Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger has received much attention in archaeology since the 1990s (Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996; Dobres 2000; Karlsson 2000). Along with Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger has been the great influence in phenomenological archaeology. It is quite striking that it is the most intractable Heidegger, that of the first period (Being and Time, 1927), that has mainly attracted archaeologists (e.g. Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996). On the contrary, what is perhaps the most pertinent work of the philosopher with regard to archaeology, has received probably less attention than it deserves. I am referring to the writings dealing with “the thing” (das Ding) (e.g. 1968 [1962]) and technology (but see Dobres 2000). Heidegger has proved to be a valuable inspiration on archaeological issues of time and space and phenomenology at large has been strongly related to the archaeologies of landscape (Tilley 1994; Thomas 2001).
My intention here is to outline the possibilities for archaeology of Heidegger’s theory of art and to prove the usefulness of this philosopher for rethinking not only time and space, but also the nature of archaeology. The text in question is “The origin of the work of art” (Heidegger 2002). Originally written in 1935-37, it was reworked and published in 1950 and again in 1960. It has not been extremely influential, compared to other philosophers’ reflections on art, perhaps because it has little to do with aesthetics and art itself, and more with the concepts of being, truth, things and language. In archaeology, although Julian Thomas has already dealt briefly with this text, it occupies a rather negligible role in his great book Time, Culture and Identity (Thomas 1996: 76-77). These reflections stem from a re-reading of “The origin of the work of art” with occasion of a [http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/projects/StanfordArchaeologicalTheory/Home SAT] meeting on Heidegger.
“The origin of the work of art”.
If we want to understand what a work of art is, Heidegger says, we have first to inquire into the nature of the thing, since works of art are things in the first place. For the philosopher, the way things have been studied and understood as objects since Enlightment has done violence to the thingliness of the thing (p. 7). There are three main ways in which things have been traditionally understood: 1) things as a gathering of properties (“bearers of traits”); 2) things as unities of a sensory manifolds; 3) things as syntheses of matter (the irrational) and form (the rational). Each of these approaches delineates the character of things in a more accurate way than the previous one, but they are all flawed and inadequate; they represent “an assault on the thing-being of the thing” (p. 11), so that eventually “the thing disappears” (p. 8)
Besides, modern thinking has also led to a conflation of the three kinds of things that, in Heidegger’s opinion, exist: things in themselves, tools, and works of art. Things in themselves are those material entities that have not been subjected to human intervention (a stone or a tree). Tools and works of art are akin because they arecrafted by human hands and, thus, all artists are, in a sense, artisans. Every work has a “thingly character” (p. 3). Yet there is something in the work of art that makes it irreducible to a mere artefact (such as a hammer), and that puts it “over and above its thingliness” (ibid.).
Heidegger proposes to look at a particular piece of equipment in order to understand what a tool is. He suggests a picture by Van Gogh in which a couple of old peasant boots are depicted (p.13) (n. 1):
“In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field” (p. 14).
Here, he argues, we can find out what an artefact really is, where “the equipmentality of equipment” lies (p. 13). Firstly, it is about usefulness, but behind this first impression there is something more important, buried (concealed) under the mere appearance of utility: reliability. An artefact is what is reliable: the less one notices the tool, the better it fulfils its function as a tool. Indeed, for Heidegger, we only think about artefacts when they fail or break, when they stop being useful. Therefore, an inescapable condition of the artefact is gone unthought. This recalls Heidegger’s idea that the inauthentic state of the Dasein (described in Being and Time) is marked by unreflexivity, thoughtlessness, the ambiguities of common thought, the unchallenged assumption of prejudices. Equipment has a great relevance in maintaining the Dasein in the embeddedness of the inauthentic state of being. Put it in another way, material culture is essential in producing and reproducing the world as it is.
