THIS CHAPTER DEVELOPS a strongly reflective social framework for exploring the historical background of the major philosophical paradigms in archaeology since the 1960s and pursuing some of the most promising directions suggested by several current arguments for fresh perspectives on the tasks or purposes of philosophy’s (or theory’s) tasks. The main sections center on the following themes:
1. Contrasts over what is important: crises of interpretation and pedagogical wars
2. Contextualizing the state of emergency as norm in Platonist and Aristotelian traditions
3. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the modern cosmopolis
4. The collapse of the modern cosmopolis and the parting of the ways of twentieth-century analytic, Continental, and sociological (or critical theory) philosophical traditions
5. The philosophical significance of practical reasoning, poesis, and history
We will conclude by exploring some requirements of a strongly reflective approach to the philosophical significance of the materiality and mutuality of practical reasoning.
The past century has seen a series of crises over philosophy and the dynamics of political history, pedagogical institutions, and public affairs. Today, debates over these crises’ causes and consequences proliferate across increasingly specialized cross-disciplinary theoretical literatures, areas of research and teaching, and programs for public understanding (appreciation?) of expert knowledge cultures. Until recently, the focus has been on processual (or New) and post-processual theory as responses of analytic, Continental, and sociological (or critical theory) philosophical traditions to crises in the physical sciences during the first half of the twentieth century (Hempel 1965; M. Friedman 2002), and in the human sciences and humanities during the second (Salmon 1982, 1992; Pinsky and Wylie 1989; Hodder 1999; Thomas 2004b).
Polemical debates have centered on principles drawn from these traditions’ critiques of nineteenth-century positivism, and their diverging interpretations of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of the Faculty of Judgment (1790). Processual and post-processual archaeologies contrast in how they consider:
(a1) Objects or domains of analysis
(b1) Methods for causally explaining or interpreting and understanding (a1)
(c1) The researcher’s relation to (a1) and (b1)
(d1) The contents of (a1), (b1). and (c1) and their socio-historical contexts
(e1) Relationships of (a1–d1) to social and moral accountability
(We refer to these issues as a1–e1 and return to them in the concluding section.)
The publication in Antiquity of David Clarke’s (1973) paper, “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” is recurrently cited as a turning point in archaeology’s relationship to philosophical debate, and wider political, pedagogical, and public affairs (Pinsky and Wylie eds. 1989; Preucel 1991; Embree 1992; Yoffee and Sherratt 1994; Thomas 1999; Wylie 2002). Clarke presents a philosophically distilled and elaborated model of the impacts on the discipline of technological innovation and social change, stressing the importance of a critically self-conscious archaeology for overcoming obstacles of traditional introspective foci (Clarke 1968). Building on Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) New (post-analytic) history of the philosophy of science, Clarke distinguishes three thresholds:
1. Consciousness, when the subject is defined as a specialized field of knowledge and practice distinct from its antiquarian predecessors
2. Self-consciousness, when different schools of thought begin to systematically debate the relative merits of methods for collecting and interpreting archaeological materials
3. Critical self-consciousness, when researchers begin to question the internal structure of the discipline itself from perspectives offered by schemes derived from contemporary philosophy of science
For Clarke, twentieth-century science vastly expanded available archaeological information, and brought about a loss of innocence (or naïveté) by revealing anomalies in approaches to (a1–e1), which had been motivated by positivist beliefs that facts speak for themselves rather than be addressed without altogether new paradigms (Clarke 1973). Clarke’s paper created a “critical attitude of doubt and suspicion” (Shanks 2004:491), which led New archaeologists to turn to philosophy of science for creating unique archaeological principles of theory construction and testing (Binford 1972; Salmon 1982).
Changing Contents and Contexts of Pedagogical Paradigms
Disputes between New and post-processual archaeologists arose in tandem with the cold war, postcolonial conflict, the industrialization of military and commercial research, and the first worldwide criticism of exploitation of the third world. Critiques of metanarratives about science and modernity drew similarities between generalizations about human nature, knowledge, and history and colonialist, imperialist, and nationalist political ideologies. It was asked whether crises of interpretation are restricted to academics.
The turn of the twenty-first century is seeing philosophy traverse boundaries between physical sciences, human sciences and humanities, and expert and public information (Irwin and Wynne 1996). Contradictions have arisen between (1) homogenizing core periphery models of globalization and multiculturalism (Giddens 1990; Miller 1995; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; see chapter 19 by Jones, and chapter 25 by McNiven and Russell); (2) patterns in the destruction and conservation of cultural property (Layton et al. 2001); and (3) radical transformation of the social geography of ecological risk, sustainable development, and exposure to violence (Wynne 1996; Baudrillard 1970; Lash et al. 1996; Friedman 1996).
Reflection on loss of innocence does not offer much help under these postmodern conditions. New approaches to the social accountability of research on the diversity of past, present day, and future human circumstances are not just of academic interest (Benjamin 1940; Friedlander 1992; Lacapra 1992; Schmitt and Patterson 1995; Toulmin 1990; Olsen 2001; Barrett 2005; Koerner 2005, 2006). Many debates in archaeology over the above themes (a1–e1) have ended in a standoff, with positions widening over the discipline’s stage of critical self-consciousness (Preucel 1991), and the pictures of a unified past that various institutions expect from archaeology (Holtorf 2001; Layton et al. 2001; Carman 2002; see Fowler et al., chapter 24). Preucel (1991:17) speaks of the deeper “ontological, epistemological, and practical” implications of Clarke’s critically self-conscious phase, referring to the post-processual movement as “an attack on the scientism of processual archaeology and the exploration of alternative interpretive frameworks.”
Relating to daunting expectations of unity, Cornelius Holtorf (2001:286–287) notes that much world archaeological heritage management expects archaeological sites and objects to be (1) authentic, in the sense of possessing a distinctive aura which fakes and copies do not have; (2) irreplaceable and nonrenewable; (3) in danger of ecological risk and destruction by commercial development and antiquities trade; (4) dependent on professional archaeologists for protection from further destruction on behalf of future generations. These expectations signal how issues of ontology (theories of what exists in the world—of being—and why other things do not) and epistemology (theories of the conditions of knowledge) are tied up with matters of ethical accountability, as well as epistemic authority and sociopolitical legitimacy (or sovereignty):
(a2) What are the sources of epistemic authority and credible knowledge production (e.g., natural law, a rational subject, a privileged class, collective representations, language, political power)?
