Mike Pearson died last week. He was a performance artist, theatre director, theorist and philosopher, scholar and teacher. And, as composer John Hardy said, Mike collaborated and connected – visual design, architectural stagecraft, poets, playwrights, composers, experimental jazz musicians, dancers, disability & gender specialists, comics, community art conveners, museum curators, traditional Japanese theatre performers, Patagonian farmers,…
the posthuman
The principle of symmetry according to Tim Ingold: An occasion for more clarification
When deployed in the context of metaphysics, symmetry is an awkward, even unsightly, term. Those of us who have enrolled this principle have been the first to admit this. We have also been the first to state that we are more than happy to take leave of symmetry. But such vocabulary works because it is…
Polyagency – in-between the virtual and the actual. Polyagentive archaeology, Part IV
Originally, the notion of polyagency pertained to the causative capabilities of materialities and intangibilities in more or less a humanocentric way, similar to Gell’s agency concept (Normark 2004a, 2004b). However, now I see it as a phase of becoming and the word agency here relates to something active. Poly means many, and both words together…
Bergsonian and Deleuzian ontologies for a posthuman archaeology. Polyagentive archaeology, Part III
Can we rely on materialities, objects or humans in archaeological analyses? What should our basic categories of analysis be? What do the humans and non-humans share that make them create a network? Symmetrical archaeology suggests that we should not give primacy to the human while we study archaeological remains. To this I agree (Normark 2004a,…
Polyagentive archaeology. Part II: On the virtual and the actual
Polyagentive archaeology works from the understanding of two realities of the world; the virtual and the actual. The virtual (V1) The non-empirical and immanent level of polyagentive archaeology is the level of virtual (qualitative) multiplicities (Bergson 1998, 2001, 2004; Deleuze 1991, 1994). The virtual is a nonnumeric duration which is impossible to split up. It…
Polyagentive archaeology. Part I: Evolution Revisited
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…