Archaeology and Poetry

Archaeology and Poetry:
Questions of translation and of the particular versus the universal


by


Vítor Oliveira Jorge (UP) and Daniela Kato (Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Archaeology and poetry are markedly different fields of creation. Archaeology is (or purports to be) a branch of the social sciences, whereas poetry is a form of literary art. Nevertheless, we are interested in their interrelations at a theoretical and general level. This approach may be useful indeed for reasoning about both activities, which compel so many of us as readers and/or as professionals.

But let us begin by defining the terms in which we think those links may not be particularly fruitful. First of all, we would rather not focus on two fairly obvious points: the fact that many archaeologists were/are also poets, and vice-versa; or the fact that many poets refer to archaeological matters in their works. Focusing on such topics would constitute a mere inventory or archive.
On the other hand, we do not wish to be trapped within superficial or formal metaphors, such as representing archaeology and poetry as different forms of textual production (in that they both express their results in written media), or as different ways of “digging deep into the matter”, unveiling some hidden meaning, truth or origin under the surface of appearances. This “import-export transaction” from one field to another may lead to a pointless and mistaken kind of common sense.

Instead, we would like to locate our reflection at a more theoretical level, even though we concede that any contribution to this goal may and should be “demonstrated” by real experience or “case studies”. Archaeological practice and poetical practice are the creative products of a need, of a desire felt by the archaeologist and/or the poet. In other words, they stem from a strong motivation. Such motivation, however, is not ahistorical nor attached to a supposed “human nature”; on the contrary, it is nurtured within a specific cultural context.


Poetry, whether it is oral or written, associated or not with music and song, is virtually a universal mode of human expression. Yet, its specific modes of realisation are historical, culturally specific, and raise thereby the crucial question of translation. This configures, indeed, a whole range of well-known questions: is it possible to translate a poetic piece of art into another language and context? How can a particular piece of art, using a specific language, reach the other, and therefore reach a universal audience, if by definition it is something that in reality tells nothing and has no content except itself? How is presentation turned into representation?


Translation is always a re-creation, but this recreation is a mode of creation, a way of enlarging aesthetic experience, of entering into an infinite series of interpretations, of unlimited works. Translation corresponds thus to a need and to a theoretical option: that nothing is this world has an essence in itself, that everything is constantly being translated into something else, in an unstoppable movement of recreation, improvisation, performance.



It is precisely at this juncture that we would like to link up to archaeology what has been said about poetry. Archaeology too is an act of interpretation, an intention of making sense, of finding an explanation for the traces that surround us and that come from an absence: the so called past (whether it refers to a one-million year span or to yesterday). How can we translate, or represent, the absence into a presence - that strange Lack into our ontic experience, our desire to make sense, to “explain” our own historicity and contingence?


Although born in the West, archaeology is today a universal practice, active all over the world, and in a permanent state of re-lation through the media and through personal inter-communication. As it is, if poetry, in a sense, has always been universal, archaeology, in turn, a Western invention, has become universal too, raising political problems in the present, for it deals with, and implies, the very definition of the identity of each person, of a people, of a nation-state, or of mankind in general.


It is therefore at this level of representation - of interpretation, of translation - that both poetry and archaeology encounter each other. Particularly if we are dealing with an archaeology that, being mature enough not to be content with general “laws” or regularities of “human behaviour”or sweeping explanations taken for granted, gradually becomes aware of the different ways of defining basic problems such as what to be human and non-human is (a rather contingent frontier). To raise this kind of question is not to cross the limits of archaeology, to invade philosophy or any other field of creation; it is simply to expand into its limits - and at its very core - the motivations of archaeology.


It is on this borderline that archaeology and poetry meet. Both seek to contribute to an understanding of what is common and what is radically unique in each thing or being, in a act of resistance to commonsensical generalities and ready-made assumptions. Hence, poetry and archaeology (as art or science in general) ultimately deal with questions that are of mutual interest, but not in the sense of making a poetical archaeology or an archaeological poetry - that would not make make much sense, we believe. Yet, as two different fields of creative production, poetry and archaeology may mutually cross-fertilize - in the same way that those at once interested in poetry and in archaeology may come to realise that, after all, the two fields are not as separate as it seems at first glance, or that their affinities are not as superficial as some seem to envisage or propose.

