Things are not what they used to be

In recent years, a multifaceted argument has been mounted to the effect that material entities have been systematically underestimated and neglected by the human sciences (Olsen Reference Olsen2012: 20). Indeed, they are reduced to one of the following: inanimate matter to which things are ‘done’; symbols invested with meaning by humans; expressions of human creativity; or mundane objects to be passed over without comment (Webmoor Reference Webmoor2007: 567). The net effect of this is that although disciplines from archaeology to art history study ‘things’, they generally do so in order to get at something else: the people who made, perceived and consumed them, the social or aesthetic values that they embody or the history that they reflect (Olsen Reference Olsen2012: 24). ‘Things’ are not interesting enough in themselves to merit investigation, while their inertia means that they must be explained in terms of an external force: society, culture, power. Moreover, when ‘things’ do become the focus of enquiry, they are often rendered as surrogate humans, so that pots are equated with people in cultural history, while artefacts are identified as having human-esque ‘biographies’ (Domanska Reference Domanska2006: 180).

For some decades, a distinct sub-discipline of material culture studies has been in existence, investigating the production, reception and consumption of contemporary artefacts, but this has predominantly operated using a framework of ‘objectification’ or ‘materialisation’ (Miller Reference Miller1987). Under this dialectical rubric, people make objects that then act back on the formation of human subjects. More recent approaches within archaeology have begun to identify objects as independent actors. Thus, long-lasting artefact traditions and enduring objects lay down the conditions for human life, encouraging people to act in particular ways and effectively placing obligations on them (Gosden Reference Gosden2005: 208). Similarly, Ian Hodder has recently developed a sophisticated argument concerning the ways in which people and ‘things’ become progressively entangled with one another. People find themselves increasingly dependent on the ‘things’ that they make (from plastered walls and domesticated cereals to washing machines and cars), while those ‘things’ depend on humans for their upkeep, and on other ‘things’ for their stability (Hodder Reference Hodder2012: 88). The philosopher Graham Harman, however, complains that much of the recent ‘material turn’ is really only concerned with the relationships between people and ‘things’, and that, in Hodder's case, the presumption seems to be that at some prelapsarian time, humans and objects were entirely separate (Harman Reference Harman2014: 47). Hodder advocates a return to a state of hunter-gatherer simplicity, but Harman counters that people and ‘things’ have always been thoroughly bound up with each other.

Harman's call to take real, substantial ‘things’ seriously already has its correlates in archaeology. Olsen (Reference Olsen2012: 20) argues that we must consider how ‘things’ are amongst themselves, when shorn of any human involvement. For objects do not have to rely on people to animate them: they have the potential to do things independently. That is to say, matter can be considered as vibrant, imbued with powers of its own and continually in flux (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 6). Left to its own devices, matter will flow, erode, degrade, decompose and reconfigure itself. The ‘making’ of artefacts is therefore less a matter of the imposition of a pre-determined design than a negotiation, in which the artisan follows and responds to the qualities of a material that is already in motion, so that form is emergent (Ingold Reference Ingold2012: 433).

The recognition that objects and animals are actively involved in the processes of our world, and that humans do not occupy a separate sphere of reality, has given rise to what is referred to as a ‘flat ontology’ (Bogost Reference Bogost2012: 17). In accordance with the theme of humility noted above, this is presented as a democratic framework in which all kinds of entities are placed on an equal footing and presumed to be capable of affecting other ‘things’. No single entity is imagined to be the sovereign source of change in the world. The first archaeological movement to advocate such a perspective was ‘symmetrical archaeology’, which argues that we should employ the same means to understand ourselves as those used to understand the entities that we study (Witmore Reference Witmore2007: 546; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012: 12). Noting that modern Western thought tends to divide reality up into unequally balanced dichotomies, it advocates a levelling of the relationships between people and ‘things’, ideas and practices. It has been argued, however, that the effect of this balancing is simply to leave these dualisms in place, while reducing heterogeneous things and objects to sameness (Ingold Reference Ingold2012: 429).

Democratic modesty, and the recognition of objects as dynamic participants in our world, has led to a re-evaluation of the ethical status of material ‘things’, particularly in the domain of heritage studies. If objects can affect us, do they merely exist for our pleasure and edification, or do they have rights of their own (Sørenson Reference Sørenson2013: 7)? And if objects are not ‘surrogate humans’ but operate in their own ways, should we not show greater respect for their independent role in our shared world (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012: 202)? There is, however, growing unease over the indiscriminate affordance of respect and sympathy to groups of non-humans. Does putting everything on the same level ultimately erode our capacity to prioritise the needs of disadvantaged humans (Gratton Reference Gratton2014: 119)? Do we really want to create a moral equivalence between migrants, disabled people, fruit flies and anglepoise lamps (Berry Reference Berry2012)?

