Components for wind turbines at port in Nafplion, Greece.
Last Wednesday I attended a workshop at MIT entitled “Relocating innovation: Places and material practices of future making”. Convened by Lucy Suchman (in residence with the Department of Anthropology at MIT for the Spring of 2009), Endre Dányi and Laura Watts, all of the Centre for Science Studies at the University of Lancaster (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/), the workshop sought to critically engage with discourses of ‘innovation’ through the comparative juxtaposition of “three different sites of social, technological, and political future making”: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Orkney, Scotland and the Hungarian Parliament. A basic premise of the workshop was that futures, or more precisely ‘future(s) making’, are located.
It helps to situate this premise—futures are located—by thinking about it historically. Thales in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, al-Haytham at Dar Al-Hekma, Edison in his laboratory Menlo Park, President Obama in the Oval Office; with each figure and site one encounters scenarios where horizons for substantial potentiality were designed. Whether we speak of geometry, optics, electricity or efficiency targets for the American Auto Industry, the practices undertaken with each site translated into futures that were made. (Of course, none of these futures were inevitable. The clinamen, Lucretius’ indeterminate swerve, is always a possibility.)
By centering our account upon these key figures, it is perhaps easy to see why popular culture persistently regards innovation as the province of the lone genius. However, Suchman, Dányi and Watts are much more cautious. Future(s) making, as the workshop sought to probe in more depth, is shaped by heterogeneous network of entities, contestations, utterly specific qualities of place and culturally oriented material practices. With each site of future(s) making one also encounters innovation at work.

So, yes, futures are located. Of course, the great difficulty is in predicting exactly where and when they are to be found. Those that identified Google in the making were all rewarded substantially when the company went public in August of 2004. Most of us, to use an aphorism that arose during workshop, are always a few minutes late.
Suchman, Dányi and Watts’ ethnographic interventions critically engage with the question of how futures are shaped by their location. In juxtaposing PARC (a center for innovation), Orkney (an island with a small scale high-tech industry in which new technologies are tested)) and the Hungarian Parliament (an iconic political assembly for articulating politically sanctioned futures) their project is a katachretic one; one where connections arise in ways they would not have occurred otherwise (on katachresis as an empirical strategy see Shanks 2004). These connections fell under the heading of a number of themes—newness, centres/peripheries, place and landscape, (non)histories and distributed-centered subject/objects (Mialet 1999)—which were engaged over the course of the afternoon by the participants.
So why should archaeologists be sitting in this crowd? (I was one of two archaeologists, along with my JIAAW colleague and friend Krysta Ryzewski—who, to be sure, has her own, extremely interesting, grounds for participating.)
Several reasons.
In her research on Orkney, Laura Watts has shown how past crafting is simultaneously a form of future(s) making. For example, landscape has been argued as central to the associations and practices that went into the Ring of Brodgar stone circle (see, for example, Richards 1996). The land is part of the monument. As a world heritage site the protected buffer zone extends to the horizon. No wind turbines can be constructed within view of the circle. (Such is the case in my own research area in Greece where both Tiryns and Mycenae enjoy similar protections whose effectiveness in this regard can be gauged by gazing at the ridgelines to the southwest.)
Likewise, in the shadow of fashioning the new is the crafting of the old. Across all sites, Suchman, Dányi and Watts traced a “remarkable repetitiveness” in how the new was forged. Consistently, it was only by shedding the past that the kinetics of ‘newness’ thrived. In other words, if innovation is one’s business then newness becomes an expression of forward movement. It was in this movement that Suchman, in her work at PARC, pointed to the simultaneous elimination of what were essentially rendered as ‘antiquated practices’. So while the Alto workstation with its large 2.5 MB removable discs becomes archival as a 1979 stop along the tracks of progression, the associated idiosyncrasies of knowledge craftsmanship and tacit bodily interactions are left to oblivion. Sites of futures making were found to also be sites of forgetting.
Arising out of an urge to craft the new was an accompanying gesture, an old and familiar ‘Copernican’ gesture, of casting previous practices, now regarded as hindrances, by the wayside. In sacrificing past practices in the face of crafting the new we often run the risk, the likelihood, of repetition. In such cases, ‘newness’ often becomes a false mobility (Sloterdijk 2006).