________________

photo above: Rolf Horn
site (author. rep.): http://www.f45.com/html/mainfram.html

Archaeology’s Achilles heel: notes in order to overcome the concept of “material culture”

Image: Rolf Horn
Site (auth. reprod.):

Archaeology’s Achilles heel: notes in order to overcome the concept of “material culture”

by
Vítor Oliveira Jorge

This is a beginning in the reflection on the metaphysics of absence/presence.
What do I mean by that?
Logocentrism - calls Jacques Derrida to the logic of “presence” that dominates and structures our ideals, values and institutions - connected to this ambition of “memoires”, of the “the wild desire to preserve everything, to gather everything together” in the idiom of our (ultimately) autobiographical design of memory.”
On another hand, and quoting the words of Dooley & Cavanagh (2007, p. 8) about Derrida: “(...) it is the impossible act of endeavouring to infuse the past with life - to make it present, to bring it home to us - that makes us passionate about historical investigation. It is (...)unavoidable loss that drives us to mourn the past and, in so doing, attempt the impossible by resurrecting it.”

For Derrida, “identity is always haunted by the spectral traces of absence, loss and death.” (ib., p. 17). “PRESENCE IS ALWAYS INHABITED BY TRACES OF ABSENCE.” (ib., p. 34).
Quoting:
“We can never recollect the presence of a original intention, because there never was an original presence to begin with.
“All presence is marked by traces of absence. It is always marked by the no-longer of the past, and the not-yet of the future.And it is only on the basis of these traces that we can experience “presence” at all.”
“(...) we can have no experience of presence or anythinh else without difference, deferral and repetition.”
Mark Doodley and Liam Kavanagh, “The Philosophy of Derrida”, Stocksfield, Acumen, 2007, p. 38.
In this contest, I am very critical apropos of the concepts of material culture and materiality.
They are included in the logic of Western metaphysics: “ the telos of presence and full recollection” (to use words of Dooley and Cavanagh, p. 50)
In fact, to distinguish between a material world (objects) and a non-material one (ideas, etc.) is very much in the Western dichotomic tradition coming from the Greeks, and accentuated with Descartes cogito, etc.
That dichotomy has no meaning for the majority of cultures living or extinct. It is a peculiarity (we could call it exoticism) of our own.
(See for instance the anthropological works by the French social anthropologist Philippe Descola).
To quote Doley and Cavanagh (2007, pp. 64-65) apropos of Derrida’s thought:
“We can never completely recolect the past. Memory is always incomplete(...). And it is precisely this impossibility of teleological recollection that is the very possibility of speech, meaning, communication and intetionality.”
(...)
“While we passionately desire to recollect and resurrect the past, the most we can do is stitch together the traces and cinders of memory.”
In archaeology, the so called “material culture” has been always the focus of attention.
The idea is: material culture is a part (or, in more “modern” terms, a sub-system) of culture as a whole (the system in general).
The archaeologist has to deal with this part (the objectual or material sub-system, reduced to traces) in order to recover the entire system to whom it refers, of which it is a mere reflection or metonymy.
Underpinning assumption:
There is a possibility to recover the whole (or, at least, its “mechanism”, its way of functioning) from one of its parts, and in particular it is possible to departure from conserved material objects (traces, remains) existing in the present to the reality of “life” in the past.
Remains are documents and in a certain way mute witnesses of a lost, of a lack. This lack may be filled up again through our research effort. The object may speak to us in the name of a dead situation: it is a witness, a “representative”: something chosen to act and speak on behalf of a wider group.
But we may consider it otherwise.
According to the culture-historical viewpoint (first half of the XX century), those objects were the materialization of ideas, of norms transmitted from generation to generation. They were invented in particular places, and then they circulated and were diffused. This diffusionism was one of the main causes of change.
For some, archaeological cultures were only archaeological entities: strict associations of objects.
Bur for others, they tended to be the expression of (to be the “representatives” of) peoples. So, each culture, each people. Archaeological assemblages were so to speak ethnological entities, each one of them located in a sort of “ethnological present” projected into the past, i.e., out of time.
The past - in particular, the prehistoric past - was “filled up” and narrated as a series of discrete entities (cultures) displayed in time and space.
It was the projection of the notion of the nation-state in modern history, conceived at the image of the Western history, notion enlarged to embrace the entire planet, conceptually (etc.) colonized by Westerners.
Then, processual archaeology (from the 60’s on, in the Anglo-Saxon world) tried to focus on adaptation and later, in its more sophisticated, cognitive version, tended to follow the old mentalist tradition: material objects are results of a previous design (a mental template) conceived in a “mind” detached from concrete action and the individual body.
But now, with the help of the brain/computer sciences, we would build much more complex, rich, and “true” models of the functioning of old societies and persons. Modern technology would allow us to “see” the past, not only in the actions of people, from the outside, but also in their very motivations, intention (i.e., from the inside). A sort of Redemption of the Lack was possible.
Cognitive sciences pursue a overwhelming goal today in connection with Artificial Intelligence studies: to understand the brain and therefore all human action as the product of the funtion of a very sophisticated machine, the mind of the individual and its invariants and particularities. Ultimately, this is the ideology of modern entrepreneurship. An economy of parts (the autonomous individual) and wholes (the general system functioning and self-regulating.