(b2) How do different methods for judging knowledge claims relate to one another? Can arguments be judged one by one, or is a level of analysis needed to referee from above or beyond particular cases?
(c2) Do integrative systems have to be restricted to a single vocabulary? Or can different levels of description be allowed for autonomous regions of knowledge?
(d2) Can methods claim the force of what is true and/ or right? What distinguishes warrant for a piece of knowledge from political forces involved in policy making and enforcement (Foucault 1980; Rouse 1996:6, 2001; Latour 2001)?
(e2) Are accountability and responsibility reducible to expert competence (Wynne 1996; Barnes 2000)?
Conflicting views of archaeology invoke epistemic, ontic, and ethical questions about the intelligibility of history and the world. What can and cannot be known about history? What separates the past from the present? What is good, morally right, and wrong? What is at risk and what needs saving? And again, are accountability and trust reducible to the conditions of possibility for expertise?
Today, archaeologists are exploring elements of the practice turn in contemporary theory (Schatzki et al. 1991) toward questions of how human beings relate to one another, social stability and change, and history (Barrett 2000; Johnson 2004), themes of agency and structure, and what the human self owes to material preconditions, embodied social practices, and symbolic forms (Foucault 1980; Bourdieu 1990; Gero 2000; Graves-Brown 2000; Butler 1993; Dobres and Robb 2000; Gardner 2004; see Gardner, chapter 7; and Taylor, chapter 18).
There are good reasons to object to images of timeless, interchangeable, and atomistic individuals. But reducing agency to embodied material preconditions and collectivist notions of interests cannot account for intentionality, human interaction, different experiences, and the diversity of forms that we can take (Lash 1994). An intersubjective intentional “we” is important for relational approaches to the indeterminacy of a1–e1, and to maintain research accountability while addressing the contingency of claims to what matters.
In what follows, our social framework for pursuing our tasks is structured around the five themes listed in the introduction. This helps us to cover materials relating to questions about archaeology and philosophy.
In Platonist and Aristotelian traditions, everything in the cosmos and polis is tied together by natural law; philosophy’s task is an epistemological, ontological, and classificatory scheme to address foundational questions, such as, Is there such a thing as natural law, above or beyond the domain of human enactments? If so, what is its ultimate source? How might it be discovered, or identified? What is its specific content? How does it relate to man-made laws, and vice versa?
The roots of rationalism have been traced to Plato’s predecessor, Parmenides (Cassirer 1953). Their modern reformulation is conventionally attributed to René Descartes (1596–1650), who entrenched the idea that the mind can be considered independently of physiologically and socially embodied experiences. The roots of empiricism have also been traced to Plato, and especially Aristotle’s alternative to Plato’s attitude toward the deceptive tendencies of sensorial impressions (Cassirer 1944; Funkenstein 1986). As an empiricist, Hume (1822) emphasized the importance of sensorial contact with the environment for understanding human cognition. While rationalists hold that mentality is an a priori, innate capacity, empiricists argue for its a posteriori, environmentally conditioned emergence and development. Rationalists advocate a deductive approach to the study of the human mind, while empiricists advocate an inductive approach.
Ever since Plato and Aristotle, foundationalist and probabalist paradigms for epistemology and ontology have been structured around two opposing poles, with absolute unity and permanence of essence on one side, and disunity (pure flux) on the other (McGuire and Tuchanska 2001). In his Metaphysics (1941), Aristotle asked, if something can be said to be subject to change, what is the essence of that something? For Aristotle, there are three alternative answers: (1) the unchanging aspect, (2) the changing aspect, and (3) the interaction of changing and unchanging aspects.
For foundationalists (such as Plato), the only important answer is (1), and the others are reducible to it. In this view, the criterion for scientific objecthood is exhibiting regularities that are universal and demonstrable by chain of necessary causes, specifying not only what is the case (by sufficient conditions) but what must be the case (by necessity) (Daston 2000). For probabilists (like Aristotle), things observed to be always or for the most part can satisfy requirements of a science (Metaphysics 1027a20-27) if they can be described in the terms of a universally valid system of classification or treated as particular (probable) instantiations of essential properties. Focusing on the unchanging essence of things leads to the disregard of questions about how things come into being, instead focusing on classification: what (underlying substance) makes particular items what they are? What distinguishes them from one another? What timeless substances distinguish different categories of entities? It demands that the answers to these questions add up to universally valid generalizations about the range of categories in terms of which all things existing at all times can be classified (McGuire and Tuchanska 2001:45–47) and dividing of all time-space scales into categories of universals and particulars (S. Koerner 2004).
Historical change becomes problematic by these requirements, which reduce indeterminate issues (a1–e1) to epistemic problems, agency and history to theories of knowledge, and the issues of lists a1–e1 and a2–e2 to supposedly synonymous dichotomies, including (Rorty 1979; Descola and Pálssén 1996):
Table 21.1. Traditional Dichotomies
| A | B |
| Mind | Body |
| Perceiving things | Extended things |
| Nature | Culture |
| History | Myth |
| Doubt | Reality |
| Fact (permitted) | Fiction (forbidden) |
| Moderns | Premoderns |
| Epistemic values | Social and values |
| Expert knowledge | Public belief |
In archaeology, analytic, Continental, and sociological versions of Platonist and Aristotelian traditions have become the focus of much discussion. Patrik (1985) has influentially examined treatments of the archaeological record as a methodological tool and theoretical principle. Focusing on processualist and post-processualist paradigms, she notes that while the former treat the record as a fossilized imprint of the operations of past social systems, the latter stress its being like a text that can, through interpretation, reveal the operations of past symbolic systems or mental states. John Barrett (2000:62) argues that “the archaeological record is treated as the independent and material representation of certain events and processes, and it is normally asserted that archaeology can only study those aspects of the past which are capable of material representation in this record.” This relates to how archaeological theories are conformed to the requirements of essentialist paradigms for human agency and history. Since essentialism accepts only ahistorical theories of knowledge, it restricts options for historical description and explanation to foundationalist approaches to a1–e1. Twentieth-century pedagogical wars have raged over two options. In one approach to historical representation, history is treated as a perceptual experience, which exists in the minds of individual subjects (as cognitive content of mental states). In the other, history is an extended thing that can occur in different forms, such as the social types of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state, or cultures of different times and places: Neolithic Britain, Bronze Age Denmark, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, modern Europe.
