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Posted by Johan Normark
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 relate to the plurality of becomings that any actualized entity generates.
Polyagency begins in the intersection of two actualizations/entities that share a milieu, either with a human being or another materiality. This is not a dialectic relationship. What is virtually inside these actualizations/entities is not unimportant, but the actualizations can be aligned to connect and create a plane of coexistence. Polyagency is how these two actualizations transform. The becoming is how the encounter between entities releases them from their actualizations, objects, entities, systems, series or organisms. In this process, the whole is transformed (Grosz 1995:134).
The short version is that polyagency is a collective term for intensive processes between actualized entities whose virtualities generate a multitude of transformations. Polyagency consists of four interrelated concepts that describe inseparable phases of becoming: the in-between, individuation, stratification and the time-shelter. These intensive processes also occur in the formation of actual entities where there is no human relation. Polyagency is used to explain how matter changes in encounters. These processes begin as a body without organs (plane of immanence) and ends in the actualized strata of matter and social interaction, a body with organs arranged as a rhizome.
Continue reading "Polyagency – in-between the virtual and the actual. Polyagentive archaeology, Part IV" »
Posted by Johan Normark
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, 2004b, 2004c, 2006a, 2006b). However, there is still the problem of defining entities; human or non-human alike. When we define entities, we take them out of their own becoming and we make them static. Humanocentric archaeologists believe that the events of the past are gone and that the materialities persist (see for example Olivier 2004). This is true to some extent, but is a broken vessel the same object as when it was a complete vessel? What is it that lasts? Clearly not the physical and chemical characteristics of materiality. The crucial but simple question for polyagentive archaeology is: what existed in relation to the past vessel before it broke into sherds, which also exist in the present sherds? In short; what can differentiate from within and still be a unity without adding an external transcendental quasi-object such as culture or practice or an essential form? We need to raise the level of abstraction and elaborate upon the idea of an ontology of virtuality (Bergson 1998, 2001, 2004; Deleuze 1991, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Grosz 1999, 2004, 2005; Pearson 1999, 2002).
Ontology concerns the entities that is believed to exist and that populate reality. DeLanda classifies the ontologies into three main groups. Some believe that there is no reality beyond the human mind (“idealism”). Others believe that the objects we observe do exist beyond us but they are sceptical to the idea that theories are independent from social constructions. A third group believes that there is a world completely independent from the human mind. The two first perspectives deal with phenomena (the way things appear in our mind), and the latter also discuss nuomena (the things in themselves). This latter ontology is a realist ontology to which Deleuze belongs (DeLanda 2000a, 2000b). However, Deleuze does not believe in essences or transcendental entities like the “naïve realists” do (DeLanda 2000b:1).
Deleuze/DeLanda creates a flat ontology in which the ontological differences are reduced to an ontology concerning emergent property. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts which makes it impossible to reduce the whole to the parts. By this is meant that the human being cannot be reduced to biology, biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, chemistry cannot be reduced to physics and physics cannot be reduced to mathematics. Deleuze flattens all the distinctions above into a virtual plane of consistency/immanence in which there is no opposition. The plane of immanence is pure immanence. Therefore, it has no substantial division, it is immanent only to itself. Immanence is substance itself. This also means that the mind is not separated from the bodily substance. The plane of immanence is a formless self-organizing process that diverges from itself and, on top of this plane, a rhizomatic network is formed (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:266).
A concept used in research should not be an empty form that needs to be filled with some transcendent content, such as a predefined quasi-object like the “Classic period Maya culture” that is filled with Long Count calendars, ballcourts, pyramids, stelae, etc. The lack of these entities would become an anomaly in humanocentric archaeology. The concepts should rather be affected by other concepts, bodies, etc. There is no need for transcendent concepts that explains what is beyond the immediate. This is because immanence is not just within, but also upon and of. A building is not just within a larger polyagentive network, it is formed from the network. A building functions and operates upon and through the network (DeLanda 2000b).
Continue reading "Bergsonian and Deleuzian ontologies for a posthuman archaeology. Polyagentive archaeology, Part III" »
Posted by Johan Normark
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 is pure quality. The virtual is the past that is simultaneous with the present, which it actualizes through becomings. It is always turning into something else by differentiating and repeating. This virtual multiplicity becomes actual (quantitative) multiplicities that make up the analytical and spatialized world. It is the latter we find as polyagents, which are actualized objects with “causative capabilities” in an actualized polyagentive network.
(V2) Polyagency is a collection of intensive processes that lie in-between the virtual and the actual. It is a distributed agency that lacks an identity of its own, but it generates other identities through the becoming, both externally and internally (Grosz 2001). It is rhizomatic, meaning that there is no genealogy here, no straight line in the polyagentive process. It is in the in-between where individuation takes place, where virtuality closes onto itself and forms an actualized boundary to what is external.
(V3) Both polyagency and virtuality lack metric spatiality (space seen in Euclidean terms) and actualized/spatialized temporality (when time is seen as sharing the characteristics of space). However, they generate polyagents that have spatiality (Grosz 2001). With polyagentive archaeology it is possible to use both “long-term” and instantaneous perspectives of the same data. The virtual that persists in a “long-term” perspective is actualized through events that come down to us as material patterns.
(V4) The virtual is the ontological foundation for a complex ontology of ontologies (Aijmer 2001; Wittgenstein 1998). No ontology can be said to be truer than any other. However, the virtual can be found in all ontologies, but it does not explain how their actualizations are perceived by human beings which can be reached by other ontological perspectives. This “virtual ontology of actual ontologies” focuses on temporal movement rather than on substance and representation.
Continue reading "Polyagentive archaeology. Part II: On the virtual and the actual " »
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" »
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
The enchantment of the 'social' has, as it has in the other social sciences, achieved orthodoxy in archaeology. To play on the revered title of Alfred Gell's piece, 'the enchantment of the social, the social of enchantment' envelops itself so that 'the social' seems to both enchant archaeologists and archaeologists 'enchant' the 'social'. That is, 'the social' seems to become both the explanandum and the explanan for archaeological inquiry. This indeed appears to be a puzzling spell. How can we explain the phenomena of the archaeological past (or present) by attributing a Durkheimian 'force' behind the scenes which directs and compels events but which nonetheless is not itself explained? In stating that social processes, or social meanings, or (social) discourse accounts for the events of the past, we seem to be stating very little. Indeed, there is a tautology at work here. Or more precisely, there is simply tautology as 'the social' is not doing any work. It comes as a stand-in, a modifier or catch-all prefix; and it attaches itself first to domains of study: 'social lives', 'social meaning', 'social body', 'social structure', 'social environment'; then it goes on to define the very fields undertaking research into these domains: 'social archaeology'. What does that mean? Much like Ian Hacking's edification through tongue-in-cheek (or getting to laugh at our pretensions once in a while), do we need to attach 'social..." to everything. Does it clarify? Does it do anything other than assert the hard-fought battle of academic underdogs (sociology and its closest allies) to partition 'reality' into nature versus society, so that in this partitive scheme there was incontrovertible ownership of the 'social territory' and the blitzkrieging advances of the natural sciences could be contained? Is it simply entrepreneurial brandnaming in the academic free market?
As individuals in the science wars have told the story, such as Latour in his Reassembling the Social (2005), this is part of the story. But there is more, both internal to archaeology and in the wider arena of academia. No, the rise of 'social explanation' is not simply due to the 'social context' of disciplinary wrangling. Without the above qualifier, the issue goes to the heart of explanation in archaeology.
Continue reading "What's gathered under the banner of the 'social'? 'The enchantment of the social, the social of enchantment' " »
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