Ontology and alterity

The newfound preoccupation with material entities among the human sciences is structurally linked with a ‘turn’ to ontology, the philosophical investigation of the fundamental character of worldly entities. It is argued that since at least the seventeenth century, Western thought has been fixated with the problem of human knowledge. The question of how the mind can acquire secure information about the world was more crucial than what it is we might learn (Niemoczynski Reference Niemoczynski2013: 20). The philosophical movement known as ‘speculative realism’ argues that we have consequentially been caught like rabbits in the headlights of epistemology for 300 years (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux2008). We should instead have the confidence to assert that there is a real world out there, and be prepared to speculate about the character of that world. The ‘ontological turn’ has, however, taken radically different forms in different disciplines. For the speculative realists, it is concerned with the primordial nature of a reality that is utterly independent of human cognition and cultural values (Gratton Reference Gratton2014: 16). By contrast, in anthropology the talk is not of ontology but ontologies (Henare et al. Reference Henare, Holbraad, Wastell, Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007: 6). In the past, ethnographers have generally held that the peoples whom they study have different cultural perceptions of a single material world (whose definitive understanding is implicitly given by Western science). Breaking down any division between ideas and reality, it becomes possible to argue that different people are not just interpreting the world differently, but inhabiting different material worlds with multiple ontologies (Alberti Reference Alberti, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013: 45). A particular community may, for example, maintain that stones and people are one and the same. This need not be evaluated in terms of cultural belief. Under particular circumstances, stones can have the same capacities as human beings and cause similar things to happen; in this sense, they are equivalent (Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011: 904). In a similar way, different archaeological interpretations are not just sets of abstract ideas, as they actually arise from linking real ‘things’ together (artefacts, site reports, archives, measuring equipment, soil descriptions, photographs). Once in existence, such interpretations are capable of creating effects of their own, becoming artefacts themselves to an extent (Fowler Reference Fowler, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013a: 249).

The virtue of this approach is that it enables us to encounter unfamiliar worlds and to evaluate the adequacy of our conceptual apparatus (Jones & Alberti Reference Jones, Alberti, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013: 26). When our ideas simply cannot make sense of a situation, we need to re-assess them. Yet those archaeologists who have been influenced by speculative realism have a very different view of alterity. They urge us to stop making up stories that subjugate ‘things’ to their relationships with people (Olsen Reference Olsen2012: 22). The real strangeness and unfamiliarity of objects lies in their non-humanness, their resistance to our intellectual schemes and the inaccessible depths that we can sense hidden beneath their surfaces.

Correlationism and realism

This imperative to think about ‘things’ in the absence of people is closely connected with the contemporary debate on correlationism, which begins with the conventional argument that the human mind orders and structures the raw data of experience, so that we never know the world as it really is in itself, only as mediated by our faculties (Braver Reference Braver2007: 3). Any knowledge that we have is always, in part, a human construction, and it becomes impossible for us to think of people or the world in isolation, only ever the correlation between the two (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux2008: 3). Meillassoux, however, objects that it is actually possible for us to get beyond the correlation of thought and being, and instead contemplate the ‘great outdoors’ beyond. His argument is that science is fully capable of addressing ‘ancestral events’ that took place long before the existence of humans: the big bang, the formation of the earth, the beginnings of life. Here we are not just thinking about the significance of evidence for the past that exists ‘for us’ in the present, we are thinking of a world utterly without human consciousness (Niemoczynski Reference Niemoczynski2013: 19). The conviction that there are means of knowing ‘things’ as they really are is a further dimension of speculative realism, and it has contributed to a more general renaissance of realist philosophy.

The attraction of realism is that it allows for the possibility of entities that are entirely independent of ourselves (Gratton Reference Gratton2014: 29). Traditionally, this implies that the world is composed of free-standing objects, that humans passively accumulate knowledge of those ‘things’ in their minds, that truth involves a correspondence between objects and their mental representations, and that known ‘things’ are unaffected by our knowledge of them (Braver Reference Braver2007: 14). Yet some of the ‘realisms’ that have emerged in archaeology are only realist to the extent that they maintain that the world is not a product of the human mind (Fowler Reference Fowler, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013a: 235). Particularly influential has been the ‘agential realism’ of Karen Barad, who holds that our world is not composed of separate entities but of phenomena that are thoroughly entwined. These phenomena do not affect each other externally so much as ‘intra-act’ as elements of a greater whole. We understand this world from within, transforming it in the process (Barad Reference Barad2011: 147). This approach is quite distinct from conventional forms of realism, and potentially conflicts with the view that objects are entirely autonomous.

