Stated differently, “an object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates itself afresh, over and over again” (Shaviro 2009, 20). This is not to say objects do not have a history or genesis—their composite nature is inherited from past occasions. Rather, to speak of the Parthenon Marbles is to speak of efforts by Melina Mercouri, the Greek Ministry of Culture, UNESCO, descriptions in Pausanias, protests by impassioned Greek Students in London, the new Acropolis Museum, numerous articles and books, and a former temple, turned church, turned mosque, turned munitions depot, turned target-for-artillery, turned ruin, turned World Heritage Monument in Athens (see Hamilakis 2008; Kaldellis 2009; Yalouri 2001; also see Hamilakis’ entry from April of 2008 http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/the_other_acropolis_project.html). To mention the Elgin Marbles is to refer to the Duveen Gallery, information cards on displays, the tenacious trustees of the British Museum, notions of common heritage, a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816, a contentious firman, the 7th Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce and his country house at Broomhall (see Hitchins 1997). Incidentally, the cardboard box containing relics of my childhood will last only so long; without sufficient work to ‘rescue the contents’ from the closet other entities will intervene—nieces and nephews in search of new treasures or relatives who will see excess hordes off either through eBay or the dumpster (also see Auslander et al, 2009).

The past is both precedent and product. The past as precedent has always already perished. In this, the past that perishes is actualized in ever-burgeoning legions of material entities (Edensor 2005; Olivier 2008; Olsen 2003), but the past that perishes looses its immediacy in the lived moment. No one can encounter the same occasion twice. “A perished occasion subsists only as a “datum”: a sort of raw material, which any subsequent occasion may take up in its own turn, in order to transform it in a new process of self-creation” (Shaviro 2009, 18). The past as product is that which archaeologists and historians co-produce (co, as many other entities play a role in this) and that with which they co-emerge (for other angles on this process see Lucas 2001; for the past as an outcome of archaeological practices see, for example, González-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2004). Marble torsos, display pedestals, Francesco Morosini (the Venetian commander who fired his cannons upon the “beautiful temple” in 1687), long chains of negotiation, selection, transportation, controversy and acquisition; all contribute to the co-emergence of the Parthenon Sculptures—architectural sculptures become art works which become world heritage for some, objects of cultural patrimony for others. Working for these pasts is a perpetual and most necessary struggle.

Controversies revolve around things. An object-orientation suggests a particular angle of association with respect to the matter at hand (Harman 2002 and 2009). Here, the word ‘object’ is not to be construed in opposition to the word of ‘subject’. With an awareness of the shortcomings of the term (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), objects also participate in a given controversy, but the nature of that participation will vary depending on the associations it gathers. A particular object-orientation will always be one of many (Latour 2005). In this way, an object is not so much a substance as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44; Webmoor and Witmore 2008 have discussed this as mixture). Because objects, as actual entities or occasions, become something entirely novel with every new relation—even if what they transform into bears a striking resemblance to their former selves—their nature is highly variegated and uncertain. Put another way, “there is no difference which does not make a difference” (Bryant 2009).

Consider a section of stonewall in Nafplion, Greece. Running at an oblique angle along the rear of two former residences at 24 and 26 Zygomala Street is a large, polygonal wall of grey limestone.

It stretches 19.5 meters from a short segment of rubble wall, which forms the southeast corner of 26 to the edge of Zygomala street. At this junction, the wall abruptly turns a few meters shy of the street into an adjacent building. Resting directly upon bedrock, segments of this wall stand as high as 3 meters. Sections are still covered in wall plaster of various colors: red ochre, teal green, and white. This wall is not merely a static, impassive object across which historical events have washed—the most recent being its incorporation into the fabric of two former houses, the decay of these structures or the subsequent clearing of the debris. What is a relic wall for some is a matter of contention for others. A point of orientation for property boundaries, the rear support for a structural wall, a plastered interior edifice, the external defenses of an ancient citadel: the polygonal wall is all these things; which occasion we encounter is matter of orientation and gathering. We can no longer be indifferent to all these realities. Any thing held to be of the past by archaeologists or historians, under different fields of relation is something entirely novel, which may have nothing to do with a past orientation.

