From inexhaustibility to non-appearance

In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (Reference Miller2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis Reference Alvis2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways.

It is arguable that in the modern West a proper knowledge of reality has come to be associated with a considered and analytical inspection of things, stepping back from physical engagement in order to achieve objectivity (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991, 45). It follows from this that knowledge takes a form that is both explicit and composed of distinct ‘bits’, which have a self-evident significance and can be gradually accumulated to create a satisfactory understanding of the whole (Johnson Reference Johnson2011, 765). However, an important critique of these ideas was developed within the Romantic movement. From Herder and Schelling onwards, it began to be argued that not all of life is fully conscious, and that some experiences cannot be expressed in an unambiguous and particulate fashion, or even verbalized at all (Berlin Reference Berlin2013, 115). No matter how closely we look at something, there is potentially always more to be seen and more insights to be gained, and in this lies the wonder of creation. But at the same time, the implication is that our knowledge of the world will always be partial and incomplete. This insight was developed within phenomenological thought. For although Edmund Husserl initially hoped to strip away the inessential paraphernalia of everyday life, in order to isolate the core of pure experience, those who followed him were often concerned with the everyday ‘natural attitude’ that he had sought to set aside (Hintikka Reference Hintikka, Smith and Smith1995, 88). How and why do we pass over, and neglect, much of what is closest to us? These later approaches were explicitly concerned with non-appearance, how things fail to become discrete objects of knowledge or withdraw from our attention. Indeed, these perspectives recognize that only a small portion of the understanding that we rely on in order to conduct our lives is acquired in any explicit manner. The atomized ‘facts’ that the Western tradition deals in can be identified as secondary and derived, rather than as the grounding building-blocks of knowledge.

For Martin Heidegger, it is a mistake to imagine that material things are isolated and self-supporting entities, or that we can get closer to them by listing their outward qualities or identifying their process of manufacture (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1971, 164). Famously, in Being and Time (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962), Heidegger identifies two distinct modes of engagement between people and things. The Cartesian/Baconian way of looking consciously and analytically at objects, as if from a distance, places them in a mode of present-at-handness. They are just there, to be observed as lumps of matter. But this is a relatively unusual state of affairs, because most of the time things are ready-to-hand. That is, they achieve the ‘humility’ that Miller describes by fading into the background, most characteristically in the process of use, as a tool. Heidegger's classic analysis concerns the way that we make use of a hammer. I can pick up the hammer, feel the heft of it, note the materials from which it has been made, assess its suitability for the task at hand. But when I begin actually to use it to hammer nails into a board that I want to attach to the roof of a building, it recedes into the task. I cease to be aware of the hammer as an object at all, because I am absorbed in my project of mending the roof: my conscious awareness is directed towards the outcome that I am seeking to achieve. As the thing disappears into the task, my relationship with it becomes one of almost instinctual know-how rather than analytical knowing. Both the hammer and I cease to be discrete entities, as we melt into the relational involvement of the work.

When a thing is in this state of ‘toolness’ or equipmentality, it becomes inconspicuously familiar to me. My thoughts are elsewhere, and the tool functions unobtrusively (Harman Reference Harman2018, 152). The claim that Heidegger effectively makes is that this unconsidered engagement with things challenges the Kantian belief that we can only know representations of things in consciousness that have been subjected to our cognitive processes and never the things as they actually are (Braver Reference Braver2014, 34). The things of the world are really there, even if they unveil or reveal themselves to us in a variety of different ways, according to the character of our involvement with them (Käufer Reference Käufer and Wrathall2013, 350). However, this involvement can change, sometimes quite abruptly. A key element in Heidegger's argument is that ready-to-hand things that we are employing as tools can be suddenly rendered more clearly perceptible through the breakdown of the tool relationship. If the hammer's handle breaks, or the head works itself loose, it may become conspicuous, obstinate, or obtrusive. In failing to operate, it alerts me to its objective presence. I may need to wedge the head back on, get a new handle, or give up work entirely for the day. When it fails, the hammer reveals itself as an object that needs to be interrogated in some fashion, while I become a subject separated from it, looking on in distress. But these are only particular ways in which the tool and I can be, drawn from a range of possibilities. This relationship between an object and an observing person does not exhaust the possibilities of either. It was the mistake of the Western tradition to imagine that this is the only person–thing relationship that is possible, arising from the simplistic division between knowing subjects and self-evident objects that we have already mentioned.

