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From time to time I will likely bring into this space ideas from the graduate seminar I am teaching at Berkeley this semester on New Materialisms. For now, I thought I would leave you with a very long piece of writing: my commentary on the TAG 2014 plenary session, Convergence: New Materialisms and Ontologies in Archaeological Perspective
May 23, 2014
a site exists
by virtue of its specific hangings together, its variations and its
congealments...these processes signal a tendency toward convergence on the part
of loosely defined bodies. (Woodward, Jones, & Marston 2012:210)
Archaeology
straddles those academic divisions that Karen Barad notes were charged with a
"division of labor" in which "the natural sciences are assigned
matters of fact and the humanities matters of concern", something she
critiques because this division "elides the resonances and dissonances
that...make entanglements visible" (in Dolphijn & van der Tuin
2012:50).
That
position makes the archaeological perspective a promising place from which to
engage new materialism productively.
For
new materialism, a touchstone has been the redefinition of matter as something
beyond any specific physical stuff, as active, in Jane Bennett's (2010)
felicitous term, as Vibrant Matter.
This shared perspective is exemplified by a gloss provided by Karen Barad, who
wrote that
matter does not
refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter
is substance in its intra-active becoming-- not a thing, but a doing, a
congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of
iterative intra-activity (Barad 2003:822; emphasis original).
Coole
and Frost (2010:8) describe the project of new materialism as an
"insistence on describing active processes of materialization of which
embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of
dead matter from which human subjects are apart".
Or as Bennett
(2010:117) puts it, materialities comprise "all forces and flows"
including the human body and nonhumans, differentiated but
too protean and
diverse to coincide exclusively with philosophical categories of life, matter,
mental, environmental. The consistency of the field is more uneven than that:
portions congeal into bodies, but not in a way that makes any one type the
privileged site of agency. The source of effects is, rather, always an
ontologically diverse assemblage of energies and bodies, of simple and complex
bodies, of the physical and the physiological.
All
these statements share a few core commitments: a refusal of separate ontologies
for nature and culture; a concern with emergence or immanence, materialities in
action rather than inert; and connection among elements replacing any presumed
hierarchy of elements.
Mary
Weismantel challenges us to rethink places like Çatalhöyük and the ancient
north coast of Peru. Demonstrating how the concept of assemblages at multiple
scales might be thought through the convergence of forces, humans, and
nonhumans, she asks us to make our abstract notions of
"relationality" more concrete, and shows us that the social
theoretical tradition provides ways to think about specific characters of
relationality.
New
materialism appears positioned as a response to post-structuralist emphases on
language; to quote Rosi Braidotti: "'neo-materialism' emerges as a method,
a conceptual frame and a political stand, which refuses the linguistic
paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies
immersed in social relations of power" (Rosi Braidotti in Dolphijn &
van der Tuin 2012:21). Hence in our own discipline, Archaeology After Interpretation.
Interrogation
of boundaries between humans, other animals, and other things in the world is
fundamental to new materialism, along with a persistent concern with the nature
of agential possibility and subjectivities. This culminates in the pursuit of
new ontologies, especially non-dualistic ontologies.
In
2010, Theodore Schatzki published an article calling for a new ontology
treating materiality as part of social life. He argued that "social
phenomena consist in nexuses of human practices and material arrangements"
to be understood relationally, as "intercalated constellations of
practices, technology, and materiality", asserting that this ontology
erases the boundary between society and materiality (Schatzki 2010:123, 124).
In keeping with new materialism's rejection of an ontological separation
between nature and humankind, Schatzki (2010:129) maintains that "in
arguing that materiality is part of society, I am arguing... that nonhuman organisms...are
part of society". Still, his new ontology defined "material
arrangements" as made up of four pre-determined kinds of entities:
"humans, artifacts, organisms, and things of nature" (Schatzki
2010:129).
Schatzki's
is just one example of a variety of new ontologies, many characterized as
"flat" ontologies, which are woven through new materialist research.
Quoting David Delgado Shorter, Tallbear underlines a less commonly emphasized
aspect of new materialisms: that it is post-secular; it admits of spirit that
was once ruled out of attempts to understand the world.