Essentialist paradigms for human agency, knowledge, and history pose problems for developing new approaches to historical representation and ways to relate evidence for the diversity of the past to matters of social and moral accountability (Friedlander 1992; Lacapra 1992; Schmitt and Patterson 1995; Buchli and Lucas 2001). These problems are further complicated by low estimations of the philosophical significance of poesis and practical reasoning. In Platonist views and essentialist interpretations of Aristotle, poesis becomes entangled in the causes and consequences of false beliefs and irrational claims to political sovereignty.
Platonists and Aristotelians speak not of the philosophical significance of ethics, but of the practical significance of philosophy. For Plato, history and social theory concerned primarily particular instantiations of the ways idols obscure truth. Although Aristotle had a less negative attitude, he stressed the impossibility of a science of human activities, social life, and history as these are indeterminate, contingent, and susceptible to chance. In Aristotle, such contingencies not only fail to meet requirements of scientific objectivity but impede philosophy’s practical importance. Jürgen Habermas (2003:278) notes that “the [foundationalist] Platonic answer to the question of what practical impact philosophy can have is: Nothing is more practical than theory itself,” as shown by the philosopher-king who adjudicates from outside or beyond the contingencies of political, pedagogical, and public affairs (S. Koerner 2006). In Aristotle’s empiricist and probabilist view, philosophy is tied to everyday practice through the specialized branch of prudence in which practical reason is applied to ethical questions of how to live most prudently (Habermas 2003:279). Thus questions of how to live a good life are determined not by experience but by the epistemic authority of what has already been said to be a good life on authoritative ontic, epistemic, and theological grounds. In this connection, the significance of practical philosophy or ethics loses even more of its substantive content in twentieth-century postpositivist and/or postmetaphysical (analytic, Continental, and sociological) paradigms for philosophy’s tasks.
Several of Aristotle’s works can and have been opened to interpretations that highlight the ontic and epistemic importance of poetic modes of expression and communication, and focus on the poet orator (rather the philosopher-king) as pedagogical and political ideal. In these interpretations, embodied and materially embedded images are important not only for ethical relationships between mutually susceptible and mutually accountable human beings, but the very constitution and carrying forward humanity’s history (Cicero 1942; Vico 1948; Valla 1962; Hesse 1970, 1980; Blumenberg 1983; Carruthers 1990; Barrett and Koerner 2001). These views point to what Aristotle’s Poetics (1982) and Topics (1984) suggest about the importance of poesis (imaginative creation of images) for rational processes of asking for and giving reasons for why a particular set of observations and experiences can be seen as evidence. In order for rational processes to be carried out (such as deriving consequences from premises) we need to find connections between evidence and arguments. Invention or imaginative practical reasoning makes it possible for us to find these connections. In this view, poesis precedes the demonstrations and proofs of what Aristotelians take as satisfying the qualifications of a science or episteme.
But Aristotle is unlikely to have arrived at such a conclusion. Aristotelians have recurrently reduced poesis to an aid of empirical observation, arousal of emotions, and relating expert knowledge to public affairs (e.g., St. Augustine 1963; Thomas Aquinas 1954; Eco 1988). In predominant Aristotelian traditions, images are not windows to insight; at best they are tools for instructing the unlettered and at worst, objects of idolatry.
The State of Emergency
The passage below comes from perhaps the most frequently cited text on philosophy (or of the socially isolated way of life of a philosopher-king) and pure ideas of suprasensible reality (eidos) said to be necessary for distinguishing contextually contingent things public (res publici) from the ought to be of the city-state:
And do you see, I said, men passing along the walls carrying all sorts of vessels, and standards, and figures made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear on the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave. (Plato 1999:7.515b)
The image of the cave illustrates Plato’s theses on why state of emergency is the norm for the human condition and on the importance of the philosopher-king for unifying the cosmos and polis.
Walter Benjamin (1940) urgently argued that themes of crises of interpretation and state of emergency is not an anomaly, but rather a ruling principle of modern times. Benjamin worried about how powerful metanarratives hid what colonialist, imperialist, and nationalist political ideologies call civilizing processes and forces involved in destroying variability of human life worlds. Benjamin’s counterhistory goes against the grain of standard accounts of the predominant analytic, Continental, and sociological traditions of the twentieth century (Gillespie 1960; Wilson 1995).
Benjamin’s arguments take us back to the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), its resulting pedagogical wars over epistemic authority and political legitimacy, and the normative status of state of emergency. In fact, it takes us all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, overcoming myth, and standard accounts of unified science and classification (Blumenberg 1983; Toulmin 1990). Sources of philosophy’s authority are presented as rooted in a natural prelinguistic primordial state, and operating by laws internal to themselves, linked by claims of philosophy’s tasks as above or beyond history. Philosophy’s authority, in this view, comes from its recovering natural sources of certainty and establishing a clean slate for a now (or modernity; Greek modo, “now”), and removing historical obstacles, or to eliminate the contingent in Hegel’s (1975) terms. Failures can thus be blamed on such obstacles as the irrational beliefs in myth and superstitions on the part of others—the barbarians, the pagans, multitudes, premoderns, commoners, the public, or “a hundred thousand fools” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Giorgias (1994; Latour 2001). The resulting pedagogical wars over the epistemic and political authority of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms have often reduced social, ecological, and moral crises to epistemological difficulties and problems of cross-cultural translation.
Benjamin spoke too early and too late. Increasingly phantasmagorical ideologies have been employed to legitimate the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, even until death, of minorities. In 1949, Theodore Adorno (1973) argued that events of the twentieth century undermined the credibility of any claims for ignoring concrete historical reality to start from scratch (or a clean slate) and/or establish a universally agreed-on arbiter of what is common in the world we live in. Critical theory, Adorno said, faced the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism; it would be barbaric to hoist images of redemption arising from this dialectic, yet we cannot do without culture.
It forms what Robert Brandom (1994) calls the “space of reasons,” where reasons given and asked for by mutually susceptible and mutually accountable intentional beings create the “we” for whom things matter. It materializes and embodies the conditions of possibility for human intentional and voluntary relationships and activities, for human beings’ communicating their expectations and accountabilities, causally affecting each others beliefs, values, and actions, and thereby constituting their communities and histories (Barnes 2000:2). As Stephen Toulmin (1990:1) notes, “The ways in which [we] view [our] past affects our posture in dealing with the future.”