Contemporary archaeological realisms also often eschew both the image of thought as mental representation and the correspondence theory of truth. They break down the distinction between ideas and objects, so that it makes little sense to seek a correlation between the two or to identify archaeological interpretations as more or less successful approximations of reality (Fowler Reference Fowler2013b: 31). This suggestion hereby introduces the theme of interpretation, which is treated with some ambivalence in the contemporary literature. At least two recent publications advocate a form of archaeology that comes ‘after interpretation’, although what they each mean by this differs considerably. Jones and Alberti reject the figure of the interpreting archaeologist, aloof from both their evidence and contemporary society (2013: 16), and emphasise instead the imbrication of theories, techniques, people and apparatus described by Fowler (Reference Fowler, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013a: 235). But for Olsen, the over-interpretation of artefacts and the attempt to make them tell us about past societies should be rejected in favour of a more descriptive approach (Olsen Reference Olsen2012: 22). As a result, he argues that archaeology should attempt to reconstruct material memories rather than narrative history. This contrasts with other new materialisms that emphasise the specific historical circumstances in which ‘things’ and people interact (e.g. Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 24). While neither account rejects interpretation altogether, there is clearly a problem that it is often understood as a search for deep meanings and hidden truths. The alternative has always been to see interpretation as the way in which understanding is generated from being in the midst of events and experiences, finding one's way through the world.

Networks and the social

Just as contemporary archaeologies sometimes claim to be post-interpretive, there is also talk of a turn ‘beyond the social’ (Webmoor Reference Webmoor2007: 569). For thinkers influenced by network theories, society is not something that already exists, but something that people and ‘things’ conspire to bring into being (Latour Reference Latour2005: 4). Increasingly, archaeologists are comfortable with the view that societies may be made up of diverse entities, rather than being composed exclusively of intersubjective relations: perhaps less a post-social archaeology than an extended notion of the social (Lucas Reference Lucas2012: 260). In the case of the Eurasian Neolithic, for instance, it may be helpful to consider people, animals and artefacts becoming bound together to create new kinds of communities (Thomas Reference Thomas, Fowler, Harding and Hofman2015: 1082). These perspectives are generally informed to some extent by the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and colleagues (Latour Reference Latour2005). For Latour, nothing ever operates in isolation, but actants form networks that produce effects. Anything can be an actant—a person, a microscope, a cartoon character—so long as it can enter into alliances with other actants to bring about change (Harman Reference Harman2014: 37). No actant is more ‘real’ than any other (a mythological deity may be as ‘effective’ as a stone monument), but they may be stronger or weaker, attracting more or fewer allies. Such an approach is relational, seeing reality created by the mediations and translations that take place between actants, but it none the less presents the latter as self-contained entities that can become uncoupled in order to create new networks (Harman Reference Harman2009: 144).

In our discipline, the network approach has been impressively employed by the symmetrical ‘school’ in casting the business of investigating the past as an ‘ecology of practices’. As its followers note, the history of archaeology often focuses on a succession of ‘great men’ or sets of socio-political circumstances (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012: 37). What are left out are the battalions of plane tables, wheelbarrows, trowels, pencils, section drawings and institutions that are tied to people in the co-creation of the past. Over time, archaeology in the field and the museum has become a more elaborate network, with a greater variety of tasks being assigned to a greater number of actants of various kinds (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012: 69). Despite this, the ANT approach is not without its critics. By breaking down the distinctions between objects and concepts, humans and non-humans, and by reducing the world to a grid of actants all busily mediating and translating, there is a tendency for all analyses to look much the same (Berry Reference Berry2012).

One response to the problems of ANT is found in Harman's object-oriented philosophy; Harman rejects Latour's view that objects are always fully deployed in their relationships and retain no further potential in reserve, as this limits the possibility of change (Harman Reference Harman2009: 17). It is partially for this reason that Harman champions the autonomy of individual, actual ‘things’, rather than reducing them to their relationships. This introduces an image of physical objects wherein they possess a hidden, non-relational core (Gratton Reference Gratton2014: 120). On this basis, Harman constructs an influential account of the relationships and interactions between material ‘things’. We are all familiar with the way that when we use a tool such as a hammer, the object itself fades from our concern, and we focus on the act of hammering rather than the appearance, weight or feel of the tool. For Harman, all objects are, to a greater or lesser degree, like the hammer that has slipped from our notice: much of what they are is not just withdrawn but completely inaccessible to us (Harman Reference Harman2010: 46). Furthermore, he maintains that restricting this kind of relationship to encounters between people and ‘things’ amounts to a form of human exceptionalism (Bogost Reference Bogost2012: 6). When two objects meet (a ball bouncing against a wall, for instance), some qualities are elicited from each, but much more of the ‘subterranean reality’ of both objects is withheld (Harman Reference Harman2010: 58). The most controversial aspect of Harman's account is his claim that it is the sensual ‘outsides’ of objects that interact, and never their ‘real’ essences (Shaviro Reference Shaviro2014: 55).