Benjamin
Alberti challenges us to implement an archaeology of risk and wonder. He asks,
can we get at ontological difference through archaeology? How might ontology
help interrogate us-- that is, archaeologists? He notes the trend over 30 years
to archaeologies assuming greater life, agency, dare I say vibrancy, of things.
He observes that the peak of this development comes in ontological
archaeologies, divided between new animists and new materialists. He describes
new materialists including Jane Bennett and Tim Ingold as describing everyone
as engaged with vibrant matter in motion. Yet he notes that the ontological
archaeologies have not yet answered Viveiros de Castro's observation that
ontologies other than the modernist become cultures. He critiques the
projection into objects of the inability of archaeologists to come to grips
with things, now described as "holding something back".
Site
ontology is another example that should be particularly interesting to
archaeologists; indeed, the quote I began with was not really intended to
describe archaeology at all, but rather to propose "site" as an
ontologically distinct replacement for space and place in geography. In site ontology,
"a site exits by virtue of its specific hangings together, its variations
and its congealments...while these processes signal a tendency toward
convergence on the part of loosely defined bodies, these need neither 'touch'
nor abut one another in any extensive sense" (Woodward, Jones, &
Marston 2012:210).
Weismantel's
emphasis on assemblage, including emphasizing the convergence between the
already existing archaeological use of the term, is echoed in my view by a
broader convergence between archaeology and new materialist geography on
"site" as the term for a locale that emerges through the convergence
of humans and nonhumans.
Site
ontology does not presume that a site is dependent on a subject entering or
otherwise inter-acting with it. But subjects are not gone; they simply aren't
central to calling sites into being. In site ontology, the subject is described
as "suspended":
suspension
suggests not simply the interruption of the subject as a structuring principle
of the understanding, but something more complex, where the subject, if not
still present to itself, nevertheless continues to lurk residually somewhere... one implication of this is
that a theory of subjectivity, according to site ontology, is not a theory of
presence per se... subjectivity is not something that is either there or not
there. (The subject does not exist as such, and certainly does not exist prior
to experience.) (Woodward et al. 2012:220).
Returning to
Alberti: he calls for us to employ wonder, for lingering on the things that
surprise. He asks how we mobilize wonder. He may be aware of the European
genealogy of wonder in what have been trivialized in some contemporary
histories as "curiousity cabinets", the English translation of the
German Wunderkammer. In these early
modern sites of experience and knowledge, assemblages of things were
comprehended through reactions that, over the last five centuries, have become
identified as emotional, and thus in a modernist view, no longer associated
with knowing. Wonder, in this western European case, specifies a kind of
subjectivity.
New
materialisms don't so much do away with subjectivity as insist that
subjectivity is produced in the same way as the rest of the world. We can chase
the subject through the work of some of the key contributors to new
materialism: feminists Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, and Manuel de Landa.
Temporalities: Subjectivity, Memory, History
Braidotti
(2000:159) initially used the term "neo-materialism" to describe
"a definition of the subject, the 'I think' as the body of which it is an
idea, which we see as the emblem of the new materialism". In the same
context, Braidotti described the subject as "an embodied memory". A
few years later, she commented at greater length on the implied relationship between
temporality and subjectivity in her work:
To be in
process or transition does not place the thinking subject outside history or
time...A location is an embedded and embodied memory...A location is a
materialist temporal and spatial site of co-production of the subject
(Braidotti 2006:199).
Braidotti
argues that "complexity is the key term for understanding the multiple
affective layers, the complex temporal
variables and the internally contradictory time- and memory- lines that
frame our embodied existence" (Braidotti in Dolphijn & van der Tuin
2012:33-34; emphasis added).
Manuel de
Landa (in Dolphijn & van der
Tuin 2012:39) adds that
all objective
entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is
synthesized or produced as part of a cosmological, geological, biological, or
social history.
De Landa
endorses the concept of "double articulation" developed by Deleuze
and Guattari, which is an inherently temporal process: "first, the raw
materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed;
second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own"
(in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012:39).
