OOO and the archaeological object

As Ion points out, AA is deeply inspired by the thing-/object-oriented works of people such as Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton and Ian Bogost, and I could further name Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, as well as the legacy of such scholars as Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Henry Bergson – an eclectic squad whose paths cross over a concern for things and issues such as being, agency, memory and time.Footnote ¹ However, though truly imperative, what is at least equally important for my work and inspiration is the direct engagement with archaeological material. In response to Ion's emphasis on articulating her disbelief in OOO, and especially the works of Harman, I therefore find it important to stress a few concerns.

First, let me just make it clear that neither will I answer for the works of Harman or others, nor do I feel comfortable screening myself from critique through their work. I will rather try to gather my arms through reference to archaeology and to the empirical material at hand.

Second, and following directly from that, I will not discriminate between theory, practice and ‘data’, between ontology and epistemology, or between matter and meaning (Pétursdóttir and Olsen Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018; also e.g. Barad Reference Barad2007; Gumbrecht Reference Gumbrecht2004). There is no coincidence, I argue, that we have lately seen the rising of a collective yet sundry current of thoughts performing under legends such as post-humanism, New Materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology/philosophy and agential realism. These developments did not burst from pure reasoning, speculations or some ‘magical’ happenings in the theorists’ minds, but are fed in a macro-climate that simultaneously has seen progress in nanotechnology; the birth of Dolly the sheep; the encounter with waves from a distant black-hole merger; increasing build-up of greenhouse gases, rising temperatures, population growth and urbanization beyond compare; melting ice caps; plastic vortexes in all oceans; space debris in orbit; and so on. They are as much a product of the appearance and acknowledgement of these physical conditions and phenomena as they are reactions to any preceding abstract theoretical creed.

Similarly, my theorization around archaeology and the Anthropocene takes inspiration from the theoretical works mentioned above but mainly, however, from the material itself – drift matter on sub-Arctic shores, a material that also serves as a conspicuous testimony to the Anthropocene. Listening in on its behaviour, how it drifts and gathers on the verge of the human realm, urged me to halt. Surely, and as I also state in AA, some of the material can be grasped through a traditional retrospective approach, where journeys and origins may be retraced and located. What I found important to acknowledge, however, was how this kind of proceeding also would gloss over, or nullify, what most conspicuously characterizes these things: what they have become as a result of their post-human drift and agency. More than anything, therefore, my project and writing are an archaeological response to the challenges posed by this messy and ‘disobedient’ material.

For this reason, referring to the empirical work as an illuminating example – a mere case study employed to envisage the marvels of OOO – is to misjudge not only my intentions and inspiration, but also the potency of this material. There is a reason why I open my article with an account of the beach assemblage and strata, and why I return to it throughout the whole text. It is not a case mentioned in passing, but what really drives the argument. To be honest, and here I could possibly have been clearer, OOO is to me far less illuminating about the nature of this material than the material is informative of the potency of OOO.

Third, and following directly from this, without rearticulating the specific problems that Ion appears to have with OOO, let me just reassure her that we may in fact have more in common than not on that matter. For while the ‘thing’ of OOO and speculative realism may be a generic term, the manifestations of which may be as varied as they are many, the ‘examples’ referred to in those works are rarely – if ever – archaeological. And there is indeed something particular about archaeological material: things that have been abandoned or discarded, that have outlived their intended functions, endured, dissolved and gathered. Things that are vague – even chaotic – in their articulation and which resemble traces rather than evidence (cf. Sørensen Reference Sørensen2016b), and so on. Surely, the being of these things may be hinted at in Harman's notion of things as ‘sleeping giants’, in Latour's notion of actants, and in Bryant's distinction between light and dark objects, to name just a few. However, building theorization of object-being and agency on engagement with things that properly function, that answer to our tasks and ‘fit in’ with our everyday materiality and agendas, is significantly different from the theorization afforded by engagement with soiled and fragmented archaeological material. Hence, while I think all those things allow you (and I would even say urge you) to articulate, for example, agency in a novel way, the particularity of the archaeological is here of importance. I can therefore only agree that the theoretical frameworks gathered under OOO, speculative realism and the like often fall short in explaining archaeological contexts as well as the Anthropocene. However, rather than seeing this as shortcomings and confusions (it is only unfair to blame Harman for not being an archaeologist), I take this as an opportunity or even a call for archaeological theory and practice to provide ‘correctives’, nuances and expansions based on the richness of the empirical material.