By looking at the peasant boots, then, we have discovered the truth of the tool. But we have discovered something else: the character of the work art. It is the work of art that really reveals what the boots are – what a tool is (p. 15) – and not the actual pair of boots per se. The way Van Gogh manifested the boots for us is what allows us to understand the work as the work of art. It has nothing to do with the faithful reproduction of things as they appear. It has even less to do with the correctness of representation (p. 16, 28). The work of the artwork consists in the opening up of entities in their being (p. 18). It is about the unconcealment of the being. It is about revelation and truth. Creation is allowing something to come forth. The work brings thingliness into the open in a striking way (p. 43).
However, the work of art is not a simple act of disclosure. The work opens a world and at the same time sets forth the earth (p. 24). As opposed to the openness of the world, the earth is self-secluding and unfolds an inexhaustible richness of modes and shapes (p. 25). World and earth, as disclosed by the work, are in constant opposition, in a battle (Kampf) (p.26, 37), but at the same time they depend on each other, they are intrinsically belligerent (p. 31). This perpetual opposition is the way in which truth happens in the artwork, and the battle, rather than the world, is what the work opens. In fact, “little comes to be known. The known remains an approximation, what is mastered insecure” (p. 29). Nevertheless, this denial of absolute openness and revelation is not a fault or defect: “Denial, by way of the twofold concealing, belongs to the essence of truth as unconcealment” (p. 31).
One of the effects that results of the appearance of the work of art is the disturbance of everything around the work. The work estranges us from the immediate circle of beings in which we believe ourselves to be at home. We think that things are familiar, reliable, and ordinary. Yet, the work of art shows us that “the ordinary is not ordinary, it is extraordinary, uncanny” (p. 31). “What presents itself to us as natural (…) is merely the familiarity of a long-established habit which has forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose” (p. 7).
The work of art is not alone in this disclosure of the truth of being. There are other possible aspects that he suggests in a rather cryptical way (p. 37): the foundation of a state, the proximity of the being “which is most in being”, the “essential sacrifice”, and the thinker’s questioning of the being. On the contrary, he thinks that familiarity, connoiseurship, calculation (measuring and quantifying) all destroy the essential qualities of the artwork (p. 42).
Technemataology.
While the ancient Greek term for art is techne, the word for works of art is technemata. In this technemataology, I suggest “The origin of the work of art” has, at least, three possible archaeological qualities.
1) We can understand that some material culture is more similar in the way it works (or acts) to the work of art, in the Heideggerian sense, than to “equipment”. Sometimes material culture is not used to reproduce the world as it is given and to grant embeddedness in a familiar and secure order. Quite on the contrary, sometimes things – ordinary things – can lead us to a sensation of strangeness and produce uncanny feelings of being displaced from a familiar world (what Heidegger calls Unheimlichkeit: “not-being-at-home”). Normal artefacts may produce anxiety and bewilderment. The role of material culture in many colonial encounters may be understood in this way (n. 2). Coming to terms with a new set of artefacts means “to transform all familiar relations to world and to earth, and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to dwell within the truth that is happening in the work” (p. 40).
2) Heidegger shows an extraordinary sensibility towards materiality and texture – the “thingliness” of things. He is equally sensible to the need to avoid doing violence to things, by imposing meaning, penetrating matter and disturbing thingliness (note that this cannot be understood from an ethical point of view). This text is strikingly anti-interpretative: Let us things stand for themselves, manifest themselves. Yet it coincides with the Heideggerian motto “to the things themselves!” (zu den Sachen selbst) and it is very much in harmony with some recent archaeological thinking (Olsen 2003). “The origin of the work of art”, then, can be read as a revaluation of materiality.
3) Finally, we can add archaeology to the list of ways in which the truth of the being is disclosed. However, for that to fit Heidegger’s ideas, we have to understand archaeology in a particular way. Most of what archaeologists do helps to dispel the disclosure of the being. Measuring, quantifying, labelling makes things familiar and destroys their strangeness (p. 25, 37). Archaeology, as the Heideggerian work, can reveal what is uncanny and extraordinary about familiar things. For doing an archaeology-as-work-of-art (technemataology) we cannot do violence to things. We should not try to penetrate them, to sweep away the emergence of the earth – what cannot be known, the reserve of meanings that will never be revealed. For truth to happen, writes Heidegger, we do not need something to be correctly portrayed, we need that “in the manifestation of the equipmental being of the shoe-equipment, that which is as a whole – world and earth in their counterplay – achieves unconcealment” (p. 32). We have to admit that archaeology, as the artwork, brings forth the battle between the world and the earth, between openness and concealment. It is in this strife, too, that the work of archaeology lies.
