http://www.bogost.com/blog/materialisms.shtml). The question is how to gain access to the ways by which other entities define themselves.
While we may not have very discriminating criteria for goats in the litany I mentioned above, two hours spent with a group of shepherds in the Southern Argolid will reveal a host of interesting characters, dramas, and relations. Their differentiation will include every animal and none of them will be figured within Linnaean schemes of scientific classification. In contrast, local farmers (a generic category for the sake of argumentation) would understand the goats completely differently in the midst growing season, as potential treats to the latest crop of wheat. Good work must go forward into the world and the whole point comes down to how we can do this in as ‘empirically’ rich a way as possible.