Equally importantly, when I look at the broken hammer, it may initially seem as if I am seeing it for the first time, because it has surprised me, and presents itself in an unfamiliar manner. But actually, I already know a great deal about it: how it fits in the hand and balances, what it feels like, how to wield it effectively, where the handle has become a little worn, and so on. I have learned these things in use, without explicitly trying to, so that my observation of the broken tool is a supplement to the deeper and more fundamental knowledge that I have already acquired: it is secondary. Moreover, it is when the hammer is broken that I may become explicitly aware of a whole network of implicit relationships that I find that I have always already known: between the hammer and the nails, the boards, the roof timbers, the walls of the building (Braver Reference Braver2014, 35). This is the mesh of connections that I myself have been submerged within until the moment of breakdown. The hammer is only capable of operating as a tool within this ‘equipmental totality’ of interrelated things, which remains hidden so long as everything is working in a satisfactory way. A tool can only ever be part of a relational system of equipment; it cannot function in isolation (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991, 62).

The thing

Heidegger's analysis of things as tools has proved helpful and influential, and indeed Graham Harman has attempted to extend it by arguing that it applies to all relations between entities, whether human or non-human (Harman Reference Harman2010, 55). In particular, it demonstrates the fluctuating character of the relationship between people and things, and shows that non-human entities can be least conspicuous when they are most important. However, it is clear that Heidegger himself became dissatisfied with the argument, in part because the ‘turn’ that he took toward his later work involved a rejection of humanism and anthropocentrism. In the tool analysis, things recede and withdraw into inconspicuous familiarity as we engage with them as tools. Our absorption in the thingly world is underwritten by the structure of care: things emerge from the background as we pursue our projects within a world that we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into. But because Heidegger casts things as things-for (Zeug), the Being and Time analysis has an instrumentalist aspect to it. Things seem to be there to do our bidding, to enable us to achieve our objectives. The later Heidegger was explicitly concerned with the way that in modernity the world had come to be perceived by humanity as a massive storehouse of resources, which awaits at our disposal (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977, 17). Arguably, Heidegger's later work became more concerned with ontological structures that humans are implicated in but not central to, while things themselves were presented as playing a more fundamental articulating role (Gabriel Reference Gabriel2014, 57).

The later Heidegger draws attention to the ancient meaning of a thing as an assembly, an event that gathers people together in order to address matters of collective concern (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1971, 175). In a comparable way, a material thing as humble as an earthenware jug can have an assembling function, uniting earthly materials, elemental forces, human beings and their collective spiritual aspirations. The thing things, it does its own work of drawing the world together, rather than being just the instrument of human purposes. Here there is less of a sense that we achieve a connection with things by bending them to our designs, and more that we should approach them with humility, letting them be themselves and do what they do. But in a broader sense the argument builds on that in Being and Time: by living alongside things, allowing them to do their thingly work rather than turning them into analytical objects, we enter into the world's process. The implication is still that when things are immersed in relationality, erasing their identity as isolated entities, our relations with them become both more authentic and less conspicuous.

After anthropocentrism

One of the most significant tendencies in archaeological thought at present, as well as in the humanities in general, involves the rejection of modernist dichotomies, a turn towards ontology over epistemology, and a critique of anthropocentrism. In the context of these developments, phenomenology is open to the charge that it prioritizes the human experience and understanding of reality over the internal workings of the material world itself (Olsen Reference Olsen2010, 70). Notions of inconspicuousness and unobtrusiveness are potentially equally vulnerable to the criticism that they privilege the kind of being (human or other) that can direct its attention toward things, or can have its interest concentrated elsewhere. Inconspicuous and unobtrusive to whom? However, recognizing that different kinds of entities interact with each other in different ways does not necessarily demand that we afford humans a preeminent location, in relation to which all other things are evaluated (Rae Reference Rae2013, 4). Yet once we adopt a position in which material things, animals and plants are more than just conditions for or limitations upon human action (Jones & Boivin Reference Jones, Boivin, Hicks and Beaudry2010, 341), what place remains for a consideration of the incidentalness of things?

