Johan Normark
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Göteborg University, Sweden
The following text is a short resume of what I call Polyagentive Archaeology. It shares some similarities with Symmetrical Archaeology. Apart from the ingredients of Latour, other technoscientists and Gell, which all have been used in recent years, polyagentive archaeology mainly includes ideas from Bergson, Deleuze, Grosz, DeLanda, Pearson, Badiou, Sartre, Nietzsche, Darwin and Aijmer. The most recently updated text is my dissertation (Normark 2006) from which the following text is taken and slightly modified.
Polyagentive archaeology proceeds from the idea that the real challenge for archaeology is to construct a theory where the material remains are in focus and not the human beings which are the focus of the humanocentric approaches lumped together such as “culture-history”, “processualism” or “postprocessualism” (“assymetrical archaeologies”). Here I am partly following Fahlander and Oestigaard’s (2004:5) belief that archaeology is entering a third formative phase; the study of the social dimensions of materialities. Like my fellow colleagues Cornell and Fahlander (2002), I do not believe in an absolute symmetry since polyagentive archaeology seeks human patterns but these are initially reduced in order to find what is continuous and persistent in the archaeological record. This continuous and persistent is not the human being. However, neither is it the artefact as a material thing. Even material objects change, they become. Polyagentive archaeology sets the focus on the processes of becoming, the actualizations of the virtual.
In some contemporary social theory there has been an emphasis on the relationship between humans and non-humans, especially in the field of technoscience (Haraway 2003; Ihde 2003; Latour 1987, 1993, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Law 1999; Pickering 1995, 1997, 2003). These researchers are united in a belief in an active material world. However, the only way in which we can represent this active and changing world is through static entities and solids, such as words, pictures, numbers and matter (Bergson 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004). For this reason, some technoscientists wish to abandon the representational idiom (Fris Jørgenssen 2003:213). This is also a central issue in the polyagentive approach.
One way to break away from hyper-representationalism is to loosen up the entities, make them interpenetrate, and not see them as isolated from each other. However, we still need to write and illustrate our ideas, and we can never escape the representationalist chains. Instead, the focus for polyagentive archaeology is on how polyagents interact without any particular entity taking the central role. No entity can have an absolute boundary in space and time. In this endeavour I ally myself with posthumanism, since my aim is to decentralize, in some instances even end, the importance of human beings in archaeology. If the relation between the human and the non-human is just a social construction, then this distinction is useless. However, I do believe that this relation is more than a social construction, particularly since social constructionism sees the becomings of materiality only as the result of human activities and imagination, something Deleuze calls hylomorphism (Pearson 1999:214). Therefore, my approach aims to go beyond constructionism (Hacking 1999), representationalism and hylomorphism (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), in order to find the basis elsewhere.

Evolution revisited
Polyagentive archaeology is a neo-materialist and neo-realist approach that reappraises evolutionary ideas because by not acknowledging evolutionary processes, the constructionist approaches become static. There is no essential human being at any place and at any time. The constructionists must therefore argue that changes cannot come from within, but from without. This is a transcendent, hylomorphic and humanocentric view. What most agency-oriented researchers refuse to see is Darwin’s greatest contribution. The “feminist” philosopher Grosz points out, in her reading of Darwin, that he transformed Being (the static, eternal and essential), to Becoming (the changing); to divergence, more complexity and variation. Darwin’s world is endless variation and openness to the unexpected. It is not that of biological determinism or stages (orthogenetic evolution), which are other evolutionary ideas. Darwin saw the past as the mould for the present species but the past does not limit them. He introduced the idea of the event, the rupture that generates the unpredictable. Grosz does not see the past as the cause for the present or the future, but rather the basis for divergence and difference (Grosz 2004:7-8).
Thus, there are other ways of viewing evolution that do not run up in the dichotomy between agents and genes that Kristiansen (2004:77) has formulated. These are lines developed by some of Darwin’s philosophical followers; Nietzsche and Bergson (Grosz 2004). A mixture of these philosophers ideas are found in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1988) writings where they wish to move towards rhizomatic or machinic models of evolution instead of the predominant genealogical/arbolic and filiative models. They emphasize an ethology of assemblages rather than one of behaviour. In contrast to Darwin and the neo-Darwinists, Bergson and Deleuze do not give primacy to the gene, the germ cell, the organism, the species or the memes. They focus on the becoming of duration and intensive processes that lack a specific spatial location (Pearson 1999:145). Therefore, evolution is not just hereditary transmission and reproduction as suggested by Dawkins (1989) and his selfish genes.