Darkness, dead ends and knowledge of things

A second and related avenue I want to wander is that of darkness, dead ends and knowledge of things. With reference also to her disbelief in Harman's philosophy, Ion expresses her doubts that my ‘speculative realist agenda’ may lead anywhere but to a ‘dead end’; a ‘depressing perspective’ leading to a view of the world as ‘literally a dark one, composed of independent entities which float about in a transcendental universe (that we will not be able to know)’ (p. 196). Here I must admit I am slightly perplexed. If actually aiming for a reaction, this theatrically condescending claim would really have benefited from a less pompous and more articulate framing. What exactly are you reading between the lines? That because things have integrity, weight and the possibility of agency, they are disconnected, free-floating and utterly unaccountable? Or, that acknowledging that there are parts of the universe that withdraw from our gaze and knowledge equals an understanding of ourselves as ignorant and the world as supernatural and utterly intangible? If so, both readings are astoundingly far from what I have actually argued. But let's talk about ‘dead ends’ and knowing things.

While Ion leaves it mostly to the reader to infer what she means by ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’, she states her agreement with Terence Blake's (Reference Blake2012) notion that ‘a philosophy of non-access is still epistemological, a pessimistic negative epistemology that subtracts objects from meaningful human intervention’. Though I do not share this cynical prospect I do agree with Ion and Blake that the ‘speculative realist agenda’ indeed entails an epistemological stance. It is true that the turn to things in and outside archaeology has been referred to mostly as an ontological turn (e.g. Lucas et al. Reference Lucas2015). However, and as I have discussed at length elsewhere (Pétursdóttir and Olsen Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018), its outcome (and pedigree) is no less of epistemological import. Refraining from Cartesian bifurcations, seeing things as fundamentally involved in human conducts and social trajectories, acknowledging things’ agency, and so on, convey not only an ontological posture but also an altered understanding of things as data and, thus, a different prospect for knowing the world. And to me, this importantly means that there must be more shades to knowing than ‘dos and don'ts’ – enlightenment and ignorance. In other words, the darkness, the dark side of things, their withdrawn and hidden aspects, referred to in the works of OOO (and also in Heidegger's phenomenology) are to be understood neither as an obstacle to knowledge, nor as a rearing of distrust and suspicion, but rather as a part and means of nearing and knowing things.

Darkness and dusk as enlightenment and illumination? To recall, the notion of the Anthropocene has come about through an awareness of the resilience of things and substances, of how they escape our control, how they exceed prescribed functions and predictions to endure, swell and gather in ways not foreseen. To be clear, this awareness is not based on hypothetical fancies but on actual, empirical observations and measurements. For this reason, I argue, the Anthropocene is literally revelatory of things’ agency and, importantly, of things as always more than what their doings/use/relations may momentarily convey (cf. Harman Reference Harman2016) – an understanding that does not take things as fathomable givens, but as always partly opaque or unrealized. However, rather than reading this as pessimistic and gloomy – or as leading to ‘a helpless chaos in an unintelligible world’ (p. 200) – I see this as a challenge and opportunity to know things differently. And while Ion would apparently rather orient archaeology exclusively towards hard facts, ‘real history’ and ‘actual worlds’ (with credit to Adrian Currie Reference Currie2017), which surely reads as optimistically positivistic compared to her portrait of my murky speculations, I don't think a positivistic path is the one the current climate is calling for. We should indeed work with the ‘actual world’ but, importantly, through an approach that is not blind to but literally concerned with how things withdraw and escape from our preconceived agendas and knowledge. And resembling what Levi Bryant (Reference Bryant2011) has referred to as ‘dark enlightenment’, this is not a cynical perspective full of dead ends and unintelligible things, but rather a form of knowing that does not see darkness as its binary opposite but as a significant and meaningful constituent both of the world and of any means (we have) of nearing it.

