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Christopher Witmore |The tensions that arise out of the dualism of subject and object continue to hamper our ability of ‘coming to grips’ with the material world (Shanks and Tilley 1992; Thomas 1996a and 1996b; 2004b; also refer to Olsen 2003). Indeed, the subject/object dichotomy is one of modernity’s greatest burdens (Latour 1993) and this is, of course, an important issue in archaeology (refer to Rowlands 1984; Wylie 2002). Whether in maintaining divides between archaeologists and their fields of study (e.g. Gero 1996), or in projecting such divides onto the material past (e.g Shanks and Tilley 1992), recent writings within the discipline have acknowledged such burdens associated with this Great Divide as well as those between mind/body and culture/nature. In so doing, these various authors have attempted to move beyond these divides in a number of ways (refer to Hodder 1999; Shanks and Hodder 1995; Thomas 1996a; 1996b; Tilley 1994). Here I suggest, following Latour, another path around (to be distinguished from the gesture of ‘beyond’) this divide, which is both beneficial and necessary for archaeology.
We may recall from the discussion in Chapter 1 that interpretive archaeology denies dualisms (Shanks and Hodder 1995, 21). Indeed, Julian Thomas contends that the Cartesian framing of the world has inhibited the archaeological endeavor of coming to terms with materiality (1996a; 1996b). Within postmodern thought this denial of dualism takes the form of an all-encompassing embrace of one pole of the subject/object dichotomy—subjectivity (Latour 1993; within archaeology refer to Thomas 2004a). For Thomas, interpretive archaeology poses a way forward. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, Thomas argues that the distinguishing faculty between humans and other animals comes not from something within the human body, but is situated in the way that the human body gets on in the world (1996a). Human beings are interpretive beings and ‘the world is not composed of objects’ rather it is made up of networks of relations (2004a, 25). Human beings are always situated in such a network of relationships. In this sense, according to Thomas the ‘‘world’ is even less like a thing and more like a process, in that it is continually brought into being by the working of relationships between people and things’ (2004a, 25). Much of this resonates with my project here. However, this world as a ‘horizon of intelligibility’ is one that can only be rendered comprehensible by the human being. The world is full of other entities, of other beings, of other actants that are not taken into account. In negotiating the divide between people and things humans experience a world-for-human-consciousness solely (Latour 1999, 9). I will return to this issue shortly.
Given the relationship of traditional scientific practice in archaeology to the mantra of ‘objectivity’ through which practitioners strive to attain a de-personalized, de-politicized and unbiased rendition of the past (Wylie 2002, 155-157), the complete embrace of the opposite pole—subjectivity—can be regarded as a form of alienation (Latour 1993). Such a radical swing repeats the gesture of revolution which in archaeology contributes to further exaggeration of the divide between the humanities and sciences (Latour 1993; refer to Stengers 1998 on the science wars). In this way, we might characterize the present state of the discipline as situated in a post-hypercritical moment where various and often incommensurable theoretical platforms exist simultaneously gaining nourishment within a climate of diverse and fragmented communities (Olsen, Shanks and Witmore 2003; also Kristiansen 2004). Classic issues concerning how we relate to the material world, which were divided along the traditional lines of science and humanism remain.
Aware of the weight of the Great Divide between the humanities and sciences Ian Hodder has recently advocated a position from the in-between where archaeological fieldwork is held as ‘both subjective and objective’ (1999, 52). Indeed, the key issue for Hodder is not one of subject verses object; rather he regards it as ‘the use of data as evidence for interpretation’ (1999, 104). While as archaeologists ‘we construct the past from our own perspectives (pre-understandings), …we are also led by our experience of the data to new understandings’ (Hodder 1999, 52 and 199-200). For Hodder the data resist an all-encompassing subjectivity; ‘objects assert their own independence’ (1999, 32). However, ultimately, Hodder’s summation comes down to an issue of choice between the two poles of the dualism he wishes to transcend—either/or or both/and. Opting for both/and, Hodder’s middle-ground position leaves the structure of subject/object firmly in place, because it takes its leave from a bifurcation of reality that is the very basis of the problem (Latour 1993). Whether one advocates the in-between or an all-encompassing subjectivity (the world-for-human-consciousness) the duality of subject/object remains a point of departure. This epistemology is the very problem (Jensen 2003). Its associated conceptual frameworks are weighed down by the tremendous philosophical and critical weight of modernist thought (Gumbrecht 2004, 53).