It is obvious that right from the beginning of the discipline, every archaeologist was always interested in something more than collecting objects.
He or she was concerned with something else:“discovering” the so called “culture”, “system”, or “subject” behind the “artifact”. The intentions, the tacit rules, the “invisible”mode of constitution and reconstituion of society and of modes, regimes, of consciousness.
In sum, to unveil the metaphysical that stands behind, or underneath, the physical, to recover the event behind the trace if it, to look for appearance, presentation, instead of its image, its representation or simulacrum. This idea comes, at least, from Plato.
As I said before, the problem is the very status of those concepts, namely the artifact (whatever it may be, from a stone axe to an entire city), which archaeology has tended to look at as the product of a something previously “worked out” in the mind...a design... that is then materialized in the physical world.
That, I repeat, is the projection and the universalization of our modern ideology: the world is at our feet to be known, conquered, domesticated, possessed, colonized. The world is in a sense our pet and our playground.
Thus archaeologists have dreamed of reaching an “improvement of knowledge” by “ascending the river from the mouth to its source”, by making a movement that is in the reverse sense of common experience:
going from the material world of the so-called past (the remains of something, including people) to the building of an “interpretation” (narrative of that past, its meaning, i. e., an explanation, a re-presentation inspired by the very idea of God’s omniscience, etc.).
That narrative is a work of mourning (of loss of the Other) and on the other hand it is in connection with a construction of identity that is nostalgic of the presence of the Father, the subject who is supposed to know, the Protector, the Provider.
This is the foundational myth of archaeology. Its Achilles heel. Can we overcome it and build a post-positivistic archaeology, a “post-recontructivist” archaeology, located in the present, i.e. in a certain way free from the obsession of the representation? Assuming that the “meaning” of an object, of the so called material culture, is/was always contextual and contingent, although we desire to interpret it, to represent it in the most honest and “objective way?
Any object has/had a biography, and to trace it is in most cases not only difficult, impossible, mythical, but ultimately useless. Living we the undecidibilty of things is to accept our own capacity to imagine the future. Our past is our future ahead.
Archaeology and in general the fascination of dead things - in showcases or in the open air - is a consequence of a “death drive” and implies a work of mourning and often a sense of melancholia.
The attraction of the corpse, the face of death - our difficulty in letting the other (as a projection of our own death) go.
The attention on material culture and the consumer ‘s behavior go together: they are driven by desires that, by definition, are never fullfiled, precisely to be kept as desires.
To touch the object, the material thing, to possess something that “comes from the past”, or to buy, to acquire something that improves our image (for ourselves) - all that is a way of make a bet on the future, of reassuring ourselves of the happiness and meaning of life. In other words, to feel inscribed in the Order of things.
Actually the interest of knowledge, of science, stands in the very process of approaching (unknown or uncanny)materials and to try to give them a sense.
In a market society like ours, living surrounded by objects that are commodities answering to our supposed “needs” (= desire of signs, of images, of identification marks), we are in a good position to question the role of these so-called “materialities” as active social agents, with a spectral allure.
Of course, objects are not just things, or mirrors. They are active agents,
they are looking at us
and they are appealing for our attention. They are gazing at us, to use Lacan’s terms.
To conclude:
Given the ambiguity of the concept of culture;
Given the imprecision of the word “material” (too much general, when we speak of “material world” to oppose it to a living one, for instance; or too much reducing, when we contrast material with spiritual, for instance);
Given the dualism in which we fall when we keep using the dichotomy material/spiritual ot its variants...
Given the need to overcome the idea of a total recovery, of a complete archive, of an ideal museum, of a mystical image of science and knowledge that would be so complete that it would cover the world, stop life, and condemn us to death...
We shall keep doing our duty, working hard in order to dispute more room for a interdisciplinarity and for a transdisciplinarity field, the field of human diversity and experiential richness, having in mind that the field of dispute is a political one: each sector, each class, each individual struggles from a particular position and is longing to keep, reinforce or acquire that or another position in the social field.
Actually, as anybody knows,the possession and the curation of material “aural” objects is a signal of power and of a desire of totality that goes beyond the political power of the moment, and that reveals the character of sovereignty and the State: its tendency to enlarge, to go beyond its limits, its unlimited desire of totality, of embracing the archive and life, and replacing one by the other and vice-versa. Every power is imperial by vocation.
I would suggest that we use the word material mainly in the plural materials, and that we try to build a contextual interpretation of the relationship of people with materials (in each epoch, in each case or context) than to loose ourselves in a current discussion of abstractions that may be empty, mistaken, and useless, such as, for instance, “materialities”, among others of the same kind.
The relationship with materials, with affordances of their environment, and the way they built themselves together, in biunivocal sense - that makes sense, in my view. The archaeological look shall begin to watch around, the world of he small things forgotten.