While Harman's views may prove influential in archaeology, it is worth noting Wolfendale's (Reference Wolfendale2014: 165) criticism that Harman does not describe a world at all, just an array of partially accessible objects. Be that as it may, Harman's arguments highlight the critical distinction between two visions of reality: one in which ‘things’ emerge from their relationships, and one in which relations are created between objects that are essentially independent. Fowler and Harris have recently provided an elegant solution to this conundrum. Just as it is possible to identify an electron as either a particle or a wave, in the process bringing different realities into being, so we too can treat an archaeological entity (a chambered tomb, a stone axe) as either a mesh of expanding relations or as an enduring physical presence—but not as both at the same time (Fowler & Harris Reference Fowler and Harris2015: 128).

Assemblages and archaeologies of life

The apparent limitations of Latourian network theory have led a number of archaeologists to explore instead the concept of assemblage (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2006: 12–16). An assemblage is a composition made up of disparate elements that cohere for a greater or lesser period, and to a greater or lesser extent, under specific historical conditions (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 23). They are vibrant, unbounded and affective, unlike cybernetic systems. Assemblages have no essence or organising principle, and it is the assemblage as a whole that acts, with outcomes that are emergent rather than attributable to any one element (Fowler Reference Fowler2013b: 23). The notion of assemblage deliberately blurs the conventional boundary between culture and nature, so that both ecologies and societies can, together and independently, be assemblages. Although their components may include ‘inanimate’ objects, assemblages are alive even though they are not bounded organisms (Lucas Reference Lucas2012: 188). Assemblages may be more or less ‘territorialised’, meaning that they may either become more stable and coherent, or prone to break apart to form new combinations. For our discipline, one of the attractions of the concept is that it is equally applicable to sets of artefacts existing in the present and to social or ecological entities operating in the past (Jones & Alberti Reference Jones, Alberti, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013: 28).

Assemblage theory offers a novel approach to agency, which it presents as confederate, compositional and distributive (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 33). Neither ‘things’ nor people act in isolation, and outcomes are emergent rather than attributable to any single entity. This view has been used by John Robb (Reference Robb2013) in his discussion of the spread of the European Neolithic, and by Jane Bennett in her classic account of the 2003 North American electrical blackout (Reference Bennett2010: 25). Yet as Bennett recognises, this approach raises serious ethical difficulties. It is one thing to say that several millions of Americans were inconvenienced by a cascade of effects generated by an assemblage of electrons, managers, power lines, trees and wind. But we might have reservations about treating a historical event such as the Holocaust as an assemblage of disparate entities if it in any way reduced the scale of human responsibility, illuminating though it might be. Indeed, although we might wish to reject anthropocentrism, archaeologists will probably continue to concern themselves with humanity, if only as a historically emergent phenomenon (Barrett Reference Barrett2014: 68).

Embedding humanity in heterogeneous assemblages of vibrant materials and living organisms demands that we should focus on the process of life. In one view, it is essential that we should distinguish between living and non-living matter, recognising that only the former is capable of self-production (Barrett Reference Barrett2014: 72). The alternative, however, is that living assemblages are composed of both organic and inorganic matter (Protevi Reference Protevi, Smith and Somers-Hall2012: 248). For instance, soil is composed of both humus and a mineral component. Organisms are a specialised kind of entity, in which the process of life is enclosed. From this perspective, not only causality but animacy and vitality are best understood at the level of the assemblage rather than that of the individual organism. Nevertheless, the entities that make up assemblages are differentiated according to their capacities, such as intentionality and skill. Equally, we might wish to argue that thinking is not something that is enclosed in a single brain, but involves an ‘extended mind’ that encompasses the flows and fluxes of the physical world (Ingold Reference Ingold2012: 438). This would amount to a revised form of panpsychism, in which we think and experience with and through the world, rather than about it (Shaviro Reference Shaviro2014: 63).