Benjamin (1940) likened the way in which pedagogical wars impede relating history to social and moral matters to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novum, in which the angel looks out from the canvas toward its past, with its back to the future’s conditions of possibility. It was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that mainstream research programs started to question whether Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms for philosophy’s tasks have exhausted their usefulness.
Alternatives to Platonist and Aristotelian Traditions
The pursuit of theory has played central roles in the dynamics of political leadership, pedagogy, and public affairs for well over three thousand years in large-scale complex societies. In traditions that form the background of the human sciences and humanities, philosophy and theory refer to the systematic and methodologically unified treatment of subjects that lend themselves to public debate, because their mutual understanding and use hinge on reasons.
Likewise of great antiquity (and cross-cultural interest) are modes of expressing relationships between the physical world and human communities. In ancient Greek, the words “cosmos” and “polis” referred to the structure, composition, and forces of the universe; and to the means whereby members of the communities distinguish themselves from outsiders and organize themselves. Many cultures develop a common sense (sensus communis) of what is good, valuable, and should and should not be allowed to happen. Mary Helms (1979, 1993) has explored a model of an informed “cultured” social entity surrounded by an outside cosmological realm, which is believed to contain all manner of visible, invisible, and exceptional qualities, energies, beings, and resources, some harmful, some helpful. These outside realms are explored, controlled, transformed, and exploited by traditional religious practitioners—shamans, priest, diviners, curers, midwives, and so on (Helms 1993:7). Similar philosophical arguments about a common sense of the “we” are as old as the Platonist and Aristotelian traditions, including poet-orators embodying a pedagogical and political ideal through “art of memory,” such as Horace (65–8 B.C.) and Cicero (106–43 B.C.) (Cicero 1942; Vico 1948; Valla 1962; Hesse 1970, 1980; Carruthers 1990; Barrett and Koerner 2001).
Cicero’s account of how the poet-orator Siminides of Ceos invented this art has been of lasting importance (De Oratore 1942:2.84.351–354; Yates 1966:1–26). At a banquet given by a noble of Thessaly (Scopas), Simonides chants a lyric poem. Simonides is then summoned outside to meet two travelers, but outside Simonides finds no one. As he starts his return, the banquet hall roof collapses, crushing everyone beyond identification. Now Simonides is commissioned to chant a poem of recollection—one which will identify the unrecognizable victims. At first he does not know how he can do this. Then, using the architectural remains as a mnemonic aid, he chants the poem he presented at the ill-fated banquet again—this time with the names and honorary memorials of the people lost in the event by their living families and neighbors.
Simonides’s invention of the art of memory shows how places (loci) act in the recollection of words as well as people, places, and events. It also illustrates key formal requirements of poet-orators’ conception of philosophy’s tasks. The works of Cicero (1942), Vico (1948), and Aristotle’s Poetics (1982) and Topics (1984) suggest that we can distinguish structuration from moral and/or philosophical implications. Structuration relates to the grammar or logic of poetic tropes (verba translate, “words with transferred meanings”), which are structured around at least four types of tropes (or figures) that transfer meanings: (1) from one thing to something similar (metaphor), (2) from cause to effect or vice versa (metonymy), (3) from the whole to the parts (synecdoche), and (4) from one thing to its opposite (irony). The moral/philosophical implications of poetic practice include (1) inventio, finding the relevant arguments; (2) dispositio, arranging them in effective order; (3) elocutio, choosing appropriate language; (4) memoria, memorizing the speech; and (5) pronuncia, delivering it.
These properties are not restricted to words, but include such material images as Plato’s account of the cave, Locke’s image of the mind as a tubula rasa, and Marx’s commodity fetish. Such images and objects do not stand for (represent) but express meaning relations (Hesse 1970, 1980). We create (Greek poesis) these when we participate as mutually susceptible, accountable, and expressive beings in practices of giving and asking for reasons (Brandom 1994, 2000; Barnes 2000; Habermas 2003).
Cicero’s account shows how we use our capacities for poesis to rationally make our implicit experiences explicit (to transform know-how into knowing that), and to logically express how we are able to do so. It shows the materially embedded ethical mutuality of rational accountability and it demonstrates the logic that enables us to show one another why we believe which of these reasons count. The poet-orator helps us to reflect upon and debate different views on a common sense of what matters about past, present, and future conditions of possibility.
These themes relate to the wealth of conceptual tools that we have available for replacing notions of archaeology as the study of a record of representations of the operations of symbolic or social systems by an archaeology whose object of study is “the range of contextual mechanism by which different forms of agency have gained their various historical realities” (Barrett 2000:61).
In the wake of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the age of revolutions (c. 1776–1848), a new sense of cosmos and polis emerged around the artifactual truth conditions of René Descarte’s (1596–1626) doubt, the artifactual nature of Isaac Newton’s (1642–1724) laboratory, the artifactual society of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) Atlantis or Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) Leviathan, and the artifactual value of Isaac Newton’s mint and market.
Newton is credited for replacing the closed, fixed, and finished medieval cosmos by an open and unfinished universe determined by covering laws of the changeless change of matter and motion (Koyre 1965; Blumenberg 1983). The dynamic stability of the modern cosmopolis revolves around a new double breakup. One removes absolutely transcendent and immanent reality (a Creator ineffable in being and inscrutable in design) while, at the same time, infinitely expanding the scope of human beings (or modern nation-states) centrality in their artifactual nature and society. The second separates the individual subject’s cognitions from its location on the cosmos (Blumenberg 1983; Dupré 1993; S. Koerner 2004).
During the age of revolutions (1776–1848), pedagogical wars over Enlightenment and Romantic generalizations about human nature came to revolve around two axes. One treats the subject (I) as the source of all meaning and value as well as a mere node through which nature and society operated. The other revolves around dichotomies of moderns and others. Predominant paradigms for philosophy’s tasks were reduced to (1) dividing the world between perceived things and things determined by causal necessity, (2) reducing social life to interindividual contractual structures, (3) privatizing ethics and globalizing indifference, (4) isolating ethics as a specialized field, and (5) centralizing the importance of a modern-premodern dichotomy.
