Posted by Johan Normark
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.
Continue reading "Polyagentive archaeology. Part I: Evolution Revisited" »