Therefore, the answer for a symmetrical archaeology to the problem posed by the modernist divide of subject/object is neither/nor. For Latour ‘the less familiar the terms we use to describe human and non-human associations are to the subject-object dichotomy, the better’ (1999, 165). This is because the characterization of an entity as either this or that is regarded as the product of modernist thought (Jensen 2003). Pure objects and pure subjects do not exist in the world. Instead the world is populated by hybrids that are more quasi-objects or quasi-subjects (Latour 1993). The proliferation of these hybrids challenges philosophy to rethink the basis of the Great Divide that maintains the transcendental subject as separate from, distinct from and contraposed to the world. But this endeavor, Latour maintains, cannot continue down the line of purification that has exacerbated the radical divide of subjects and objects to the point of hyper-incommensurability (1993, 58). Rather, inspired by the work of philosopher Michel Serres, Latour returns to what he considers to be the source of the ever-increasing gap between the material world and language—Emmanuel Kant. In his Copernican counter-revolution Latour reverses the formulation of the purified object or subject/society and treats these not as the starting point but as a final outcome. We begin with a world composed of hybrid collectives made up of humans and things.
Following the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, Bjørnar Olsen has called for a symmetrical archaeology (2003). Symmetrical archaeology is not social constructivist nor is it objectivist. It does not side exclusively with culture nor nature. Symmetrical archaeology holds all of these dualistic divisions of entities as modernist rather than any empirically verifiable articulation of the world as it is. Instead, symmetrical archaeology treats human beings as collective and distributed entities and thereby accords action to things, instruments, media, and so on. By treating things as ‘actants,’ after Latour, symmetrical archaeology recognizes that things have a stake in the production of archaeological knowledge.
Symmetrical archaeology moves toward a distributed series of practices undertaken by a human/thing collective of actants in effecting change. This brings us to the question of with what do we replace the divide between the world-out-there and the thought-in-here that is bridged by correspondence via language that was complicated through the discussion of AEP practice in the first section of this chapter? Bruno Latour has challenged the classic model of correspondence between the material world and language. His circumvention of this dichotomy is based upon the notions of proposition and articulation. According to Latour:
Propositions are not statements, or things, or any sort of intermediary between the two. They are, first of all, actants… What distinguishes propositions from one another is not a single vertical abyss between words and the world but the many differences between them, without anyone knowing in advance if these differences are big or small, provisional or definitive, reducible or irreducible (Latour 1999, 141).
Borrowing the term from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1978), Latour uses the notion of proposition to refer to the ontological capacity of actor/actant to modify relations with other actors/actants in the course of an event or practice. Propositions ‘are not positions, things, substances, or essences pertaining to nature made up of mute objects facing a talkative human mind, but occasions given to different entities to enter into contact. These occasions for interaction allow the entities to modify their definitions over the course of an event’ (Latour 1999, 141). Such an event may be the survey of a terrace line where exchanges occur between person, compass, tape, 1:5000 map, and the constituent parts of a stone wall. Propositions are located throughout the many steps of the AEP process.
Consider the example of a high-density scatter of roof tiles, courseware and finer ware sherds denoted as archaeological site ‘A34’ by the AEP (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 428). Canonically, the material world would be conceived of as a separate sphere from discourse. The gap that exists between the two spheres is mediated by a statement—this is a scatter consisting of X, Y and Z—, which establishes a correspondence between the material world and discourse (pace Hodder and Hutson 2003, 198-199). This was taken to its fruition with phenomenology where emphasis is placed upon the unity of the subject and object worlds with the subjective being the form that the objective world takes (Tilley 1994). In other words nothing exists outside of the discursive realm. However, for Latour, ‘between the statement and the state of affairs to which it corresponds, a radical doubt always sets in, since there should be a resemblance where none is possible’ (1999, 142). The word ‘scatter’ in no way resembles the tangible distribution of roof tile and other ceramic fragments across the surface of a recently plowed field that is transformed through a series of actions whereby an archaeologist with compass, tape, and notebook delimit (rather than delimits) its extent.