Beliefs in the Beliefs of Others and the Reduction of Social Crises to Epistemic Problems
“Standard” accounts of the factors most responsible for the scientific revolution and birth of modernity have stressed seventeenth-century economic prosperity, the withering of religious restrictions on social mobility and intellectual life, expansion of secular culture, the political centrality of the nation-state, and the overturning of premodern worldviews by the new mathematical-mechanical experimental science and natural philosophy (Gillespie 1960; Toulmin 1990; Wilson 1995; Daston 2000). These factors clash, however, with Stephen Toulmin’s (1990) observations on the worsening conditions that dragged the Thirty Years War to an end:
The longer the bloodshed continued, the more paradoxical the state of Europe became . . . For many of those involved, it ceased to be crucial what their theological beliefs were, or where they were rooted in experience, as 16th-century theologians would have demand. All that mattered, by this stage, was for supporters of Religious Truth to believe, devoutly in belief itself. For them, as for Tertullian long ago, the difficulty of squaring a doctrine with experience was just one more reason for accepting this doctrine that much more strongly. (Toulmin 1990:54)
It took a decade to negotiate the Peace of Westphalia, which created the system of international institutions of modern nation-states. Toulmin (1990:152) notes that no “League of Nations existed, nor could other institutions, transnational or subnational, restrain the ambitions or curb the actions of Europe’s self willed sovereign nations.” The only beliefs on which negotiators agreed were that prewar institutions had been rendered obsolete by the state of emergency. Emphasis came to fall on (1) establishing a unifying agent that could stand outside or beyond conflicting claims to political legitimacy as impartial referee, (2) identifying obstacles to agreement on universalizable principles of the world being negotiated, and (3) the need of new social structures and modes of solidarity (Sprat 1667; Rossi 1978; Bacon 1884, 1974).
Standard accounts tend to obscure the dire conditions of contexts in which mathematical mechanical interpretations of Platonist and Aristotelian traditions were assigned tasks of a clean slate for universal method, science, and classification, and the impacts on these interpretations of devout beliefs in belief itself (Peitz 1985, 1987, 1988, 2002; Latour 2002; Latour and Weibel, eds. 2002; Weibel 2002). Claims that idols corrupt and undermine social stability linked natural philosophy and experimental science by devices for exposing the deceits of idols. Many early modern scientific experiments dealt with instruments designed to reveal what were claimed to be the primary obstacles to rational agreement among men of goodwill: the idols and irrational beliefs of commoners, colonized savages, premoderns, and others. For Isaac Newton (1958), the material remains of obstacles to rational political, pedagogical, and public order could be found everywhere: China, Egypt, the New World, ancient Rome, and at Stonehenge (Westfall 1982). His contemporary, the antiquarian John Aubrey (1972), agreed in light of his excavations of temples built by the ancients, such as Stonehenge, collections of primitive ritual objects, and reports on priests fabricating miracles (Schaffer 2002:508). Unmasking fetishes (deluded beliefs of the so-called savages and barbarians of Africa and the Americas in occult powers of artifacts) was a key component of seventeenth-century natural philosophers and antiquarians’ search for truth (Schaffer 2002:507–508).
The expressions “fetish,” “artifact,” and “commodity” occur throughout memoirs that Newton (1959–1977) wrote in defense of the standardization of value by the mint and market while establishing the social structures and modes of solidarity of a ferocious regime for governance and commerce aiming at the replacement of what he called the distorted experiences of intrinsic value by stable extrinsic constructions of artifactual value: money in the capitalist market (Shaffer 2002:508–510). Notions of the idolatrous habits of medieval Europe and primitives became increasingly important to claims about the timeless placeless advantages of science and standardized monetary values for cleaning the slate of obstacles to the epistemic and political authority, and progress of the modern episteme.
The Age of the Revolutions: Hume, Compte, and Kant
Concerns to secure the epistemic authority of a science of man were crucial in the struggles over political sovereignty in early modern Europe. In the wake of the Thirty Years War, the most powerful political leaders and pedagogical institutions focused on calls for new social structures and modes of solidarity. A controversial question was whether to base new social ideals and institutions on the new natural philosophy and mathematical and mechanical experimental science (Hobbes 1962; Shapin and Schaffer 1985), as suggested by such iconic Enlightenment figures as Descartes (1596–1650), Newton (1642–1727), and John Locke (1612–1704). For several founders of positivist natural philosophy, a science of man was based on premises that humans obey natural laws, including forces of self-preservation that function as the principles of Newton’s nature. By use of natural rather than cultural language (Mali 1992) and Newtonian principles (i.e., social and psychological physics), the researcher would infer the unchanging primary qualities of human nature from observations on the secondary qualities of cultures.
Alexander Koyré (1965:22) remarked, “So strong was the belief in nature, so overwhelming the prestige of the Newtonian (or pseudo-Newtonian) pattern of order arising automatically from interaction of isolated and self-contained atoms, that nobody dared to doubt that order and harmony would in some way be produced by human atoms acting according to their nature, whatever this might be.” These beliefs underwrote influential paradigms for an atomist individual psychology, which explained away mind as a mosaic of sensations, ideas, and laws of association and sociology that human history to clusters of “human atoms, complete and self-contained each in itself and only mutually attracting and repelling each other” (Koyré 1965:22).
Throughout the so-called long eighteenth century (from Descartes and Newton to the post-Napoleonic settlement in 1815), such iconic Enlightenment figures as John Locke (1632–1704), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), C. L. de Secondat (1689–1755), David Hume 1711–1776), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Henri Saint-Simone (1760–1825), and Auguste Compte (1798–1857) debated the appropriateness of principles drawn from mathematical-mechanical experimental science not only for a science of man but for bringing about social progress. Critics of these debates stressed differences between the world experienced by human beings and the ways in which the world was represented by mechanical theories of nature. Human experiences of nature are filled with colors, smells, sounds, tastes, and tactile impressions—what paradigms centering on primary qualities regard as secondary. Questions of great antiquity were reopened: What is the connection between the ideas we have about the world and how the world actually is? Are there any necessary connections? How did human knowledge, culture, and history originate? Is free will a distinguishing feature of being human? What sorts of knowledge help human beings critically evaluate and transform the circumstances under which they live? Is it possible for human beings to resolve discrepancies between actual circumstances and ideals concerning how things ought to be (Rousseau 2000)?