I have already briefly alluded to Graham Harman's revision of Heidegger's analysis of the tool. Harman reveres the work of Bruno Latour, whom he describes as the ‘prince of networks’ (Harman Reference Harman2009). However, in one respect he differs from him profoundly. In Latour's vision of networks, everything is an actant, and every actant is no more than the sum of its relationships. Harman, however, draws on Heidegger to argue for the inexhaustibility of objects. For not only do things withdraw into the inconspicuousness of the tool state; some part of them always remains dark and unfathomable. Pollock and colleagues ask whether incidentalness could be seen as an ontological relationship, existing between entities of various kinds and not only humans. In Harman's terms, when any two things encounter each other, something is elicited from each. When a leaf blows against a wall, the hardness and resilience of the wall and the malleability of the leaf are manifested, but many other aspects of their internal structures, composition, history and durability are not revealed in the interaction. The question that this raises is whether the attributes of an entity have to be processed by consciousness in order to qualify as ‘apparent’ or ‘incidental’. If not, then we could imagine a world in which all material things normally exist in a state of reciprocal incidentalness, sporadically revealing some aspects of themselves through their mutual interactions: ‘lighting up’, as it were. The fluctuating attentiveness of humans (and other sentient beings) to their material surroundings might then be understood as a subset of this more general play of conspicuousness and incidentalness.

The opposition between Latourian relational networks and Harmanite withdrawn objects is, perhaps, unsatisfactory because both options are arguably somewhat static. As Harman points out, Latour rejects the notion that any part of an actor can be held in reserve. And without the possibility of hidden potential in things it is hard to see how change can come about: when one element of one of Latour's networks changes, it simply becomes a different network (Latour Reference Latour1988, 158). But equally, Harman's objects seem to be distinguished by a stable relationship between a real core and a sensual exterior, and he tends to reject notions of becoming. One does not find in Harman's work much discussion of materials and substances flowing into and out of object forms, assembling, stabilizing and dispersing (e.g. Ingold Reference Ingold2012, 429). Harman responds that he uses the term ‘object’ very broadly, to describe anything that cannot be reduced down to its component parts or upward to the array of effects that it has on other things; objects should be neither undermined nor overmined (Harman Reference Harman2018, 48). But we might object that things are not only unstable; they are always assemblages or compositions made up of lesser entities, and they can also combine to form larger assemblages, which may have properties and capacities of their own, different from those of their component parts (Bennett Reference Bennett2005, 446). Deleuzian assemblage theory shares the emphasis that Latour places on mixed-up, heterogenous ensembles of elements, emphasizing that what distinguishes an assemblage is its capacity to produce difference, to have an effect (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2016, 9). But assemblages are often dynamic, protean, and in a continual state of becoming. In the context of the current discussion, it is important to note that some assemblages may contain humans and some may not: weather systems versus power-supply grids, for instance. Sometimes, we humans participate in assemblage-level processes without being aware of it: dispersing the seeds of plants that we brush against, hosting and transmitting viruses, eroding pathways or polluting watercourses. So far from people having mastery over their surroundings, it is possible for not only the material things that we engage with, but also the dynamic processes that we are embedded within, to remain inconspicuous to us.

The assemblage framework emphasizes becoming and change, and stresses that both organic and inorganic matter are caught up in the process of life (Protevi Reference Protevi, Smith and Somers-Hall2012, 242). But it is important to note that becoming is always complemented by un-becoming, perishing and loss (Williams Reference Williams, Bell and Colebrook2009, 144). Material entities are always gathering, but they are also always wasting away. Physical things have duration, in that they endure over time, but they also undergo change. Only some of this change is ever wrought by human beings, and in their absence, things disperse, erode, decay and collapse, as well as reacting and interacting with each other in unexpected ways (Hodder Reference Hodder2011, 160). This combination of durability and volatility means that ‘inanimate’ things have the capacity to surprise us: the way that fences need mending, washing machines malfunction and windows periodically need repainting can be seen as a version of the Heideggerian tool-breakdown. But it has a deeper significance: it undermines the expectation that the world should be composed of static, inert entities, which should stay where we left them, without changing. It alerts us to the disquieting reality that everything is always in motion, to a greater or lesser degree, with or without our permission.