The concept of mediation for Bruno Latour denotes far more than simply the acts of things as means, tools or intermediaries. Mediation refers to the multiple ways humans and ‘non-humans’ swap properties in the process of moving toward a goal, a possibility, an outcome. The prime mover of an action in the course of the archaeological process, as with the AEP, is a ‘distributed and nested series of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants in the series’ (Latour 1999, 181). So, for example, an archaeologist-with-a-pick is different from an archaeologist-without-a-pick, just as the pick is different within the hands of an archaeologist. The outcome of their combined action in the removal of topsoil or the excavation of wall collapse is different from the possible outcome of an archaeologist who excavates without a pick. A shift has occurred in what would have been the goals if the two entities, the pick and the archaeologist, had remained independent of each other. An entirely different outcome occurs through the combined action of a sociotechnical collective—archaeologist and pick. This collective shift is a form of mediation.

Mediation, I suggest, can be understood in yet another sense. It can have a broad meaning encompassing all forms of representation, that is, all forms of transformation and translation from the material world to the discursive whether textual, visual, or aural. However, I suggest that mediation also be understood in a more focused sense, as doing something fundamentally different from the semiotically-limited notion of representation in conventional scholarly forms of documentation and inscription. Following Latour’s notion of ‘circulating reference’, with each step in the archaeological process, from excavating a trench profile, drawing building phase sections, taking photographs, sampling, measuring, narrating, etc. we lose ‘locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity’—aspects of the material world—yet we gain ‘compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality’—qualities of documentation (Latour 1999, 47). Within this process, some form of textual referent, an ‘inscription,’ marks each of these gaps—these constituting moments of articulation—between the material world and whatever the final modes of documentation may be. Subtle shifts and translations, articulations and acts of mediation occur throughout the multiple fields of the archaeological process. But what of transforming those qualities of material presence normally suspended under the rubric of the ineffable? How might we hold on to the complexity and variability—the aspects of understanding and the messiness that cannot be encompassed under the banner of meaning? How might we attend to their manifestation?

Mediation occurs across this series of transformations between material presence and media. Understood in its more focused sense, ‘mediation’ allows one to contemplate ways of transforming aspects of the material past while at the same time bringing forth—manifesting—something of the locality, multiplicity, and materiality left behind with conventional processes of documentation and inscription. Such qualities of material presence, such belles noiseuses, are fundamental aspects of the archaeological. And, to be sure, mediation is a mode of engagement, which takes us beyond narrative, for scholarly narrative obfuscates the multiplicity of material presence. In this more focused sense mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot adequately sum up. I argue that it is a way of manifesting something of the ineffable (also Shanks 1997). Moreover, mediation is a process that allows us to attain richer and fuller translations of bodily experience and materiality that are located, multi-textured, reflexive, sensory, and polysemous.

While figures within this post-human, post-interpretive turn such as Latour, Haraway, Law, Stengers, and others have developed a rich suite of schemes for dealing with the complexities of how science transforms the material world through sociotechnical collectives of humans and materials, they have overwhelmingly utilized traditional modes of documentation. To be fair, Bruno Latour has recognized the importance of new media as propositions, which aid in the articulation of aspects of mundane city life in Paris. Invisible City was presented as a new media experiment on his website. Still, this dissertation will push further. In pushing against the old Platonic separation of means and end that has been hardened into the economic, technical, and corporate infrastructures behind new media, I seek to hold both ‘content driven’ and ‘form driven’ applications in symmetry while developing a platform for a post-human process of mediation. This requires a new philosophy of ‘data’ based upon situated media—that is, media designed for particular contexts.

As previously stated, to take the stance of ‘the medium is the message’ is to simply flip the emphasis from representation to materiality within the confines of the traditional duality of subject/object. We are always already dealing with multiples, networks, connections, collectivities, human/material assemblages, whatever designation we wish to give it. Furthermore the notions of ‘assemblage’ and ‘collective’ are key terms I foreground in relation to the mixture, hybrid or cyborg in collapsing, or rather, denying the existence in the hyper-incommensurability of the subject and object (refer to Latour 1993).

Hans Gumbrecht contends that in recharacterizing our relationship with things we should avoid ‘interpretation—without even criticizing the highly sophisticated and highly self-reflexive art of interpretation that the humanities have long established’ (2004, 57). It would be an exaggerated claim to situate mediation as the antithesis of interpretation. They are fundamentally different practices and to contrast them would be to open up mediation to the same criticisms as interpretation. In circumventing the classic error of critiquing one-sided (asymmetrical) positions and in so doing replacing them with one-sided (asymmetrical) positions I emphasize mediation as a process open to a collective of things and humans. As such we situate archaeology as a practice of materialization and manifestation that is mediational.

Return to modernist divides and hermeneutics: bypassing interpretation for mediation

Forward to reiteration

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