This reflection is very much inspired in the works of Tim Ingold, Dep. of Anthropology, Univ. of Aberdeen, but also in my collaboration with Prof. Julian Thomas, Dep. of Archaeology, Univ. of Manchester.
What I want is to configure the discursive fields,metaphorical regimes, dispositives, formulations of consciousness (in the line of Foucaut and others, like Eric Dwonig, Fred Kersten, etc.) or “ implicit frames” that in a certain way allowed the “production” of the explicit, be it objectual or not.
This is not “culture history”, nor even the unveiling of stratified realities driving us towards a hidden focus or center or origin, but the very idea that every human production is at the same time aleatory and tied to others in a common “grammar”, that identity and memory would be impossible without the lack and the oblivion, the oblivion of something that never existed in the first place.
Actually, we need to try:
- to establish a common ground, or “center of meaning”, that may connect the “innovations” and discoursive productions of each epoch, in the line of Foucault and others. See for instance Fred Kersten (1997) when he shows that the opera (Monteverdi) and modern science (Galileo) were born at the same time, as symptoms of he same “consciousness”, in this case, the Baroque one;
- to think together techniques and subjectivities as being in a dialect situation of continuous feedback, in the line of Leroi-Gourhan and many others, including Marx’s inspiration;
- to complete the works of archaeologists and “material culture” scholars in general with a reflection on the contemporary tendency to fluidity and movement that characterizes our post-modernity (see J. Urry, for instance), from performance studies to a renewed psychoanalytic theory. Right from the beginning, the psychoanalytical inspiration dissolved boundaries. We need that it abandons its representational matrix.

Some bibliography

Barthes, Roland (1981 – Port. ed. 1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York, Hill & Wang.
Baudrillard, Jean (1972 – Port. ed. 1995). Pour Une Critique de l’ﾉconomie Politique du Signe, Paris, ﾉd. Gallimard.
Bennett, Tony (2004 – or. 1988). The exhibitory complex, Grasping the World. The Idea of the Museum (ed. Preziosi, D. & Farago, Claire), Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Company, pp. 413-441.
Berger, John (2004 – Spanish ed. 2005). Ways of Seeing, London, Penguin Books.
Buchli, Victor (ed.) (2005 – pb ed.). The Material Culture Reader, Oxford, Berg.
Crary, Jonathan (2001). Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge/Mass, London, The MIT Press.
Dicks, Bella (2003). Culture on Display. The Production of Contemporary Visibility, Maidenhead, Open University Press.
Descola, Philippe (2006), Par-Delà Nature et Culture, Paris, Galimard.
Dooley, Mark & Kavanagh, Liam (2007), The Philosophy of Derrida, Stocksfield, Acumen.
Downing, Eric (2006), After Images. Photography, Archaeology and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung, Detroit, Wayne State Univ. Press.
Ingold, Tim (2001). From complementarity to obviation: on dissolving the boundaries between social and biological anthropology, archaeology and psychology, Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution (ed. Oyama, Susan et al), Cambridge/Mass., London, MIT Press, pp. 255-279.
Ingold, Tim (2004). Culture on the ground. The world perceived through the feet, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 9 (3), pp. 315-340.
Ingold, Tim (2007). Materials against materiality, Archaeological Dialogues.
Ingold, Tim (2000 – 2002- pb). The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London, Routledge.
Jorge, Vítor Oliveira & Thomas, Julian (2006/2007), Overcoming the Modern Concept of Material Culture, Porto, ADECAP.
Jorge, Viíor Oliveira Jorge & Thomas, Julian (2008 -under press), Archaeology and the Politics of Vision in a Post-Modern Context, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kersten, Fred (1997), Galileo and the “Invention” of Opera. A Study in the Phenomenology of Consciousness, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Pearson, Mike & Shanks, Michael (2001). Theatre/Archaeology, London, Routledge.
Schiffer, Michael B. (1999). The Material Life of Human Beings. Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication, London, Routledge.
Thomas, Julian (2004). Archaeology and Modernity, London, Routledge.
Tilley, Chris et al. (eds). Handbook of Material Culture, London, Sage Publications.
Zizzek, Slavoj (1992). Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge/Mass, London, The MIT Press.
Zizek, Slavoj (2006 – 2nd ed.). Interrogating the Real, London, Continuum.