Thus far, it is fair to say archaeologists have missed this ontological multiplicity (although see Knappett and Malaforis 2009; Lucas 2009; Olsen 2003; Witmore 2009). Whether we are dealing with indigenous (Watkins 2000), interpretive (Hodder 1999), social (Meskell and Preucel 2004) or even processual archaeologies rooted in solid ‘fact’ (Binford 1972), diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations, beliefs and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a durable substance or a singular natural world (also see Latour 2003; from a yet another archaeological angle, see papers in Alberti and Bray 2009). In this, ‘data’, ‘heritage’, ‘evidence of a definitive past’ are prematurely conflated with reality and utilized as the final arbiter of disagreement. Phenomenological archaeologies have faired no better. With the latter, privilege is granted to human access to the world with relations between nonhumans consigned to the sciences (Brück 2005; Tilley 2004; for more of how phenomenology brackets the world as presented to human consciousness see Harman 2009, 78; and 2010). Understanding the lively, variegated nature of things poses a challenge to any bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the other. Arguing for multiplicities of meaning, interpretation, belief, has left intact a determinative substance, a definitive core, which assumes one reality at the expense of others. Marbles in London and Greece, a wall in Nafplion, a humble relic from our childhoods; all these things must be understood in the plural (Latour 2005, 116).

While things are clearly much more interesting than archaeologists have previously allowed, our freedom as archaeologists to follow things, formerly considered to be of the past, wherever they may go will run up against a snag contained within the very etymology of archaeology—the study of ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’. So long as archaeology holds fast to the cares specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta archaia’—there is nothing wrong with this commitment. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand beyond this remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations. In other words, while marbles, monuments, walls may be ‘ta archaia’, they are also a lot of other things in addition. We can no longer assume that that materials we archaeologists engage are of the past, in advance.

If to be of the past is now an orientation among many, then perhaps it is time for we archaeologists concerned with concurrent relations with things to consider a new banner under which the range of motion required to do such concerns justice could be granted—might it be labeled pragmatology? Pragmatology is a reversal of what was taken for granted under a modernist empiricism. Pragmata are starting points, ontological grounds, for archaia, but in this the importance of archaia is not subverted. Archaeology continues to encompass that creative action for linking fragments to build temporally framed accounts. Pragmatology might provide a surrogate umbrella under which archaeologists who are concerned with stakeholder associations, questions of heritage, contemporary archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and reflexive method might operate.

References

Alberti, B. and T.L. Bray (ed.) 2009: Animating Archaeology: of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies, A Special Section for Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 19(3), 337-441.

Auslander, L., A. Bentley, L. Halevi, H.O. Sibum, and C. Witmore 2009: AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture. American Historical Review, 114(5), 1354-1404.

Binford, L. R. 1972: An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Brück, J. 2005: Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1), 45-72.

Bryant, L. 2009: The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of Any Future Object-Oriented Philosophy. Larval Subjects. Available at: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/the-ontic-principle-the-fundamental-principle-of-any-future-object-oriented-philosophy/

DeSilvey, C. 2006: Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318-38.

Edensor, T. 2005: Industrial Ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006: The past is tomorrow: Towards an archaeology of the vanishing present. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 39(2), 110-25.

Hamilakis, Y. 2008: The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harman, G. 2002: Tool-Being. Chicago: Open Court.

Harman, G. 2009: Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Harman, G. 2010: Technology, objects and things in Heidegger. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 17-25.

Hitchens, C. 1997: The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece? London: Verso.

Hodder, I. 1999: The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Holtorf, C. and A. Picinni (eds) 2009: Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Hutchins, E. 1995: Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jones, A. 2007: Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: CUP.

Kaldellis, A. 2009: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: CUP.

Knappett, C. and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Lucas, G., 2001: Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. Routledge: London.

