If there are any lingering doubts about the ability of non-humans to cause incalculable suffering by their own capacities, we need look no further than COVID-19, that microscopic, semi-living, spiky sphere of protein and RNA that has changed the world as we know it. By the same token, if there are any doubts about the locus of responsibility for harm in which non-humans play a leading role, we need look no further than the 2020 public health crisis in the USA, in which moral outrage over the mishandling of the pandemic has been aimed directly at human (if inhumane) leaders. Why has the virus not been subject to moral judgement? Despite its irrefutable capacity to inflict harm, and thus the pandemic's distributed causality, there is no confusion regarding where accountability for preventable suffering resides. Nevertheless, we have taken this non-human object extremely seriously. And in so doing, we have heightened our attunement to ‘hard power’—to the racism and injustices of health inequities that have left Black, Latinx and Indigenous bodies particularly vulnerable to morbidity and death.

In their debate piece on the pitfalls of the ‘new materialism’, Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020) advance two critiques of this disparate body of theory as it has been deployed in studies of Roman expansion. First, they proffer that the turn to ‘things’ absolves humans of responsibility for harm, including the damages inflicted by Roman conquest and subjection. Second, they submit that an undue focus on objects at the expense of humans works to marginalise ‘hard power’ and obscure inequality (in the Roman Empire and elsewhere), thereby undermining archaeology as a force for social change. Such critiques are, by now, familiar (Hodder Reference Hodder2014; Rekret Reference Rekret2016; Boysen Reference Boysen2018; Van Dyke Reference Van Dykein press). Yet the coronavirus crisis helps us to see that theoretical acrobatics may not be required to hold causation apart from culpability. It also teaches us that non-humans can, in fact, make injustice acutely manifest. In other words, the authors present us with two compelling dilemmas—but are they truly dilemmas? Before turning to this question, a historiographic observation is required. It is difficult to accept that the failure to confront dispossession, subjection, inequality and the predations of Roman conquest has much to do with the ‘new materialism’. After all, Roman archaeology's ‘post-colonial turn’ of the 1990s emerged from similar critiques, and likewise foregrounded the infringements of imperial sovereignty, back when things were still fully passive and representational.

Let us return to the coronavirus. Laidlaw (Reference Laidlaw and Lambek2010) and Krause (Reference Krause2011) can help us through the problem of responsibility. Both authors allow for a dimension of agency as distributed in the causal sense (in line with actor-network theory). But their formulations of agency bear differently upon questions of blame. For Laidlaw, the relational quality of agency is key to the apportionment of culpability. Certain others (be they people or objects) stand in ‘agentive’ relations with us as our intermediaries, and these relations become conduits for accountability. Let us suppose you discovered that your mailperson contracted COVID-19 from contact with your mailbox. Your ‘reactive attitudes’ (Strawson, cited in Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw and Lambek2010), such as guilt or shame, would prompt you to feel some responsibility, due to your association with your mailbox. From this, I understand that, if anything, things can extend human responsibility by association precisely because of their efficacy (in this example, the metal mailbox's hospitability to the virus). Key to Laidlaw's discussion is also the ‘response’ aspect of responsibility, or the possibility to expect compensation, which resides with people (and perhaps other beings regarded as moral agents). Krause is more explicit in expecting humans alone to shoulder the burden of blame. Krause would say the reason that the coronavirus is let ‘off the hook’ is because, for all its destructive efficacy, the virus does not latch onto healthy cells with a sense of self that is reflexive and responsive to norms. Krause's emphasis on subjectivity is at odds with Laidlaw's formulation, which refutes the notion that responsibility is intrinsic to the individual. Krause's stress on the capacity for responsiveness, however, brings the two scholars somewhat closer together.