We are now quite familiar and rightly concerned with how such gestures spill over these sites and inundate our world (González-Ruibal 2006). Peter Sloterdijk stated it as a “trivial fact that kinetics is the ethics of modernity” (2006, 37). In his research with the Hungarian Parliament, Dányi scrutinizes such movements as aspects of the “technopolitical”. For Dányi, Hungarian technopolitics goes hand in hand with Andrew Barry’s “technological society”. “A technological society is one which takes technological change to be the model for political invention” (2001, 2). Concerned with maintaining position at the risk of being left behind on the international stage, many European governments have adopted a philosophy: constantly “retool, adapt and update” (Ibid. 1). These attitudes tread dangerously upon the line of innovate at any expense. For Dányi a key question in the face of technopolitics is how to proceed in a responsible way?
At the root of innovation is the Latin word innovare: to renew. However, a second, less acknowledged connotation of innovare is ‘to alter’. In some small way, every new technology changes our rapport with the world and among ourselves. Without a long-term perspective, without the careful consideration of the accompanying losses associated with these alterations, a technological society can be said to hold forth on the very short term exclusively. Its politics, its future(s) making, are often the result of immediate reckonings and instant gain (Serres 1995). The belatedly recognized losses have spawned counter movements in the form of sustainable design, alternative energy, organic farming and so on. For these to be truly effective, as Michel Serres has argued, they need to break free of the narrow domain of the immediate. For how, asks Serres, “are we to succeed in a long-term enterprise with short-term means” (Ibid. 31)?
If entropy, if perpetual perishing, is the rule, then archaeology is the struggle against it. Our task is to toil against forgetting, but not simply in the short term. An archaeological intervention into the technopolitics of innovation comes with forging very long terms. The question is what do these look like?
Very long terms run to the heart of archaeological perspectives. They are encapsulated in work of V. Gordon Childe with the rise of civilization, André Leroi-Gourhan with the externalization of memory, and Chuck Redman with long-term human relations with environments (to name but a few key figures and research). Innovation is no latecomer to change. It has, to borrow the verb from the title of the workshop, been relocated to a central position that thrives in an atmosphere where “morals and kinetics” are melded together and sustained as a “controlled morality” (Sloterdijk 2006). In absence of other beacons, our innovation as archaeologists might become one of reframing past narratives in order to offer viable long-term alternatives (also see Shennan 2004). (Such is behind Ian Hodder’s recent work with questions of ownership and what he calls “sustainable time travel” [2003].)
In the end, the workshop prompted us to further consider two key issues: 1) past crafting is a key aspect of responsible future(s) making and; 2) true innovation arises through deep re-membering. No doubt, these issues deserve far more work and consideration by both archaeologists and science studies researchers alike.
References
Barry, A. 2001: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London & New York: The Athlone Press.
González-Ruibal, A. 2006: The Dream of Reason: An Archaeology of the Failures of Modernity in Ethiopia. Journal of Social Archaeology 6(2), 175-201.
Hodder, I. 2003: Sustainable Time Travel: Towards a Global Politics of the Past. In S. Kane (ed.) The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context. Boston: The Archaeological Institute of America, pp. 139-47.
Mialet, H. 1999: Do Angels Have Bodies? Two Stories About Subjectivity in Science: The Cases of William X and Mister H. Social Studies of Science 29(4), 551-81.
Richards, C. 1996: Monuments as Landscape: Creating the Centre of the World in Late Neolithic Orkney. World Archaeology 28(2), 190-208.
Serres, M. 1995: The Natural Contract. (trans. W. macArthur and W. Paulson). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Shanks, M. 2004: Three Rooms: Archaeology and Performance. Journal of Social Archaeology 4(2), 147-80.
Shennan, S. 2004: Analytical Archaeology. In J. Bintliff (ed.) A Companion to Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 3-20.
Sloterdijk, P. 2006: Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification. TDR: The Drama Review 50(4), 36-43.