Lucas, G. 2005: The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. forthcoming, Dead Things Walking. Journal of Science Technology and Human Values.

Malafouris, L. 2008: At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In C. Knappett and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, pp. 19-36.

Meskell, L., and R. Preucel (eds) 2004. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.

Olivier, L. 2008: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen, B. 2003: Material culture after text: Re-Membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36(2), 87-104.

Schlanger, N. 2004: The Past Is in the Present: On the History and Archives of Archaeology. Modernism / Modernity 11(1), 165-67.

Shaviro, S. 2009: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shanks, M. 2007: Digital Media, Agile Design, and the Politics of Archaeological Authorship. In T. Clack and M. Brittain (ed.) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 273-89.

Tilley, C. 2004: The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: BERG.

Webmoor, T. and C.L. Witmore, 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeology Review, 41(1), 53-70.

Whitehead, A.N. [1929] 1978: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.

Watkins, J. 2000: Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Witmore, C.L. 2004: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’. Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64.

Witmore, C.L. 2009: Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices. In K. Ryzewski (ed.) Archaeology, Experience, Modes of Engagement, Archaeology, a special issue of Archaeologies 5(3), 511-45.

Yalouri, E. 2001: The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford: Berg.

davisoftheapes1: “Maybe one of you intellectuals might enlighten me on anthropic constants, irreducible complexity, lack of transitory fossils, the astronomically “impossible” odds of information equivalent to 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britainica being imbedded in EACH MOLECULE of DNA.”

See, the thing is, when you REALLY sit down and think about it, as Immanuel Kant did, you’ll find that the ultimate answer is outside the grasp of human reason–thus the ‘reason’ the Board of Ed in Kansas is rather puerile.

Before reading the following, you should familiarize yourself with the definition of ‘antinomy’

Here’s a taste…

THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON A452 B480
FOURTH CONFLICT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS
Thesis
There belongs to the world,
either as its part or as its
cause, a being that is
absolutely necessary.
Proof
The sensible world, as the
sum-total of all appearances,
contains a series of alterations.
For without such a series even
the representation of serial
time, as a condition of the
possibility of the sensible
world, would not be given us.
++ Time, as the formal condition of the possibility of changes, is indeed objectively prior to them; subjectively, however, in actual consciousness, the representation of time, like every other, is given only in connection with perceptions.
P 415a
Antithesis
An absolutely necessary
being nowhere exists in the
world, nor does it exist
outside the world as its cause.
Proof
If we assume that the
world itself is necessary, or
that a necessary being exists
in it, there are then two
alternatives. Either there is a
beginning in the series of
alterations which is absolutely
necessary, and therefore without
a cause, or the series itself
is without any beginning,
and although contingent and
P 416a
conditioned in all its parts,
none the less, as a whole, is
absolutely necessary and
unconditioned.
P 415
But every alteration stands
under its condition, which
precedes it in time and renders
P 416
it necessary. Now every
conditioned that is given
presupposes, in respect of its
existence, a complete series of
conditions up to the unconditioned,
which alone is absolutely
necessary. Alteration
thus existing as a consequence
of the absolutely necessary,
the existence of something
absolutely necessary must
be granted. But this necessary
existence itself belongs
to the sensible world. For if
it existed outside that world,
the series of alterations in the
world would derive its beginning
from a necessary cause
which would not itself belong A454 B482
to the sensible world. This,
however, is impossible. For
since the beginning of a series
in time can be determined
only by that which precedes
it in time, the highest
condition of the beginning of a
series of changes must exist
in the time when the series
as yet was not (for a beginning
is an existence preceded
by a time in which the thing
that begins did not yet exist).”

(continued here)

http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/cgi-bin/cprframe.pl?query=16ant1-4.htm,415

It gets real fun when you consider C.G. Jung’s work with ‘the collective unconscious’ in tandem with the workings of quantum physics.

WHAT’S MORONIC, HOWEVER, IS TO TEACH CREATIONISM AS FACT TO A BUNCH OF GULLIBLE TEENAGERS.

Wasn’t that fun?