Because propositions are ontological properties of the world, their relation is one of articulation. For Latour, ‘instead of being the privilege of a human mind surrounded by mute things, articulation becomes a very common property of propositions, in which many entities can participate’ (1999, 142). The archaeologist, compass, tape, notebook, the materiality of the scatter, even the freshly plowed soil, are all propositions and together they articulate through gesture, media, instruments, locations, performances, etc. Taken together these humans and nonhumans articulate the transformations of the scatter. But to acknowledge the action of things (and companion species following Haraway 2003a and 2003b) in the co-constitution of archaeological knowledge poses a problem for the core practice of interpretive archaeology. It is to the practice of attributing meaning through interpretation that I must now turn.
The issue of interpretation is at the heart of many contemporary writings regarding the production of archaeological knowledge (e.g. Andrews, Barrett, and Lewis 2000; Edgeworth 1990; Gero 1996; Hodder 1991a; 1999; 2001; Hodder and Hutson 2003; Hodder et al. 1995; Johnsen and Olsen 1992; Shanks and Tilley 1992; Tilley 1993; Thomas 2004a). Interpretation, the unquestioned hegemony of the humanities in general, is the central mantra of postprocessual archaeology. Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks have laid out the central tenants of interpretive archaeology whereby: (1) the archaeologist takes responsibility for their actions as an interpreter with vested interests; (2) interpretive archaeology is a material practice of the present; (3) social practices such as excavation or survey are about the constitution of meanings, ‘making sense of things;’ (4) the process of interpretation is ongoing and open ended in that there is no definitive version of what a particular past was; (5) social interpretations are less concerned with causality and more focused upon ‘understanding or making sense of things which were never certain or sure;’ (6) in any given field, interpretation is always multivocal; (7) this plurality of possible interpretations are ‘suited to different purposes, needs and desires;’ (8) in response to this multiplicity of interest, interpretation must be both critical and creative (1995, 5). More generally, interpretation—that is, how archaeologists recognize and attribute meaning—enjoys an ‘institutionally uncontested central position in the humanities’ (Gumbrecht 2004, 21).
Central to interpretation, which has been explicitly connected to philosophical hermeneutics (Hodder 1991a; 1991b; Johnsen and Olsen 1992), is a basic congruency between the material world and language—whether gestural, spoken, textual, or visual (Idhe 1998, 88-97). Hermeneutics has to ‘insinuate compatibility, not incompatibility’ (Welsch 1997, 124) across the chasm between the subject and object worlds. Hermeneutics, as a theory of how words and language relate to lived experience, is confined to the human sphere, that of the subject. In dealing with pure discourse it leaves out the things-in-themselves. The most recent guise of hermeneutics following upon ‘theological’ and ‘romantic’ is ‘phenomenological’ (Thomas 2004a). With the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer and Vattimo there is the ‘recognition that the hermeneut, as the interpreter of texts, is herself rooted in history’ (Cazeaux 2000, 65; also refer to discussion of the interpreter in relation to Gadamer’s hermeneutics in Johnsen and Olsen 1992; Shanks and Tilley 1992, 106-107). Both the more general ‘hermeneutic field’ (Gumbrecht 1998, 353) and twentieth century philosophical hermeneutics are intimately connected to the subject/object paradigm. The crux of interpretation at its broadest level is that ‘even the intended independence from interpretation can occur only as interpretation {and} cannot, as a matter of principle, be escaped from’ (Welsch 1997, 170). Thomas echoes this when he states that interpretation ‘is a circle that we can not escape’ (Thomas 2004a, 34). This take on ‘interpretation situates the world as a ‘sign-world,’ a semiological construct, a mere signifier signifying only itself’ (Madison 2001, 14). Thus placed at the level of all encompassing subjectivity, we are backed into a corner where we can ultimately only know the world through our own subjectivity. The world of objects is but a social construction (Hacking 1999; for this take on nature/culture see Ingold 2000, 13-26). But what is interpretation if it is everything? Has it dissolved, like so many rich terms—culture, discourse, narrative, representation, etc.—into denoting the full realm of human possibility? Here we run into the same problem that we ran into earlier with subjectivity. We need to force ourselves out of the prison-house of language so that we might acknowledge human relationships to the material world as comprised of wider understandings than verbal communication and meaning. This is not to say that we discard interpretation altogether. Nevertheless, in placing aside this dichotomy of subject/object one complicates the issue of hermeneutics (refer to Idhe 1998; also the various essays in Ihde and Selinger 2003). This point raises a series of questions. What is to become of interpretation within a network that extends action to non-human entities? And how does interpretation relate to mediation in the context of archaeology’s fields?