The responses with greatest impact on twentieth-century analytic, Continental, and sociological traditions have been those of Hume, Compte, and Kant. For Compte and Kant a satisfactory approach needed to address Hume’s metaphysical skepticism arguments. Hume (1902, 1958) phrased these as a problem about our knowledge of any necessary connection between cause and effect. He noted that we do not perceive connections of this sort, and therefore that the idea of necessary connection cannot come from our experience of the external world. For Hume, the source and contents of our ideas about necessary connections are observations made within ourselves. By force of habit they lead us to expect familiar effects when we observe familiar causes. Hume thus argued that neither experience nor reason can guarantee that future observations on what we take as familiar causes will be followed by familiar effects.
Auguste Compte’s positivist philosophy centers on a single natural law thesis, empiricist methodology (one which admitted only knowledge obtained through the senses), and purely descriptive language for making testable statements about observed phenomena (Carnap 1934; Cassirer 1942, 1960; Neurath 1973; cf. Preucel 1991:18). For Compte, science is crucial for social progress and harmony. Following Saint-Simon (and Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, 1973), Compte’s philosophy is a positivist response to metaphysical skepticism in that it treats knowledge as laws of relations of succession and similarity among observations: “It is the nature of positivist philosophy to regard all natural phenomena as subject to invariable laws, the discovery of which . . . is the aim and end of all our efforts . . . we do not pretend to expound generative causes of phenomena” (Compte 1974:24, emphasis added).
The major components of Immanuel Kant’s approach to philosophy’s tasks are presented in a series of three works (1781, 1788, 1790), dealing with aspects of human agency, knowledge, and history relating to the following questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What should I do? (3) What dare I hope? (4) What is it to be human? (Kant Schriften 1902:9:25, our translation.) For Kant, these questions relate to one another, and the fourth was most crucial for understanding why this was the case. Kant stresses the remarkability of human beings’ finding the world intelligible. Put another way, the world is for human beings not a confusion of sensory input. We do not need encyclopedias and maps in order to structure experiences. We have experiences, Kant says, of the intelligibility of the world, that arise through processes that are not the same as either (1) the things-in-themselves of the world that exist whether or not we experience them or (2) the various conceptual schemes we create. He goes on to note that, without capacities for experiencing the potential intelligibility of the world, we would have no basis for mutually relating to one another as human beings capable of consciousness and intentional behavior. There would be no basis for common sense, no conditions for the possibility of ethics and moral interaction. This means, for Kant, that we could not possess the freedom to treat one another not simply as means to personal ends, but as fellow human beings.
Kant’s first critique (1781) centers on a novel response to eighteenth-century debates over criteria for ensuring the certitude of knowledge. For Kant, a major cause of knowledge’s uncertainty (and the focus of metaphysical skepticism) is a failure to distinguish between things-in-themselves and phenomena (objects and processes as these are experienced and understood by human beings). The second critique (1788) relates this theory to questions about the complexity of human behavior, social change, ethics, and morality. The third (1790) deals with the foundations of knowledge, the cultural diversity of human history, and questions, which date to antiquity, concerning discrepancies between how things actually are and moral ideals concerning how things ought to be. Central to this work is what twentieth-century researchers have identified as the task of overcoming metaphysics, what Kant called capacities for pure (or a priori) intuitions and judgments—aesthetic and space-time. For Kant, aesthetic judgment shapes the sensory encounter of human beings (possessing capacities for consciousness) with the things-in-themselves of their surroundings. It forms realms of human feelings and evaluations that are prior to any practical and conceptual considerations. For Kant, aesthetic judgment is the precondition of the histories of the arts, sciences, and societies, and the realization of the moral ideal that each treats the others not as means to ends, but as moral ends in themselves.
Several themes in Kant’s works became pivotal points of departure for the founding figures of the twentieth-century analytic, Continental, and sociological (or critical theory) philosophical traditions, as well as of nineteenth- and twentieth-century human science and humanities theory (Thompson 1836; Hegel 1967, 1975; Marx and Engels 1975; Morgan 1963; Durkheim 1954, 1960; and Weber 1958). These include (1) a theory of human knowledge that centered on the importance of a priori intuitions of aesthetic judgment for distinguishing between phenomenon and things-in-themselves, (2) a universal or cosmopolitan model of the history of human agency, and (3) an approach to moral freedom that placed good and evil in the hands of human beings alone.
Conditions of Knowledge
According to Kant, knowledge should not be seen as representing objects that exist independently of our judgments. Such objects should not be construed as existing both out there in the world and in our minds behind sensory experience (as rationalists argue), nor as arising directly out of sensory experiences, which then get pieced together by ideas (as empiricists argue). For Kant, neither view concerns dimensions of consciousness, which are crucial for relating the conditions of human knowledge to ethical and moral issues. Human beings are not only able to attribute meaning and value to experience, but can discover that they themselves are the source of those meanings and values. Kant attributes this not only to reason but to imagination. Imagination, for Kant, makes it possible for human beings to discover that they are themselves sources of meanings and values, a discovery necessary for individual consciousness of freedom and for resolving discrepancies between is and ought in society and history.
For Kant, the question of the conditions of human knowledge can be restated as, What does it mean for aesthetic judgments to relate to phenomenal objects? Objects of knowledge, for Kant, do not exist independently of our judgment at all. Organization of sensory experiences by aesthetic time-space intuitions enables us to experience identity of phenomenal objects and attribute causes to them, as well as to understand relationships between objects and their phenomenal surroundings.
A Universal or Cosmopolitan Model of the History of Human Agency
Kant addressed human agency and history in “An Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1963) on relationships between the histories of nature and of culture. Kant’s universal history posed the duality as an antithesis—indeed as a causal explanation of the dialectical evolutionary trajectories of nature, culture, and human capacities for moral freedom. Kant’s vision of a universal history begins at the very beginnings of nature (particles of Newtonian matter and motion in infinite time-space) (Kant 1963) and proceeds through a succession of events supposedly leading from the emergence of primitive forms of human consciousness to the rise of civilizations, the Copernican revolution, and the eventual unification of social ideals and reality in an ideal civic order in the future (Kant 1963).
Kant derived the idea from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2000) that human beings’ natural capacities for practical reasoning and moral freedom makes them able to create a better world, as well as be responsible for evil. It marks a radical departure from methodologies that hinge on a Creator or ideal nature. To Kant (1784, 1788), reason underpins conceptual understanding and intentional practice, and imagination is crucial for human beings’ discovery of themselves as sources of meaning and values, which is their consciousness of freedom. This discovery is the source of their capacities to resolve discrepancies between is and ought, and responsibilities for good and evil. Thus Kant’s (1784) “formula of humanity” is to act by treating humanity, whether in oneself or in the person of another, not as a means, but as an end in its own right.
