Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology

Abstract

What work does the adjective ‘social’ in social archaeology do? What is the character of human/things relations under the rubric of social archaeology? We raise these questions in relation to the recent Companion to Social Archaeology by Meskell and Preucel. While the corrective of the ‘social’ has been extremely productive, in broaching these questions we enter very murky waters. Our task in this article is to show where meanings of the ‘social’ have broken down; our charge is to demonstrate how frames of reference in understanding people/things relations have become muddled. By building on the strength of archaeology with regard to things, we seek to revisit the question: what is it to be human?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article was originally submitted to NAR as two separate, yet complimentary, commentaries on The Companion to Social Archaeology. With the encouragement of the Editors we have combined them here as a single article. We would like to thank James Collins, Ewa Domanska, Alfredo Gonzalez‐Ruíbal, Ian Hodder, Carl Knappett, and Bjørnar Olsen for their comments and feedback. We also thank our reviewer for some very helpful suggestions. All usual disclaimers apply – responsibility for this article is ours alone.

Notes

1. The ‘social of enchantment’ is rhetorically (and necessarily) obscure. Moreover, we do not wish for the social to be regarded as a direct substitution for technology as in Gell's title. The ‘social’, we contend, has become far more elusive.

2. While we are aware of the long and complex history of this term in the ‘humanities’ at large, here we deploy ‘humanism’ in the classic sense as a suite of presuppositions that situate human beings in a special position in relation to the world of things (see note 10).

3. While it very well may be the case that some, as Meskell claims, ‘have easily been seduced by the magical potentials that objects are actors in the same way as individual persons, thus collapsing the subject:object dichotomy’ (Meskell 2004a:3, b:249–250), for this to be the state of affairs is to fail to recognize this important distinction.

4. ‘Embodiment’, a very dialectical term, is itself plagued by the very modernist divides it is heralded as surpassing (Joyce 2004, Meskell and Preucel 2004:15–16). This is because no matter where it goes it is forced to carry around with it the notion of a preceding separation that was once the problem in the little prefix ‘em’. If only it did not seem so awkward and sound so ridiculous to drop the prefix in favor of ‘bodiment’!

5. First, while Latour is perhaps the most vocal, not to mention animate(d), there are many other philosophers and science studies practitioners whose work rises in defense of things and companion species including Geoffrey Bowker, Michel Callon, Donna Haraway, John Law, Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. Second, for Meskell to state that the positions of Latour and Marx are not so different, as she does in her article on ‘Divine things’ (2004b) is to fail to recognize the distinction as we have sketched it here.

6. Even with Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour does not deploy as the subtext of a section heading in Part I, ‘Objects too Have Agency’, without thoroughly severing the concept of ‘object’ from ‘a privilege given to ‘objective’ matter in opposition to ‘subjective’ language, symbols, values, or feeling’ and, even then, he does so only after a long moratorium on the use of what had become a very polemical term (contrast Latour 2004:246 with 2005:76).

7. It is here that we may locate Daniel Miller's take on Latour's work as one of ‘transcendence’ in relation to the ‘simplistic duality of subjects and objects’ (Miller 2005:10). Latour has never been an advocate of the rhetoric of dialectics to transcend, overcome, or resolve modernist dichotomies! While ‘overcoming vulgarity’ and appealing to ‘common sense’ is a brilliant rhetorical strategy and way to frame the debate, common sense is not always the best guide and the high road is not always the best path!

8. This point is of fundamental importance and as such it warrants repeated emphasis. Our conventional frames of reference subsume disorderly multiplicities. In dealing with the material world, we cannot treat such frames as the starting points of our analyses.

9. How could social interests and values alone propel the development of technology to eventually enable the accurate mapping of the ancient city? Was it human intentionality all the way which directed technical developments and harnessed them for social interests? Or did rudimentary apparatuses already historically available (the navigator's compass for instance) lead ‘individuals’ to apply them in alternate manners more akin to a Bourdieu‐like technical structure? The point of identifying an originary ‘intention’ which led to the eventual ability to map Teotihuacan seems pointless. The actual practice, on the other hand, of laying out an excavation and tying it back in to the Million map of Teotihuacan reveals a mixed collective: the archaeologist‐with‐map on the ground (Webmoor 2005, also refer to Gell 1985, Hutchins 1995).

10. An autochthonous, purified ‘individual’, capable of Goodman's (1978) ‘worldmaking’ through conceptual relativity, comes rather late in the game with the modernist ideal of humanism – and then (especially then!) ever more mixed with modernity's technology (Latour 1993, and Haraway's (1991) proliferating ‘cyborgs’). The appeal to liberate and make sovereign the individual, historically and socially particular as it is, has strong roots. These are the roots of humanism. As Richard Rorty (1998) tracks (and subscribed to) this obsession in modernity, we are determined to be beholden to no one and no thing: first liberation from an external God, then liberation from external things, so that we are not answerable to anything but each other in our pan‐humanism. A look to environmental degradation should immediately rid us of such a human‐centered myopia!

11. Make no mistake, durability as it is deployed in this article is not a quality of the object‐in‐itself, but is a property of the relations and in many instances arises through subsequent engagements by other collectives.

12. The durability of an aluminium ingot is not the same as the durability of a paper‐based text. It cannot be overstated: the latter requires subsequent relations to maintain and it is made more durable through its multiplication.

13. This genealogical sketch of the eyeglasses is best described as a ‘pragmatogony’. A compound of the Greek word for materials, pragmata, and the word for creation, gonos, pragmatogonies result when we accentuate the paths which lead to a particular thing, when we map a particular gathering (refer to Latour 1994; Witmore 2007a).

14. For Nietzsche's efforts to revitalize a non‐Socratic, agonistic model of dialectics as free play refer to Deleuze 1983.

15. The latest developing bifurcation being that of materiality and immateriality (see Buchli 2004)!

16. An analogous therapeutic recognition of ‘philosophical error’ in an entire framework for thinking in philosophy of science was made by Wittgenstein (1963:109, 133) at the moment of Analytic Philosophy's almost‐coronation as the oracle of the sciences. But support for such a contentious advocacy of suspending epistemology comes both from those looking to ontologies, and from the deep tradition in pragmatic thought of identifying the ‘spinning wheels’ of epistemology itself.