As detailed in the first section of this chapter, within the series of transformations which take place between the material world and text, humans along with media, instruments, and other materials articulate transformations within a heterogeneous network made up of multiple fields. This multiplicity problematizes the classic notion of the hermeneut or interpreter, because it dissolves the subjective and inter-subjective basis for interpretation. The material world, no longer conceived as a singular ‘object’, has a stake in what humans, as material and organic assemblages, have to say about it. Therefore what we speak of as ‘interpretations’ are constituted within a web of discussions, readings, experiences, experiments, instrumentatilities, media, and materials. We are always multiple and heterogeneously networked in our interpretive act beyond communities of humans (cf. Callon 1986; Law and Callon 1997). This is not the activity of a singular hermeneut, the subject, or only the outcome of discussions amongst and exchanges between other individuals (inter-subjectivity), rather it is the activity that arises in a communal network that includes non-human actors (Latour 1993 and 1999). Interpretation as it is currently understood in archaeology is an operation of subjects and society (Andrews, Barrett, and Lewis 2000; Edgeworth 1990; Gero 1996; Hodder 1991a; 1999; 2001; Hodder and Hutson 2003; Hodder et al. 1995; Johnsen and Olsen 1992; Shanks and Tilley 1992; Tilley 1993; Thomas 2004a). If we can’t allow for the action of material actants within our own practice how will we ever do so in relation to archaeological pasts?
For hermeneutics to have a future in relation to humans and nonhumans it has to detach itself from the exclusivity of the subject (although refer to Idhe 1998 and the various chapters in Ihde and Selinger 2003). Until meaning is left entangled within a mixture with materiality it remains asymmetrical. In other words, meaning must be reconfigured within networks of humans, materials and media—only then will it acquire symmetry (Latour 1993, 136). Interpretation takes place within this relational web with the human as the mediator. As such interpretation is implicated within a much larger process of mediation. This brings us to the question of how interpretation relates to mediation?
Interpretation as a process of making sense, of situating meaning, cannot be severed from inscription and the medium of the text or mode of visualization (Idhe 1998). The post-processual embrace of history and the textual orientation of the archaeological process perpetuated this overwhelming emphasis on meaning (refer to Shanks and Hodder 1995). Indeed, there is more to understanding than meaning.
Finally, we may ask what of the ‘data’? As I touched on briefly in Chapter 1 the use of the term ‘data’ in archaeology obscures the long process transformation, the heterogeneous ingredients, the ‘cascades’ and accretions of other media that are the outcome of other processes, the many fine-grained steps which brought us to the inscriptions we call ‘data.’ Yes, ‘data’ is a misleading term because they are co-constituted out of the transactions of so many people and things (pace the case studies of Chapter 2 and the first section of this chapter). And yet the inscription, which mediates something of the material world, is ‘as solid as it gets’ (Latour 2003, 29). When we focus on inscriptions and media (understood as both the means and end) we do not entertain dualisms such as ‘data and interpretation’, rather we attend to the imbroglios of ideas and things that are caught up in these complex heterogeneous networks—these multiple fields—implicated in a generalized process of mediation.
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