The ways in which processual and post-processual archaeologies (see Watson, chapter 3; and Shanks, chapter 9) have distinguished themselves is strongly tied to their responses to crises during the first half of the twentieth century in physical sciences, and during the second half in human sciences. In the first half of the twentieth century, wars interrupted only by economic depression tore apart the institutions founded at the Peace of Westphalia to bring an end to the Thirty Years War and mediate international political relationships between European nation-states. In academia, Einstein’s Relativity Theory, it was argued, undermined Compte’s (1876) positivism and scientific unity, social progress, and empiricist methodology, and developing a purely descriptive language and judging competing knowledge claims (Carnap 1934; Cassirer 1942, 1960; Neurath 1973; cf. Preucel 1991:18). By the 1950s the responses had split between physics on one hand, and philosophy, human sciences, and humanities on the other.
Responses in Philosophy to Crises in the Physical Sciences
During the postwar decades, responses consolidated around works of the founding figures of the analytic, Continental, and sociological philosophical traditions (see Bintliff, chapter 10; Husserl 1936; Cassirer 1960; Heidegger 1962; Kuhn 1962; M. Friedman 2000). Within the analytic tradition, logical positivist and logical empiricist scientists and philosophers of science distinguish science from other types of knowledge and fact from values; use similar language to state observations and theory; and take similar approaches to discovering and justifying theories (M. H. Salmon 1992:2–3). Many of these philosophers left Europe for England and the United States after World War II and influenced their American students (Kuhn 1962; Binford 1972; Clarke 1968, 1973).
In contrast, those within Continental and sociological traditions criticized the analytic movement, which in their view
embodies and promotes an a-historical view of scientific activity by emphasizing the logical characteristics of science while ignoring the cultural context of scientific activity . . . so-called facts can only be grasped through theories, which are creations of members of a specific culture, and are never completely free of the values and aspirations of that society. (M. H. Salmon 1992:4)
In Continental and sociological traditions (Winch 1964; Bloor 1966; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Bourdieu 1990), the humanities and human sciences are better suited for philosophy’s tasks than positivism or the analytic tradition, which disregards spiritual and social problems by focusing on logical analysis of language, hypothesis testing, and explanation, so as to take on the trappings of physical sciences.
Yet beyond these contrasts, these traditions all share several features toward the issues a1–e1 and a2–e2, which were to reverberate in processual and post-processual archaeology:
NEO-KANTIANISM All three saw Kant’s (1781, 1788, 1790) approaches to human nature, knowledge, and history as crucial for post-positivist philosophy, but without his metaphysical theory of human agency, knowledge, and the histories of nature and culture (Carnap 1938; Cassirer 1942, 1960; Neurath 1973). They thus inherited Kantian dichotomies, including premodern versus modern, expert knowledge versus public beliefs, reality versus social constructions, epistemic values versus social and ethical values (e.g., morally right or socially good), and contents versus historical contexts of theory and practice.
LINGUISTIC AND/OR INTERPRETIVE TURNS AND OVERCOMING METAPHYSICS Kant’s metaphysical approach—represented in ideal (or metaphysical) models of a priori intuitions, processes whereby we come to understand things about the world in which we live, and history—is crucial for his moral freedom. As a solution to the problem of metaphysics in Kant, all three traditions developed Platonist and Aristotelian perspectives that used language to de-transcendentalize what they saw as the advantages of Kant’s notions of a priori structures of aesthetic and ethical judgment, which also solved their problems with the nineteenth-century positivist notions that facts speak for themselves. In sociology, versions of the linguistic turn were contributed by Emile Durkheim (1912), Max Weber (1958), Ernst Cassirer (1906, 1953), and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory (Areto and Gebhardt 1978), all of which saw society and culture as necessary for human knowledge, not just for social solidarity or the community of a “we,” but by providing a linguistic solution to the supposed problem of the incompleteness of individual human beings.
PRIVATIZATION OF ETHICS The importance of language to the analytic, Continental, and sociological philosophical traditions has major implications for their treatment of ethics and morality. As noted above, for Kant, a priori aesthetic intuitions and experiences of time/space endowed human beings with natural capacities for practical reasoning and moral freedom, which made them both capable of creating a better world and responsible for evil. Overcoming Kant’s metaphysics in these traditions has hinged on replacing these transcendental aspects of his work by variously reducing the conditions of possibility for ethics and sociability to linguistic competence. Without language, human life forms would collapse, not into a Hobbesian war of all against all but a chaos of brute idiocy, or, as Clifford Geertz (1973), one of the key figures in the linguistic turn in sociocultural theory, put it, mental basket cases (Rosaldo 1989). The logical analysis of linguistic relationships between scientific concepts, evidence, theory, and explanation (Russell 1921; Whitehead 1925; Carnap 1934; Frege 1965; Wittgenstein 1933, 1958) was meant to replace the metaphysical, psychological, and social models of consciousness and knowledge production (Habermas 2003). As Wittgenstein (1958) put this, just as the limits of my language are the limits of my world, the propositions of logical semantics show us the scaffolding of that world. Drawing principles explicitly from Humbolt, Dilthey, and Husserl, and implicitly from Giambattista Vico (1948), Horace (65–68 B.C.), and Valla (1407–1457) as predecessors (Grassi 1980), Martin Heidegger (1962) aimed to establish a clean slate for metaphysics, with human self-understanding hinging on a priori conditions of a linguistic happening of world disclosure (truth) to the individual self. These revolutionized concepts greatly reduced conditions of access to the world to the linguistically competent I; although it would seem that words gain meaning through our own use, there is no clear difference between the validity of an utterance and its social acceptance (Habermas 2003:68). What we are entitled to is what we are accustomed to. In other words, the analytic, Continental, and sociological paradigms have treated ethics as an area of specialization that must confine itself to the I rather than developing images or models for us to follow, and in investigating how people clarify their self-understanding by appropriating traditions.
Responses to Crises in the Physical Sciences
By the 1950s responses to crises in physical science had formed the basis of a lively tradition of debate developed among scientists about the unity of the objects and the artificial realities generated by emerging computer technologies. Peter Galison (1996) shows how a chaotic assemblage of objects, disciplines, and activities—thermonuclear weapons, poison gas, weather prediction, pion nucleon interactions, number theory, probability theory, industrial chemistry, and quantum mechanics—was transformed during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet with neither common laws nor a common ontology, by the end of World War II these varieties of research contributed foundationally to the industrialization of science: “They held a new cluster of skills in common, a new mode of producing scientific knowledge that was rich enough to coordinate highly diverse subject matter” (Galison 1996:119).