What
is produced, De Landa argues, are "individual entities",
"singular or unique", "not a particular member of a general category,
but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a
relation of part-to-whole" (in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012:40). This
is where he bases his "materialist ontology of individual entities",
which he argues each have "a date of birth and (potentially) a date of
death" (in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012:40, 44).
I
sense here a connection with Pipestone, Kim Tallbear's example of vibrant
materiality that is part of Dakota personhood. Tallbear criticizes interspecies
thinking that reserves living status to certain organisms. She argues that an
American Indian Metaphysic requires interspecies to be "stretched to
include nonhuman others" not accepted as living in "even critical
western frameworks". Kim Tallbear asks us to rethink the life/not-life
boundary.
For
both Braidotti and de Landa-- and thus, for many others working within new
materialism-- concerns like these lead to an insistence on understanding
subjectivity as a concrete product of experiences over time. However, in new materiality
time must also be understood as emergent, as a product of the process, as made.
Barad (in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012:66-67) argues that "time is not
given...time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material
practices....its sedimenting effects, its trace, can not be erased. The memory
of its materializing effects is written into the world".
One
of the ways that memory is written in the world is through the relationality of
materiality. In an essay written independently of the emergent body of work
self-identifying as new materialism, philosophers of science Michael Arnold and
Christopher Shepherd, along with Martin Gibbs, a specialist in information
systems, make a related anti-representational argument for immanence of memory
in a world of things (Arnold, Shepherd, & Gibbs 2008). They insist that
relations among things, the ability of things to act in ways that transcend
semiotics, and what they term the "obduracy" of things, their
capacity to endure, enlist things in memory in relation to time, place, and
what they call identity, which can be equated with the new materialists'
subjectivity.
From
a new materialist perspective, the making of temporalities that is the stock in
trade of archaeology may thus be re-imagined as a re-tracing of sedimented
effects, the "memory" of materializing effects that is "written
into the world".
Final thoughts
In
her contribution to one of the foundational volumes of new materialism,
feminist theorist Sara Ahmed (2010) argues that
if we were simply
to "look at" the object we face, then we would be erasing the
"signs" of history. We would apprehend the object as simply there, as
given in its sensuous certainty, rather than as "having got here", an arrival which is how objects are binding,
and how they assume a social form (Ahmed 2010:241; emphasis added).
Ahmed
(2010:241) adds "what passes through history is not only the work done by
generations but the 'sedimentation' of that work as the condition of arrival
for future generations".
That
iterative connection, created through the forming, movement, and dissolution of
materialities, leaves marks. Archaeologists can offer new materialism a long
experience thinking about the iteration that is sedimented in materialities
even as they are transformed or even displaced.
When
Ahmed (2010:243) describes the histories of tables as "spectral"
because they are "not simply available on
the surface of the object, apart from the scratches that might be left
behind", an archaeological response might be to say that those scratches
are in a very real sense histories.
Perhaps
not the kind of narratives of owning and writing on the table that might be
desired in an anthropocentric materiality, these material histories remain for
the most part to be engaged as part of new materialism, but the convergence
with contemporary archaeologies are there as sites from which to build.
References cited
Ahmed, Sara
2010 Orientations
Matter. In New Materialisms: Ontology,
Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost eds., pp. 234-257. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Arnold,
Michael, Christopher Shepherd, and Martin Gibbs
2008 Remembering
Things. The Information Society 24:
47-53.
Barad, Karen
2003 Posthumanist
Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs 28:801-831.
Bennett, Jane
2010 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of
Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi
2000 Teratologies.
In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds., pp. 156-172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
2006 Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Coole, Diana,
and Samantha Frost
2010 Introducing
the New Materialisms. In New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost,
eds., pp. 1-43. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Dolphijn, Rick,
and Iris van der Tuin
2012 New Materialism: Interviews and
Cartographies. Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor.
Schatzki,
Theodore
2010 Materiality
and Social Life. Nature and Culture
5:123-149.
Woodward,
Keith, John Paul Jones III, and Sally A. Marston
2012 The
Politics of Autonomous Space. Progress in
Human Geography 36 (2):204-224.
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