This is also where I believe archaeology has much to offer object-oriented theories. As the discipline of abandoned but durable things archaeology has always worked with the tensions between being and becoming, formation and deformation, emergence and afterlife. And while OOO does provide me with important means to think about things as vigorous, political entities, entangled in and detached from our agendas, I think an archaeological perspective and direct engagement with things – e.g. drift matter – brings nuances to my understanding that an abstract engagement with OOO would never have afforded. And this I see as an opportunity, if not an urgency, for archaeology to step in and take active part in this theoretical dialogue (which many have done).

This is because, and here we may again differ, I see theories not as ‘anchor points’ but rather as buoyant phenomena (Pétursdóttir and Olsen Reference Pétursdóttir and Olsen2018). They may be embedded in specific cultural and institutional contexts, as Ion argues, but they also become employed outside those settings, worked on in unforeseen environments, and entangled with new things. Theories are nomads in a mixed world and are not unaffected by their drift. To Ion this may leave theory as a ‘loose concept’, which is one way of phrasing it – but I don't see this as a negative thing. In fact, my supposed ‘cynical’ reference to darkness may be illuminating also here, because rather than perceiving theory as finite and always already fully irradiated, I see it as continuously mobilized and realized through new encounters (ibid.). Theory and theoretical concepts, like other things, retain a ‘dark side’, a not-yet-seen potential, which only becomes discharged through drift and association with new things and data. To deny this is, to me, to envision theory itself as detached from the ‘actual world’, as an already given ‘dead end’ that leaves nothing to inquire or question, and, as follows, to perceive of archaeological theorization mostly as a passive act of borrowing and consuming. In other words, a rather depressing and disengaged outlook – if you ask me.

Ethics, politics and responsibility

Finally, and to conclude, I want to address a third category of critique leading down the lane of ethics, politics and responsibility. It is clear that Ion sees my arguments as having severe (read: negative) ethical and political consequences, in the form of fetishizing things, abandoning any form of responsibility, and alienating human beings(!). Orienting her critique to OOO more generally, she states, ‘While the model claims to be egalitarian, it has the opposite effect. The (apparent) absence of hierarchical relations leads to the absence of any accounts of power relations, imbalance, or inequality . . . If all things are on equal grounds, whose is the responsibility for polluting the environment?’ (p. 196). And as she further contends, this also comes down to what we see as archaeology's role in the present: ‘either as an endeavour that can become a powerful reflexive tool with social, cultural and political impact, or as a lyrical and passive metaphor’ (p. 198). While she appears self-confidently situated within the former trope, the prospects of the latter, which I take to be her interpretation of my own stance, are little but an apolitical ‘poetic contemplation’ (p. 198) corresponding to total indifference, capriciousness and (with due credit to Hornborg Reference Hornborg2017) a ‘dithering while the planet burns’.

