Slow Thinking: Beyond the Entangled List (draft)

Slow Thinking: Beyond the Entangled List
Noa Corcoran-Tadd
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

Here I explore the notion of ‘slow thinking’ that underlies a number of the New Materialist interventions, and then look at some of the implications through a case study on colonial labor and infrastructure in the Andean highlands.

In an era of ‘frictionless’ digital interactions and the ‘annihilation’ of time and space, New Materialist authors have expressed particular concern for the ways the simplification of the world into smooth surfaces allowing us to slide quickly into either social construction or uncritical naturalism.  New Materialists and others argue that these surfaces (or ‘black boxes’ in the Latourian language) conceal the highly complex topologies and unstable assemblages of a world fundamentally unsuited to reduction. 

Slow thinking and the list

The list of heterogeneous things stands as an important trope in the New Materialisms literature.  In her influential discussion of the 2003 blackout (2009: 25), Jane Bennett introduces:

“coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood”

Karen Barad (2007: 360) similarly draws up a list around the phenomenon of quantum computing:

”STM microscopes and practices of microscopy, the history of microscopy, scientific and technological advances made possible by STM, the quantum theory of tunneling, material sciences, IBM’s corporate resources and research and development practices, scientific curiosity and imagination, scientific and cultural hopes for the manipulability of individual atoms, Feynman’s dream of nanotechnologies, cultural iconography, capitalist modes of producing desires, advertising, the production and public recognition of corporate logos, the history of the atom, the assumption of metaphysical individualism, complex sets of visualizing and reading practices that make such images intelligible as pictures of words and things, and the intertwined histories of representationalism and scientific practice.”

The juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements through these lists serves to highlight both an excessive multiplicity of actors/actants/materials and an openness in the networks that constitute the phenomenon under consideration.  Established domains of description and explanation (e.g. technology of the grid, economics of the grid, cultural representations of the grid) are violated by the deliberate conjoining of dreams, theories, materials, techniques, and histories.  The phenomenon is no longer easily single, portable and smoothly articulated; the excess of potential connections forces us to take stock, slow down, and perhaps most crucially, attend to the many elements usually left out.

Representing heterogeneity

                  Less apparent in these lists (but no less important) is an attention to heterogeneous, lively relationships between the constituent materials.  As Barad argues, our analyses need to move beyond the simple acknowledgement of materiality and actively engage with frictions of material intra-actions.   It is at this point – the next step beyond the list  – that the problem of adequate representation comes to the fore.  One approach has been visual, with Barad, for instance, providing a vision of the complex topologies constituting quantum physics (2007: 389). 

                  It is worth pausing here for a comparison with a longer history of apparently similar diagramming in archaeology.  David Clarke (1968) provides a classic systems theory view of a coherent cultural system constituted by internal subsystems and their relationship to an external environment.  LaMotta and Schiffer (2001) refocus on the behavioral system, enabling them to avoid the second-level abstraction of ‘culture’. Explicitly acknowledging the influence of the behavioral archaeologists, Ian Hodder (2012) has developed the tanglegram that focuses on tracing the circulations and transformations of materials at a single site (and further decenters the human emphasis on ‘behavior’).  And, drawing on complexity research, James McGlade (2006) introduces a socioeconomic topology, which introduces possibilities of structural change over time absent in the other diagrams.

                  This brief review raises the important (if well-known) question of how we chose the levels of scale and complexity in our models.  Barad’s diagram, however, seems to point in a different direction by highlighting the inadequacies of representation (389).  As she herself emphasizes, she struggles to convey the dynamic, multiscalar, and relational qualities of the phenomenon at hand. 

Projects of critique, projects of production

With this stress on the difficulties in truly accounting for things in all of their relational complexity, is the key result that are we left with Adorno’s sense of the negative, that which is left beyond representation (Bennett)?  Or Latour’s more optimistic view that while “we still don’t know how to assemble, in a single, visually coherent space, all the entities necessary for a thing to become an object…[w]hen we have learned how to do that, we might finally get our (material) materialism back” (2007: 142)?

                  Is the turn to New Materialism a question of developing entirely new ontologies (as some of the manifesto-like interventions might suggest) or guiding strategic interventions (as implied by many of case studies)?  Does New Materialism seek to replace or simply destabilize flawed concepts and methods?

