Over the last few weeks I have been causally reading through the various chapters in a recent book edited by Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden and Colin Renfrew entitled Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (2004). The book, the material product of a symposium with the same title held in March 2003 at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge, is a rich collection of 23 essays and one introduction which attends to what the editors describe as ‘current thinking about materiality in world archaeology’ (2004, 1). While there is a diversity of issues raised in the book, my concern here is with the nature of human and material relations specifically characterized in terms of a ‘dialectic,’ which was put forth and promoted by a number of the contributing authors.
Here is a list of select quotes:
• “I believe agency must be conceptualized in terms of a dialectic relationship with structure, or, in simpler terms, with reference to the ‘rules of the game’” (DeMarrais 12).
• “The affordances of the wheel-throwing technique need to be discovered each time, in real time and space within the totality of the interactive parameters. The cognitive dialectic is in a constant state of becoming through the process of ‘accommodation and resistance’” (Malafouris 59).
• “Once culture is externalized as material things which exist objectively in inter-subjective zones and which channel future actions, the result is a dialectic played out between kinds of agency” (Robb 137).
• “Studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects but must engage in the dialectic of people and things” (Meskell 249).
While each of these authors has a different agenda, all evoke the term ‘dialectic’ as a means of understanding the relationship between two poles of a bifurcation (DeMarrais and Robb), a duality (Meskell), or a separation within a set of relations (Malafouris) which they wish to ‘overcome.’ All of these archaeologists, along with others in the volume, are weary of what we might characterize as modernist dichotomies (subject / object, mind / body) in understanding how human beings relate to the material world (though they use the sufficiently all encompassing and ambiguous term of materiality; refer to my entry from February 24, 2006).

To characterize such relations as dialectic in nature is to begin with a particular bifurcation of the world. Indeed, for example, when these archaeologists deploy the term ‘dialectic’ they are basically subscribing to the belief that people make things and things make people. As such they support the notion that things and people begin as detached and separated entities.
But deploying the term ‘dialectic’ is not the correct trench to be digging in if we are to excavate underneath these divides. And this strategy is to be distinguished from ‘overcome’ which dialectical thinking would have us believe is possible. We should stick to our archaeological metaphors, because the means to bypass these divides is not to take to the dialectical high ground, but rather to dig down to the roots of the problem, to the source of the myth, and undercut it. This requires some explanation.
Within dialectics it is possible, many claim, to escape dualism through a fusion, a synthesis of the two extremes. So while a dialectical scheme allows for hybrids, it is very much a hybrid of two pure and unadulterated components in equal proportion (this comes across in Meskell’s chapter: refer to p250). Dialectics begins with the bifurcation and separation of entities such as people and things or agency and structure and then moves toward the resolution of that dichotomy. And this scheme is to be repeated, over and over again.
Dialectics, the myth of an eternal return, deploys a logic and vocabulary ‘so impoverished that anything and everything can be drawn from it’ (Serres with Latour 1995: 155). Within this oversimplified scheme, as Michel Serres has pointed out, ‘you only have to set up a contradiction, and you will always be right… From the false comes anything. Contradiction enables you to deduce anything from anything’ (Ibid). Such repetition keeps us from the novel and inventive.
The crux here centers upon the question of how we understand what it is to be a human being and how human beings in turn relate to the material world. Indeed, this question is at the heart of Lambros Malafouris’ excellent chapter on issues of ‘extended mind’/distributed cognition where what it is to be human is not limited to the skin, but is mingled with the things of the world in such a way that they are ‘ontologically inseparable’ (also refer to Knappett, Chapter 4). So dialectics as I have defined it should have no place here.
The problem with dialectics is that it doesn’t allow for the mixture (also Latour 1993: 55-56). The human being is an entanglement of various qualities and things but this is not a mingling of pure forms. Mixture is an ontological state prior to the process of purification which dialectics is complacent in accepting and exacerbating. It is with the mixture that we must begin. In this regard ‘humanity begins with things’ (Serres with Latour 1995, 166; also Olsen 2003). But this is not to fall into the revolving door of a dialectical return to the material. While it very well may be the case that some, as Meskell claims, “have easily been seduced by the magical potentials that objects are actors in the same way as individual persons, thus collapsing the subject:object dichotomy” (Meskell 249-250), for this to be the state of affairs is to fail to recognize this important distinction. The mingling I speak of is never that of two pure forms.
Things come together to make society but how this occurs is what separates Latourian understandings from those of Hegel or even Marx. To state that the positions of Latour and Marx are not so different as Meskell does (257) fails to recognize this distinction and thus betrays a profound misunderstanding.
John Robb repeats such misunderstanding when he freely deploys subject-object, human-nonhuman as if these were stable concepts freely interchangeable with each other to account for a bifurcation of people and things (Robb:131). These notions designate entirely different phenomena, the former a hyper-commensurable duality which was produced out of a long process of modernist purification, the latter refers to a way of designating and maintaining difference in the relations between people and things in a way which is not predicated upon a modernist contradiction, but one which simultaneously allows for mixture (refer to Latour 1999: 20-22).
While we should be careful of black-boxing terms we must also come to agreement about the vocabulary we deploy. We must be more exacting in our categories and more inventive with our logic. Undercutting such ‘deprivation through dialectics’ begins with reconfiguring the key ingredients of the world on the ground in practice (for examples of how to do this refer to: Shanks 2004; Witmore 2004 and (in press)).
Few today remember the etymology of dialectics and for this we must go pre-Hegel, pre-Kant, pre-Latin dialectica even. The Greek dialektikos, a combination of dialektos and techne, is the art of discussion. This is the art of debate.
Back to discussion; back to debate; for unless we wish to spiral into more fragmentation and incommensurability we must cut through such misunderstandings in relation to our common matters of concern—in this case, what is it to be human, how have we related to the world, and how are we to do so. But at the same time we must not fall back into the boring alteration between two poles in an effort to reach synthesis.
Archaeology, as Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden and Colin Renfrew have demonstrated, has much to contribute here.
References
DeMarrais, E., C. Gosden and C Renfrew (eds) 2004. Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world. Cambridge: MacDonald Institute Monographs.
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. (tr. C. Porter), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 1999. Pandora’s hope. Essays on the reality of science studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Olsen, B. 2003. Material culture after text: Re-membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(2), 87-104.
Serres, M. and B. Latour 1995. Conversations on science, culture, and time. (trans. R. Lapidus.) Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Shanks, M., 2004: Three rooms, Journal of social archaeology 4(2), 147-80.
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. (in press) Landscape, time, topology: An archaeological account of the southern Argolid Greece, In D. Hicks, G. Fairclough and L. McAtackney (eds), Landscapes in Archaeology, London: Routledge