In short, even as we witness the havoc that the coronavirus has wrought, on trial in the court of public opinion is not a collection of molecules, but powerful humans whose agency—however materially embedded, mediated and relational—includes responsiveness to norms and demands. There is thus no contradiction between recognising that humans alone are culpable for harm and that things play a collaborative role as “agents provocateurs of (historical) change” (Versluys Reference Versluys, Van Oyen and Pitts2017: 192). Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020: 1630–1639) are correct to note that “recognising the active role of material culture in social life should not lead us to underestimate either human responsibility or suffering”. The path towards reconciliation in the false dilemma of moral responsibility is to safeguard the space between distributed causation and concentrated accountability. An adequate response to the question “what harm was done and how?” requires attending to both our assemblages—to which “the charge of blame will not quite stick” (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 28)—and the human capacity to respond, to which full blame can stick as surely as a spiky coronavirus protein on a healthy human cell.

It is perhaps more difficult to chart a path through the second dilemma implied by the authors, namely that the ‘new materialism’ runs the risk of inspiring “passivity and withdrawal from political action”, in Boysen's words (Reference Boysen2018: 237), or the abdication of ‘hard power’. As I have noted elsewhere (Khatchadourian Reference Khatchadourian2016: 60), there is indeed an unsettling tranquillity in much new materialist scholarship. Those of us who have extended archaeology's engagement with this body of work into the political have tended to focus on the production of sovereignty (e.g. Smith Reference Smith2015) and the conditions of compromised sovereignty under empire (e.g. Khatchadourian Reference Khatchadourian2016, see also Bauer & Kosiba Reference Bauer and Kosiba2016), rather more than the experience of state violence. Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020) are therefore correct to put pressure on archaeologists with post-humanist inclinations to make the case that there is no inherent contradiction in an archaeological gaze that is at once object-oriented and at the same time attuned to injustice.

If González-Ruibal's (Reference González-Ruibal2019) work demonstrates that this is indeed possible in archaeology, here I want to unsettle the notion that social justice, radical politics and new materialism are philosophically incompatible. A growing body of object-oriented feminism, feminist materialism and anti-slavery materialism suggests otherwise, recognising both the tensions between object orientation and emancipatory theory/praxis, while also discovering resonances and cultivating common ground (Barad Reference Barad2007; Frost Reference Frost and Grasswick2011; Behar Reference Behar2016; Ellis Reference Ellis2018). Post-humanism certainly has its blind spots, including its neglect of race and Indigenous epistemes (Sunberg Reference Sunberg2013; Jackson Reference Jackson2015; Todd Reference Todd2016; Ellis Reference Ellis2018), and its failure to recognise that certain humans have long been rendered objects (e.g. women, people of colour) (Weheliye Reference Weheliye2014; Behar Reference Behar2016). In post-humanist theory, the ‘human’ is wrongly equated with Homo sapiens, when, in fact, it is an ideological designation that has performed its own dehumanising exclusions. Ellis (Reference Ellis2018: 143) notes that post-humanism's misstep of equating non-human with non-Homo sapiens “lies at the root of its failure to recognize its deep congruencies with the antiracist projects of social justice”.

But those congruencies do exist, as Ellis shows through her interpretation of Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter (Reference Wynter, Gordon and Gordon2005). Wynter's critical race theory, feminism and post-humanist thought all “share a common enemy”, namely, Western liberal humanism's hierarchical “construction of ‘Man’” (Ellis Reference Ellis2018: 138 & 146). Just as Wynter's work calls for “a posthumanist model of social justice” (Ellis Reference Ellis2018: 147), object-oriented feminism “gladly seizes on speculative realism's non-anthropocentric conception of the world as a pluralist population of objects, in which humans are objects no more privileged than any other” (Behar Reference Behar2016: 5). Behar (Reference Behar2016: 7) continues:

These thinkers ultimately doubt that a radically post-humanist perspective can sustain a radical politics. But one step shy of ‘radical’ post-humanism (where most new materialist archaeology resides anyway) offers space to further “the partial reconciliation and future collaboration between posthumanist materialisms and posthumanist social justice theories” (Ellis Reference Ellis2018: 138).

Pursuing such reconciliation is preferable to falling back on dichotomous choices and reversing the gains of a movement that, it is worth remembering, advances its own ethical project of confronting the hubris of human exceptionalism and its unfathomable ecological effects. The dilemma between ‘hard power’ and the new materialism may not be real, but the challenge of rethinking new-materialist archaeology in the light of feminist and Black feminist theory certainly is. Is archaeology up for it?