                  One of the striking approaches of the New Materialists has been the revisiting of previous perspectives their disciplinary genealogies that ‘lost out’ in the march of mainstream Occidental thought (Barad with Bohr, Bennett with Spinoza, Latour with Tarde).  Looking back at our own genealogy (as hinted already with the diagrams), it is worth considering whether we are, perhaps, closer than other disciplines to already developing a New Materialist perspective. 

                  Certainly our locations within anthropology and the frequent invocation of anthropocentric language might suggest otherwise.  But perhaps archaeology is, to some extent, already a ‘slow’ discipline, a field of strikingly heterogeneous qualities in which it is easier to see the work of tracing, connecting, and purification in action. 

                  Goldstein and Macphail’s textbook discussion of medieval European dark earths (2006: 271-272) serves as an instructive example in this regard.  While interest is expressed in categorizing soil as ‘material culture’ and parsing out the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ contributions to geoarchaeological features, these distinctions often fade within the concrete detail of the examples.  In the case of dark earths, Goldstein and Macphail trace the emergence of this particular soil type through the intractions of decomposing building materials, vegetation growth, the deposition of midden materials, and the calcite products of earthworm activity.   While they attempt to isolate the anthropogenic, the careful analyses of thin sections reveal the more-than-human status of this assemblage in the making – sometimes involving the actions of humans, at other times through the autonomous dynamism of the many other bodies at work.

                  Are the problems that the New Materialisms seek to address salient for archaeologists as well?  Perhaps, although as I’ve suggested so far, we may be further along than we think given the ways that our practices (if not always our explicit theoretical orientations) often already speak to New Materialist concerns with the liveliness of the material and the complex relational qualities of assemblages.

                  Barad’s intervention does raise the question of how we represent our work – perhaps we are victims of a well-developed methodology in the absence of an adequate approach to representation and its pitfalls?  An engagement with the New Materialisms may also prove to be particularly useful as a new lingua franca with which to speak to others increasingly engaged with these slower approaches to the socionatural world.

Tacna and the ruta de la plata

                  Like the neighboring valleys of the Osmore, Azapa and Lluta drainages, the Caplina valley in Tacna forms an important transport corridor between the Pacific coast and the Bolivian altiplano.  I have been developing a research project looking at the history of movement along this route, with a focus on the area of transition between coastal and altiplano topographies - here altitude increases by 3500m over a transect of 30km.  While preliminary evidence suggests substantial movement over the long-term (i.e. before the Inka expansion), the Inka and colonial period investment in roads and roadside way stations (tambos) indicate an intensification and formalization of traffic.  Particularly with the 16^th and 17^th-century rise of silver boom cities of Porco, Potosi, and La Plata in the altiplano, valleys like this become vital lifelines to the coast as part of the ruta de la plata (silver road).

                 

                  What would an account of this route look like if done ‘quickly’ (as a historian might)?  In many cases, these roads are taken as examples that fit within already existing narratives connecting notions of ‘the colonial’, ‘the economic’, and ‘globalization’.  Here almost all focus is placed on a single material moving through the empty, abstract spaces of the rural from the mining cities of the altiplano to the port cities of the Pacific.  A social historian might add considerable nuance based on written accounts of contested labor relations and changing social identities of some of the actors along the route.

                  However, the implied ontologies of these accounts remain very simple, with universal (human) bodies moving in an abstract space and all set in motion by a set of conventional black boxes.  The material is often only salient here as a commodity - indeed, the denomination of the ‘ruta de la plata’ is an instructive reduction of the route to a single material.

                  While sluggishly conducting pedestrian survey at altitudes of up to 4500m, my approach has begun to move in a rather different direction.  Slowing down the analysis by beginning with the high-altitude landscape itself, we soon begin to work with a much more inclusive list that extends far beyond silver as commodity.  We may move beyond the human actors to consider the profusion of animals involved (mules, horses, llamas).  We may move off the road to explore the many paths that both precede and continue to parallel the more formalized routes.  We may begin to rethink the built form of the tambos, with their extensive adobe courtyards and corrals, in terms of their numerous nonhuman inhabitants.  Here we may begin to see some of the dangers in replicating certain hierarchies of concern through archaeological (and historical) practice, where indigenous labor is eclipsed by discussions of discussions of Spanish enterprise, and the role of animals is even less visible.