VOJ december 20o8 porto

Performance as the modern ideology of capitalist dynamics

Performance as the modern ideology of capitalist dynamics

The fact that there is a deep connection between the organisation of economy and the general regime of life is well known. Performance is opposed to traditional theatre as the economy of flux is opposed to the economy of the traditional stable enterprise. Modern management ideology conducts the general spirit of individuals and institutions. They are organized by projects, volatile goals, whose main ethos is continuous change and, ultimately, permanent appearance and disappearance in order to create a hallucinatory environment of change and adaptation. Discipline is being turned into performance. And, ultimately, performance is the name for the general function of society and individuals, flexible and in perpetual movement. This acceleration, increased by “intelligent” machines and networks, taking the form of rhizomes, serves as a laboratory where new forms of domination and exclusion are continuously generated. Those who can not adapt to the rules of the continuous changing of roles are increasingly insecure. The spirit of performance as the model for every action or project, including the artistic ones, is the metaphysics of modern capitalism, i. e., the general aestheticizing mood of life, which is at the heart of the metaphysics of our globalized world. Therefore, in a way, dance and performance are the very physic representation of that state of things. Everything solid melts in the air, the individual body in movement seeks the immortality and the omniscience/omnipresence of the universal body.

sublime, presentation, existence

In the brief but incisive Preface to the French edition (Paris, Ed. Belin, 1988) of the collective book "Of the Sublime: Presence in Question" (Albany, State University of New York, 1993) Jean-Luc Nancy approaches a very important series of questions, developed in the book by himself and by the several authors whose names may be seen in the front cover.
He writes that the sublime "constitutes our tradition" (p. 1 - the underlines in red are mine). What that tradition "passes on" is "the aesthetic" or "the sensible presentation as question." (p.1)
Western thought is organized around this dichotomy: representation, i.e, "the instance of the object", and therefore "nonsensible", and "articulated in terms of conformity and signification" (p. 2); and the subject, who poses itself in the side of the sensible.
Presentation is an "event", an "explosive one", which traditionally is connected to "beauty and/or sublimity" (p.2).
"From the moment when representation comes to know itself to be such and comes to present itself as such (...), a moment which constitutes the history of modern art and thought, it takes up (...) a question (...) of presentation." (p. 2)

Thus the sublime is "the question of presentation", "of what is at play at the limit of the essence" (p. 2) : "(...) the sublime is more "essential" to beauty than the very essence of the beautiful." (p. 2). It "(...) puts into communication or contact all instances of presentation (...) (history, community, sense, politics, thought, and even representation) (...)" itself (p.2).
"The question of presentation is the question (...) of existence (...) the question of being-in-the-world." (p. 2).

performing heritage

Manuel Amado. Claustro (Cloister). Tomar. 2002.