I think that the work of the artwork, as Heidegger puts it, can be easily related to the idea of mediation as devised by Chris Witmore (2004): “Mediation is about manifesting qualities of the material world that are left behind through traditional modes of inscription”. This mediation, in fact, is “unmediation” in the Heideggerian sense, because it does not alter the thingliness of the things, it simply makes it manifest, it lets things stand by themselves. But as the work, archaeological mediation should also reveal something of the things it shows. Two practical examples of how things can be manifested with resort to an archaeological sensibility and without doing violence to them: katachresis as proposed by Michael Shanks (e.g. 2004) and the work of Joel Sternfeld, that Michael Shanks pointed to me recently. In On this site Sternfeld (1996) shows photographs of apparently innocent, dull places and writes a short caption telling the terrible story linked to those places. Truth, in the Heideggerian sense, is disclosed. The world and the earth are at fight in these images that are uncanny because they conceal as much as they reveal. The same happens in Shank’s “Three rooms” (2004). The juxtaposition of three different and unrelated stories brings forth qualities that more analytic and interpretive approaches would have made disappear.
Technemataology means making the most of the material poetics of archaeology (n. 3). As the Heideggerian work-of-art, it has less to do with aesthetics, than with the disclosure of truth as unconcealment (aletheia).
Notes
1. Derrida in his deconstruction of this essay has pointed out the irony that the boots represent are not really peasant boots but those of Van Gogh himself.
2. I have tried to argue this with regard to the Roman occupation of Iron Age northern Iberia (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2003). I proposed that traditional architecture was used as a means to divert the disturbing impact on local communities of Roman material culture understood as a Heideggerian work of art.
3. Julian Thomas (1996: 77) says “An archaeological poetics involves finding ways of expressing and taking the measure of something which is absent”. I agree with that but I am not sure that these “archaeological poetics” are truly found in his book – which can boast of many other qualities.
References.
Dobres, M. (2000): Technology and social agency. London: Blackwell.
González-Ruibal, A. (2003): Restoring ontological security: Roman and native objects in Early Roman Gallaecia (NW Iberia). TRAC 2002. Proceedings of the 12th annual theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, University of Kent at Canterbury 2002 (G. Carr, E. Swift, J. Weeks, eds.). Oxford: Oxbow. 30-47.
Gosden, C. (1994): Social being and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2002) [1960]: The origin of the work of art. In Off the beaten track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 1-56.
Karlsson, (2000): Why is there material culture rather than nothing? (with a comment by Julian Thomas). In Archaeology and Philosophy. Philosophy and archaeological practice. Perspectives for the 21st Century (C. Holtorf and H. Karlsson, ed.). Göteborg: Bricoleur Press, 69-86.
Olsen, B. (2003): Material culture after text: Re-membering things. Norwegian
Archaeological Review 36(2): 87-104.
Shanks, M. (2004): Three rooms. Archaeology and performance. Journal of Social Archaeology 4(2): 147-180.
Sternfeld, J. (1996): On this site: landscape in memoriam. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Thomas, J. (1996): Time, Culture and Identity. An interpretive archaeology. Routledge, London.
Thomas, J. (2001): Archaeologies of Place and Landscape. Archaeological Theory Today (I. Hodder, ed.). Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 165-186.
Tilley, J. (1994): A phenomenology of landscape. New York: Berg.
Witmore, C. (2004): Four archaeological engagements with place. Mediating bodily experience through peripatetic video. Visual Anthropology Review 20(2) 57-71.