Based upon Deleuzian ideas, Pearson (1999) argues for a reconfigured ethology where bodies become the vehicle for instincts which are particular territories of becoming and of identities that emerge through differentiation, divergence and creation. Behaviour is no longer localized in individuals as a form of a Cartesian homunculi. It is seen as a result of complex material networks which cut across individuals and which transverse boundaries of organisms or objects (rhizomes). A rhizome consists of plateaus or multiplicities that are connected to other multiplicities that form or extend a rhizome. A multiplicity is a unity that is multiple in itself. The rhizome is different from the tree metaphor (arborescent thinking and structure) since a rhizome connects any multiplicity with any other multiplicity. It has no centre and it is non-hierarchical and non-signifying. It does not consist of units, but of movement. There is no beginning or end; there is just a middle, an in-between. Whereas the tree logic emphasizes tracing in a direct line and reproduction, a rhizome is a map with multiple entryways (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). The world is a changing field of multiplicities or in another word; assemblages of heterogeneous components (human, animal, molecular, materiality) in which the creative evolution involve blocks of becoming (Pearson 1999:171).
The reason why we have problems in understanding such a changing world is found in Bergson’s writings. He argues that our mind has evolved to seek a lowest common denominator, a spatial location from where we can begin our understanding of the world. When we create a model of becoming we tend to freeze the process to a static frame and shape it into a being. We freeze duration to instants so we can analyze it. This is how science has created its categories and the way in which human beings gain knowledge (Bergson 1998). Our acts exert on fixed points in space where duration gets broken down to instants that relate to our positions (a discrete or an actual multiplicity). These instants are only snapshots that our mind has extracted from the continuity of duration (the continuous or virtual multiplicity). From this, the mind forms artificially closed systems (Pearson 2000:150). Our mind cannot understand the duration of the world since it uses these static frames as points of reference. We cannot understand what is fluid because we think to act, and to do that we need to calculate and foresee, something we do from fixed points and units. Therefore, we tend to forget that we have created the categories or representations we use. In reality, there is no fixed point or representation, only a continuous “stream” of duration (Beronius 1991:38). It is from these representations we “construct” our world view. In short, there is no fixed and ready society, and reality should be seen as a process rather than as a static being.
Bergson has by some been called a vitalist philosopher, particularly since he uses the idea of élan vital, the vital impetus, which drives the evolution (Bergson 1998). However, vitalism attributes to life a force that distinguishes it from the inorganic. It is usually opposed to mechanism, the idea that things are made up of external and mechanical atomic elements. Vitalism argues that the organism is greater than all its parts taken together (Grosz 1999:22). Bergson’s philosophy does not give matter the openness it gives to life. However, we cannot always draw a distinct line between life and non-life. The distinction between human agents and other life forms gets complicated when we try to draw the artificial boundaries between them. This means that agency has an evolutionary component that agency theorists do not confront by relying on social essentialism. Where shall we draw a line for something to be called an agent if we by agency mean the capability to affect the environment since even animals can be seen as transcendental subjectivities (San Martin and Peñaranda 2001)? It is easy to draw a line for agency if we compare a human being and a stone. However, if we follow the “chain of life” in pre-Darwinian thought (McDonald Pavelka 2002), which still is connected to traditional evolutionism, and compare chimpanzees with us; chimpanzees with dogs; dogs with lizards; fish, insects, trees, unicellular beings, etc., where do we find this boundary? Viruses are halfway between the organic and the inorganic. From such a perspective, it is not easy to say when “agency” appeared. Thus, there can never be a clear line between a supposed material inertia and the living that becomes. The material also becomes and it is this process that it shares with the living. It is information “bound up with a particular mode or organization of matter, that becomes, that expands itself as it is impelled to the future” (Grosz 1999:23).
Technical objects are more retroactive compared to biology. An evolution of technical objects does not work along a V-shaped vertical, arbolic, branch where there is increased diversity. It is rather a flat horizontal, rhizomatic, line from which multiple technical objects emerge and changes occur spontaneously. Outdated objects can reappear within new designs as if they only needed some additional invention in order to evolve again (retroactivity). These objects borrow from other technological lineages. This cannot occur in biological evolution, a dead branch can never reappear. Indexical polyagents (materiality manufactured and used by human beings that leaves a trace, an index) can therefore operate on the past (Barnet 2004). Barnet (2004) argues that it is our inevitable death that strive us to create archives or objects that leave a trace of ourselves for others to remember. These objects or inscriptions are beyond ourselves and remain after our deaths. Stiegler (1998) suggests that this is a structure of inheritance and transmission that exists beyond the genome. It is believed to carry a collective and transcendent wisdom, or “culture” which is seen as a series of memorials. I partly agree, but I focus on the immanent.
The polyagentive approach primarily differs from the humanocentric archaeology in that it tries to decentralize the human, to give an account of active tangible archaeological materialities and intangibilities (anything that can be perceived but which is not solid or palpable). This approach also aims to initially de-culturalize and de-socialize the past by emphasizing what lasts, differentiates and repeats. This is not found in the static actualizations, it is found in the virtual.
The dissertation “The Roads In-Between: Causeways and Polyagentive Networks at Ichmul and Yo’okop, Cochuah Region, Mexico” is available on the Microarchaeological Homepage and the Cochuah Regional Archaeological Survey’s (CRAS) Homepage.
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