Out of the field and into the archive

                  In light of this listed profusion of excluded things, I’m particularly interested in recasting movement and inhabitation along this route as: a) a fundamentally multispecies phenomenon, b) crosscut by the differential effects of the high-altitude environment, and c) entangled with (but not determined by) hierarchies of bodily difference.  

                  While many other elements were also in play – unstable roads and bridges in a dynamic, high-altitude landscape, the effective reach of the state, shifting notions of mita labor mobilization, urban desires for wine, silk, and the latest novels, regional shifts from subsistence to fodder crops – I’d like to focus on the conjunction of human and animal labor (cf. Braverman (1974) and Benton (1993) for the orthodox and ecological positions, respectively).

                  Human and animal porters were fundamental components of transportation networks in the Andean highlands.  While wheeled vehicles proliferated on the coast, topographic extremes in the highlands encouraged the persistence of portage regimes throughout the colonial period.   These regimes were both hybrid and contested. 

                  Rather than following the standard actors of social history, it is vital to consider that ways that humans, mules, and camelids were organized and exploited in combination, in configurations that were frequently the subject of legal and extralegal negotiation.  In these disputed projects of labor substitution, the relative roles of travellers and local communities, Indians and Africans, mules and llamas were all in flux.                   

                  José de Acosta (1590) provides a striking account of the “mortal anguish” of soroche (altitude sickness) while crossing the Andes, while Ephraim George Squier (1877) documents the similarly brutal toll on mules. Yet the roles of adaptations (both short-and long-term) to high altitude are surprisingly little discussed by archaeologists and historians of the colonial period.  Historically, the Andes have been the site of reductive explanatory frameworks that seek deterministic relationships to race and/or the environment – the challenge here is to build an adequate account for bodily differences and environmental extremes in the Andes without falling back on either social constructivist or deterministic naturalist positions.    

                  Returning to the colonial archive, one encounters repeated legal disputes over transport regimes that make frequent and explicit reference to the qualities of different human and nonhuman laborers with regard to their capacities for work and reproduction at high altitude.  While these disputes were frequently couched within highly problematic discourses of proto-racial and species difference, I hesitate to understand these as purely issues of cultural discourse.           

                  Instead, I’d like to consider how certain capacities were mobilized and made meaningful within a process of colonizing local bodies (indigenous people and camelids) and importing foreign bodies (African, Spanish, equids).  And rather than taking these capacities as essential, it would seem vital to explore the ways they emerged over multiple timescales (short-term adaptation, long-term selective pressures) and the ways in which these capacities were made to matter (or not) under specific regimes of transport labor both as sources of resilience and targets of exploitation.  Drawing on Susan DeFrance’s (2010) zooarchaeological work, an important inspiration for this paper, this is something I hope to examine in upcoming analyses of tambo contexts.  

                  Furthermore, as Braun and Whatmore (2010) have argued, we have to consider zoe within its context of techné.  The affordances of the extreme Andean landscape could be changed through the construction and maintenance of infrastructures like roads, tambos, and bridges.  In this sense, the development and care for infrastructure joins an irreducible list of things (topography, animals, humans, loads, timetables, regulations) shaping the precarity of life on the move in the colonial Andes.   

Back to the field

                  I’d like to make four final points by way of conclusion.  First, although emphasis is often placed on that which is compressed and lost in the time averaged archaeological record, I’ve argued that archaeology’s methodologies lend themselves particularly well to the notion of slow analysis and the careful tracing across domains. 

                  Second, the representation of slow analyses remains an important topic for further discussion.   As the conjunction of the Barad and Hodder graphs suggests, there are important questions to consider concerning the injection of complexity into our representational strategies.

                  Third, while still arguing for the productive possibilities of transgressing the domains of the social, the animal, the technological, and the geological, this paper has made an implicit case for what might be termed the political economy strand of the New Materialisms (Braun and Whatmore 2010, Edwards 2010, Barad 2009).

                  The colonial period remains a highly sensitive topic in the Andes and the account developed within a New Materialisms perspective may seem problematic for several reasons.  The account tends to widen the number of actors that matter (when compared with the attractive reductions of other narratives).  In exploring the issue of human and animal labor, this version of things also seeks to account for kinds of bodily differences in practice in ways that avoids reducing these to ‘mere’ discursive production.

                  However, as argued at the beginning, this slower approach to analysis helps move the discussion beyond the black-boxed causal forces of ‘capital’, ‘colonial logic’, or ‘European worldview’ and provide a clearer accounting for the complexities of precarious life and death on the road.