Well, blimey! With such nuanced reading I cannot but understand Ion's agitation. While I doubt it will be any consolation, I can only state that my prospects for OOO, not to mention for archaeology(!), are considerably less dark. First, let me just begin by asserting that it is my genuine belief that social criticism and political allegation are at least equally and often more effectively channelled through other genres than the one traditionally ascribed to academia – which I see as running the risk of being met by the public not only as downright boring but also, and more importantly, as unintelligible and literally alienating. A not too far-fetched example of this may be Ion's, or rather Svetlana Boym's (Reference Boym2011), concluding remark: ruins are ‘physical embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of modern teleologies and technologies alike, and the riddles of human freedom’. With respect for Boym's work, one may still ask in what way this, pardon me, jargon-full passage may be helpful or intelligible to, for example, the inhabitants of half-abandoned fishing villages in the sub-Arctic, who really don't have any freedom of choice in whether or not to literally inhabit a present of ‘past’ economic and technological landscapes? The past is not an option to them or us. It is not merely about our freedom of choice and ‘creativity’. And this, I argue, is what is becoming ever more pressing – and quite literally so – in the Anthropocene. Its manifestations are concrete, not abstract. Its ruins are full-blown bodies, not embodied. So let's be careful when we elevate our traditional academic perspectives and self-claimed ‘rigorous’ articulations at the cost of, for example, poetry, lyrics or the word on the street.

Second, it is not my intention to abolish distinctions between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans – and one should think that a telling indication is that I repeatedly refer to those in my text. Also, I do not suggest, nor does OOO, that such ‘analytical distinctions are in some way the ones responsible for the existence of inequalities, ecological destruction, racism or discrimination’ (p. 191). This claim is exclusively Ion's (and possibly Hornborg's Reference Hornborg2017). It is my belief, however, that social and political reality is considerably more complex than an anthropocentric perspective that reserves agency and politics to humans only is able to convey. This, however, is not at all to claim that political relations are egalitarian, that difference is abolished, or that all things are equal, which is a common misreading of OOO. It suffices to refer to Bryant's conception of things’ gravity and Harman's conception of symbiosis. Ian Bogost (Reference Bogost2012, 11) framed this neatly, even poetically(!), when he said that ‘all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally’. So it is not about factually flattening the sociopolitical landscape, ascribing agency to all phenomena alike, or seeing it as ‘a quality shared by everyone’. In fact, as I see it, agency is not a quality at all, but a potential that is based on qualities held – and inequalities suffered – and which becomes realized through associations. Hence, when it comes to, for example, the validation of statements and accountability, the mode of inquiry for OOO would in fact be to try to expose power inequalities and how these may not only be imprinted on, but also fuelled by, non-human criteria.

Third, and to conclude, let me make a short note about ethics. While accusing my work of furthering error and lack of liability, Ion does not herself spend as much as a word on explaining what she actually means by either ethics or responsibility. And maybe there is a clue in just this: that both phenomena are taken as given, normative truths. If so, I can only elucidate that in my own understanding, inspired amongst others by Silvia Benso (Reference Benso2000), ethics is not simply a prescribed formula for distinguishing good from bad, right from wrong, or a measure applied to identify culprits, but about attentiveness to difference and about the disposition and ability to hesitate, rethink and respond. As claimed by Derrida (Reference Derrida2009), ethics may even be seen as remaining latent in the face of familiarity and apparent elucidation, ‘sleeping a dogmatic slumber’ (ibid., 156), and being awakened only by the challenge and concern for otherness. Thus, where Ion eyes danger and darkness in anything but trotting the ‘known’ path, referring to my considerations as ‘passive contemplation’ that will surrender any possibility for knowledge and for ‘meeting and mutual understanding’ (p. 198), I simply couldn't disagree more. And to be honest, a mutual understanding is probably not around the corner anyway. To be clear, my perspective is not one of indifference. Like Ion, I care deeply and feel responsible. However, with my understanding of ethics, and like Karen Barad, I see responsibility not least as ‘a matter of the ability to respond . . . [and] be responsive to the other’ (Barad Reference Barad, Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 69). So, to me, acting responsibly is not a corrective engagement, making things obey pre-given categories and agendas. It is rather the ability to acknowledge and respond to their difference and drift. Therefore, daring to ‘dither’, to hesitate and to consider how to take seriously the way things spill over, swell and endure – and how, quite literally, to express matters of the Anthropocene – is to me the condition for an environmental ethics and responsibility.