Performing heritage


I am an archaeologist, with a basic training (academic degree) in history. And, as such, I always put myself the question: why should archaeologists (and historians, etc.) aim to represent [ to present again] the so called past, i. e. to know and to see and to a certain point to experience and to show everybody “what really happened”: to narrate it as a story – or a “history”, if you prefer - and to present it in a rational fashion, as if it had a logic, i. e., an almost teleological sense.
It seems that this is also what the public expects us to do, to explain the history of mankind, to tell the story how human beings emerged in this planet and became what they are today. And they are longing to believe us, to hear the truth about what we are, where did we came from, etc.
When knowledge was basically recorded in books, only a few educated persons searched for such overwhelming history. Legends and local explanations (even if they were cosmologies and cosmogonies) satisfied oral "curiosity" and speculation.
But as long as experience and sensorial knowledge started to have an increased importance, the “objectual” (the material) in a certain way superimposed to the written, and the individual experience to the authority of abstraction.
And so archaeology, now transformed into heritage as an industry and as a commodity, became matter of growing general concern. Tourists want to visit sites, landscapes, parks, museums and other places (machines) of memory (of encapsulated time) and they are looking for rapid responses to their instantaneous fascination. What is this? How old is this? Who made it? For what purpose? Is it rare, is it unique, is it precious for any reason? Etc.
Common sense and erudite rationalist knowledge are two faces, or aspects, of the same ontology, of the same quest: the curiosity for the past, for our origins.
But now we prefer to "extract" it directly from the earth, from the excavated or unveiled, than only from the books: the world itself (the so-called material world) became a sort of document of its own history. That hidden history, or at least its general logic or schema, is somewhere (everywhere), mysteriously preserved, even under the figure of a trace. We can, we may, and we shall uncover that mystery, follow the traces back into their matrix and expose it as a spectacle to the masses of public, the heritage consumers.
These heritage consumers do not satisfy only with seeing and getting some pictures or replicas to take home. They want to see the past alive again, as in a theatre, they want us to reconstruct vivid scenes for them, and more than that, they want to participate, not only in the production of the representation (excavations, etc.), but in the representation itself. Briefly, they want to be in, to trespass the mirror, to become performers of the past.
Not just to read it, not just to make sense out of it (mental or visual schemes and pictures of steps of cultural evolution), not only to look at it, they want to become part of it, to jump inside it, to feel within.
What a problem, but also… what a fantastic world to explore and to offer to a increasing demand of adventure, exoticism, tourism, in particular risk tourism, etc. !
So archaeology can make money, heritage is one of the most promising industries, and everything coupled with tourism and the search for personal adventure makes archaeology a field of great potential, as long as each state, each country has the means "to exploit the mine" and to invert money in the business.
Underpinning all this phenomena, there are very old questions that come to our mind, in particular the Western metaphysics of representation.
Actually it seems to be the ultimate conscious or unconscious motivation for all this movement in order to a more vivid and “performative heritage”. Sentiment, emotion, the “real thing” and not only its representations are inherently present is this frenetic quest for the past. This may mean that our representationist kind of thought is the frame and the drive of all this frantic heritage excitation.
Western reason, accentuated in modernity, is intimately concerned with representation, with constructing things that appear as objective truths to the neutral observational subject.
This subject is, if possible, a recorder of data, data that are themselves the result of observations taken out from the “real” according to a shared methodology, and avoiding as most as possible any subjectivity judged as an interference, as “noise” (in terms of information theory) that causes prejudice to valuable knowledge. Truth as something fixed, categorical, submitted to proof, and as much as independent as possible of contingency - that is our ultimate question and quest.
Objectification and subjectiveness go side by side, feeding mutually.
But this bifurcation between art and science, or even between common sense and educated subjectivity, dichotomies so typical of modernity, tended to accentuate to a point that it was no more compatible with current “modern” life and its more sustainable and abstract value, the money.
The regime of the image (of the sign) that supported much of the modern culture (scientific and artistic) does not have any more the old solid correspondence to any visible or quantifiable equivalent. As Marx has previewed, even the most solid things, values and beliefs tended to become evanescent and to dissolve in the air.
That is why performance is replacing theatre, and representation and "experience" are occupying the place of mere contemplation and observation.
Trust in intuition and improvisation, embodiment, movement, self sculpture, easy opinion, the emphasis on “art” (whatever this word may mean) in installation and in the ephemeral.
To sum it up, the old regime of separation between subject and object has melted, and the search for the event and its valorisation appears as a signal of disruption, as a symptom of the disappearance of an old and stabilised order or signs.
Structuralism, then phenomenology, even psychoanalysis have been criticized for belonging to this representationism. Our “libidinal economy” (to use a Lyotard’s expression) is turned into a fugue, trying to escape the stability of the sign, the regime of identity.
Why this mixture of terms of economy and sentiment? Perhaps because the “real” economic practice itself has turned well before the “humanistic field” consciousness into a process of “dematerialization” that is typical of capitalist dynamics and extreme acceleration, changing old forms of subjectiveness.
Let us review the process very schematically, using a schematic triadic distinction in the history of money, i. e., of value (so falling ourselves again in a representationist, categorical, and also “evolutionary” scheme/trap (inspired in Jean-Joseph Goux, quoted by Miranda 2001 - see references).
The value as gold is the imperium of the visible, of the coexistence and convertibility between all forms of material items.
The value as finance is the reign of money as a pure sign, typical of modernity, the regime where the correspondence between image and truth, paper and gold, was still possible.
The digitalization of value transformed it in totally metaphysical, i.e., in something that can find no equivalence in objectual reality: it is pure energy in circulation.
Thus life is a infinite scenario of continuous changes around the same, of circulation of signs signifying nothing but other signs, a mere fluctuation of images taken as reality. To be real is to be in motion, i.e., to be animated, fluid, with moments of extreme energy and others of temporary stop, throughout the circuits of a dynamic, incredible net in constant transfiguration.
Even when people talk about "materialities" that have already separated them as an abstraction, as Ingold refers (see references). That is one of the reasons why to talk about "material culture" is a contradiction in terms.
The transfiguration above mentined actually is no more the irruption of the sublime or the beautiful, the theophany or the ancient “aura”, but of the kitsch itself (turned sometimes into a new form of sublime).
It is an auto-ironic religious eroticism and pornography, i.e., a continuous production of impressions, “scandals”, instantaneous realities which replace, through a desacralized repetition, the old apparition of divinities. Courtains that hide other curtains, spaces that have doors to other spaces, like in a dream or in a David Lynch's film.
The regime of representation, in spite of the effort of philosophers like Deleuze, Derrida, or Lyotard, etc. – making emphasis in “the becoming”, the difference, the dissimulation, etc – is omnipresent.
Everything is falling into the field of the performance, of the ecstasy or trance which is purely hedonistisc, auto-referential, parodic.
The dance of the signs in permanent invention, a sort of hypocritical carnival where all boundaries are dissolved and each individual and experience occurs and circulates in a sort of moebius strip. The very parody, the fantastic burlesque in a constant "imitation", reproduction, representation of itself .
This is the epoch where the setting (be it material or immaterial) has become spectator and gazes at us alternatively as a stage or as an empty auditorium, like in certain paintings of the Portuguese artist Manuel Amado, in-between nostalgia and irony, the absence and the impossibility of calling again to our presence the very absence "in person".
Performance of the emptiness.


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Some references

- Badiou, Alain (2007), The Century, Cambridge, Polity Press.
- Baudrillard, Jean (1981), Simulacres et Simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1979.
Baudrillard, Jean (1995), Para uma Crítica da Economia Política do Signo, Lisboa, Ed. 70.
Bolt, Barbara (2004), Art Beyond Representation. The Performative Power of the Image, London, I. B. Taurus.
Butler, Judith (1997), Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performartive, London, Routledge.
Carlson, Marvin (2004 -2nd ed.), Performance. A Critical Introduction, London, Routledge.
- Deleuze, Gilles (2002), Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation, Paris, Seuil.
- Derrida, Jacques (2007), Psyche. Inventions of the Other, vol. I (ed. by P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg), Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Freeman, John (2007), New Performance/New Writing, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel (1966), Les Mots et Les Choses. Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines, Paris, Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1969), L’ Archéologie du Savoir, Paris, Gallimard.
- Gil, José (2001), Movimento Total. O Corpo e a Dança, Lisboa, Relógio d’Água.
- Goffman, Erving (1993), A Apresentação do Eu na Vida de Todos os Dias, Lisboa, Relógio d¹ Água.
- Goody, Jack (2003), La Peur des Représentations, Paris, Éd. de la Découverte.
-Hewitt, Andrew (2005), Social Choreography. Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Durham, Duke University Press.
-Huxley, Michael and Witts, Noel (2007 -2nd ed.), The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, London, Routledge.
-Ingold, Tim (2000), The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London, Routledge.
- Lyotard, Jean-François (2004), Libidinal Economy, London, Continuum.
- Macey, David (2000), Dictionary of Critical Theory, London, Penguin Books.
-Marin, Louis (1994), De La Représentation, Paris, Seuil/Gallimard.
- Miranda. José A. Bragança de (2001), Uma arte bem instalada, Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, vol. 30, Lisboa, CECL, pp. 35-45.
-Olkowski, Dorothea (1999), Giles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley, University of California Press.
- Pearson, Mike & Shanks, Michael (2001), Theatre/Archaeology, Londres, Routledge.
-Roudinesco, Elisabeth (2006), A Análise e o Arquivo, Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Ed.
- Schechner, R. & Appel, W. (eds.) (1990), By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Cambridge University Press.
- Schechner, Richard (1994), Ritual and performance, Companyon Encyclopedia of Anthropology, London, Routledge, pp. 613-647.
- Zizek, Slavoj (2008), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London, Verso.

Archaeological excavation as performance

Performance is not only something to be seen by others, like in the architecture of a formal theatre, where there is a scene (for the actors) and an auditorium (for the audience, the spectators), often divided by curtains, the signs of something hidden (to be displayed at a certain moment).
Performance involves a con-fusion between the two. It also implies not only the view and the ear, like when we are looking at a screen, but all the senses.
If there is a narrative, it is not the staging of a text, the re-presentation of a play, but the very creation in vivo of that “play” – it is the presentation of something new: in some way, it erases the divide between text and action, past and present.
Performance aims to be like an Apparition: the very evidence, the irrefutable Presence.
Performance is a work of the body, with the body; and in that sense it approaches dance and choreography. But, having an important part of improvisation, it implies a particular kind of energy and risk.
It has something excessive, a desire of expansion beyond common contention of the actor, of the character. It is in a limit, in a transitional status.
From that limit, sometimes in the very proscenium of the conventional theatre, something is expected to happen that is unpredictable, unique.
Performance is the religious ritual of the laic society.
In my last studies I have been searching for connecting performance and archaeological excavation, trying to develop (as in a piece of music) some variations in turn of these theme.
My ultimate point is that excavation is one of those “profane rituals” of modernity and, indeed, of post-modernity.
Ultimately the excavation has no goal of revealing a hidden, deep texture (a past), instead it acts out as a common desire in order to enact a dead site at the surface of the present, assembling people, bodies, in a particular king of choreography.
In spite of that, it makes sense(s).


Photo: Ernesto Timor
Source: http://www.ernestotimor.com/
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DESIRES FROM THE PAST

DESIRES FROM THE PAST:
WHAT DO ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGES WANT?

Inspired in J. Lacan, Slavoj Zizek wrote (“Looking Awry”, The MIT Press, 1992): “When I look at an object, the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I can not see it.”
And he adds that, if this antinomy - of my view and of the gaze that the object devolves to me - disappears, I am caught in a kind of "pornographic" environment: “reality” approaches too close and in all its details.
I need a distance between that “reality” and fantasy in order to articulate my desire (in this case, my desire of understanding what we have conventionally accepted to be the “archaeological reality”).
Knowledge implies not a frontal, straightforward view, but an “awry look” at things. That look does not seek some kind of “hidden meaning” in the objects, from which to extract a product called “past”.
But in a way, helped by lots of tools, including images, what we want is to establish a narrative that, being ultimately "fictional" (truth is a divine monopoly), increases some sense to our lives as temporal beings.
Photography, then cinema or video, and many other image technologies have been, and increasingly are, intimately connected to our desire of “looking at the past.”
Or is it that, alternatively, the past is already looking at us, gazing at us? The question remains open.
This subject is, I think, a good topic for discussing these ideas from fresh standpoints, in order to play with the concepts of desire, past, and image.
This is probably a fruitful way, among many others, to overcome some current ready made notions about the “archaeological process”.
In order not to keep tied to domestic visions of the past, too simplistic to comfort our imagination, and incapable of freeing us from the fetishism of the so-called “material record”.

performancescape

People do not inhabit landscapes. That was an invention of modern Europe, of our scopic drive. People perform themselves within a enormous variety of territories, of environments. People and environments are not separate realities. Environments are made up of "affordances", of available features people deal with, and features that are manipulated by people. This interaction is constant. Nothing exists in a vacuum. No part of this world is just a "vista", a place to be seen from afar, a landscape, except for modern tourism. The expression "landscape architecture" is meaningless. We built things in a piece of land to tie us together and to feel the materials, to play with them. We built a wall in order to have two sides in what was just a continuum. We introduce new features within the features of the environment. In that sense, all the environment is in a process of performance itself. It performs as a series of features: places to stay, paths to follow, open areas to camp and meet, to sleep and eat. People do not just accomplish tasks. Tasks and "taskscapes" seem to me a very interesting idea, developed by my friend and distinguished colleague Tim Ingold in his book "The Perception of the Environment" (London, Routledge, 2000), one of the most important books published in the domain of the so-called "social anthropology". Of course, as any important book, it has significant philosophical implications, going well beyond the established frontiers of any discipline.
But I would risk a step further, proposing a more general and embracing concept, the concept of performancescape. It avoids, I think, a certain functionalist connotation - if I am not mistaken - of the word "task". Actually, people do not only accomplish tasks; they are complex subjects which do not dominate entirely what they are doing. They are made continuously by their common action. As reflexive beings, they feel the look of others, which is the projection of their own consciousness. So people perform together, in an environment full of performative situations. We may consider as performative even natural phenomena, like wind or rain. It is in this mesh (yo use again a Tim Ingold's happily appropriate word) that we really live.
So, performancescape seems to be our environment. It accounts of the complex reality of being human.
These ideas are not motivated by the intention of separating persons and other beings. I am a materialist. But as a materialist I can not reduce a man or a woman to an organism similar to a bacteria or, say, a horse, a cat, or even an ape. I would not make love to an ape, be it a very nice female, believe me. We are all living matter, but in our case (I do not care for establishing any barrier or border between humans and non humans) we have something that is not supernatural, but that makes us "something special". Whatever it is, "performance" is a word of universal applicability, both to inanimate and animate matter. So I propose the adoption of this concept/word.
I apologize for my bad English, and I wish to confront these basic and caricatural ideas with other colleagues's ones... so please send me your opinions, even if you think that my proposal is complete nonsense. Thanks!


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Photo: Ernesto Timor
Source:
http://www.ernestotimor.com/pages
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