The common sense of these activities centered the creation of alternative realities through computer simulations. Galison (1996:119–120) shows how this development transformed epistemology through a new methodology for extracting information from physical measurements and equations, and transformed metaphysics by replacing the artifactual nature of classical mechanics with simulated realities consisting of discrete entities interacting through irreducibly stochastic processes. As Galison (1996:120) notes, the computer as a calculating tool had led to the “computer-as-nature,” a seemingly unlimited site for simulated realities production.
Crises in the Human Sciences and Humanities
In tandem with the cold war, postcolonial conflict, the industrialization of military, and commercial research, worldwide critique emerged of the exploitation of the third world, as well as the colonialist, imperialist, nationalist, and postcolonial roots of the human sciences and humanities, including how caricaturing the differences between premoderns and moderns obscured increasing social inequality, ecological exploitation, and postcolonial violence (Ardener 1971; Wolf 1975; Augé 1982; Fabian 1983; Clifford 1988). In these decades of critiques of the standard view of the science and modernity (Hollis and Lukes 1982), the situation in archaeology was characterized as a crisis of naïveté—a loss of innocence (Clarke 1973). For some, the problem has been empiricism—belief in a fixed given above or beyond but also somehow asserting a participatory presence (to use Durkheim’s 1954 expression). For instance, as Binford and Sabloff (1982:1937) wrote:
Boasian anthropology and most of the intellectual background of archaeology in general was founded on the old Baconian idea of “psychological objectivity”: one simply cleared one’s mind of biases and allowed the great truths of nature to be uncovered through the vehicle of one’s “bias-free” mind. Such were the views dominating the “great days” when “discoveries” were considered to be the products of a science whose mission was to accumulate and inventory “natural facts.”
The 1960s New (or processual) Archaeology was among the numerous new research programs in various fields drawn from analytic, Continental, and sociological philosophical influences. Subsequent decades saw the parting of the ways of processual and post-processual approaches to issues a1–e1 (Renfrew and Bahn 1994; Thomas 1999; Bintliff 2004), and the emergence of literatures dealing with the discipline’s critical traditions (Pinsky and Wylie 1989; Trigger 1989; Preucel 1991; Embree 1992; Renfrew and Bahn 1994; Thomas 1999; Wylie 2002; Bintliff 2004). Preucel (1991) outlined “three influential theoretical programmes in Anglo-American archaeology” in this regard:
Positivist programs seek general laws based on empirical observation (Preucel 1991:18). A causal explanation of an event required the application of general laws for a given set of initial conditions. For Binford and others (Watson et al. 1971; Peebles and Kus 1977) this “covering law” model was the basis of a scientific archaeology (see Watson, chapter 3).
Hermeneutic programs identify how meaning is achieved through interpretation. In the late 1970s Ian Hodder, a former student of David Clarke, recognized that archaeologists’ desire for science and objectivity was accompanied by fear of speculation and the subjective (Preucel 1991:21). The dilemma, as Hodder (1984:28) recognized, was that saying anything about the past requires an interpretation of the data, and these interpretations are not testable because the theories and the data are part of the same argument. Patrik (1985) thus questioned whether there even is an “archaeological record” in the sense of an imprint of the operations of past social systems, as opposed to a text requiring literary theory-based interpretation (Wylie 2002).
Critical theory grew out of these hermeneutic traditions and desires to enable social change by revealing how ideologies mask social contradiction (Althusser and Balibar 1970; Habermas 1972; Preucel 1991:24; Hodder 1999; see Shanks, chapter 9). In archaeology, critical theory is closely associated with Mark Leone who, like Hodder, radically revised his processual line of thinking upon recognizing that archaeologists rarely question how their received views structure their reconstructions of past societies. Leone (1978) challenged the modern division of time into past, present, and future, as well as relations between contents and contexts of research, and matters of social and moral accountability (Preucel 1991:24).
Over the past decade, a number of archaeologists have highlighted areas of overlap and complementarity between analytic, hermeneutic, and critical theory ideas and goals, and argued for going beyond problematic conceptions of divisions between contents and contexts of research, and/or epistemic and social and moral values. As Alison Wylie (2002:174) notes, there are agreed views that archaeological data and evidence are neither stable nor independent of theory, and they depend on linking principles and background knowledge (middle-range theory). To prevent circular reasoning between theory and theory-laden evidence, Wylie (2002:174) identifies the core problem as “how to give a systematic account of how researchers make . . . judgments about the relative credibility of claims about the evidential significance of archaeological data.”
In everyday life the wise guide themselves as often by waiting to see how events unfold as by plans and prediction . . . In other words, we often improvise, learn by doing and make things up as we go along.
—Rosaldo 1989:92
During the 1980s and 1990s, considerable efforts were made to develop models of the nature and consequences of the postmodern condition, and the contradictions between images of globalization (Inda and Rosaldo 2002; see Jones, chapter 19; McNiven and Russell, chapter 25), the destruction and conservation of cultural property (Layton et al. 2001), the social geography of ecological risk, sustainable development and exposure to violence (Lash et al. 1996; J. Friedman 1996), and the loss of ideological images of culture’s unlimited conquest and total domination over nature (Toulmin 1990; Beck et al. 1994; Latour 1993). Crises of representation center on features that homogenizing core-periphery images of globalization and multiculturalism share with colonialist, imperialist, and nationalist political ideologies that have rendered invisible the barbarism of what they called civilizing processes.
Archaeologists have become interested in the long-term history of the discipline’s involvements in the creation of images and metanarratives about the modern episteme and supposed obstacles to modernity (or vanishing pasts). Certain problems confound attempts to go beyond the premodern versus modern and expert knowledge versus public beliefs divides, including the emerging normative status of archaeology’s critical self-consciousness phase, and expanding expectations for unified images of the past (Clarke 1973; Preucel 1991; Holtorf 2001; Carman 2002; Thomas 2004a). Future research might explore how current debates relate to various positions on expert versus public (or local indigenous) fields of practice, and how questions of agency and structure are rooted in a confusion of fears of academic isolation versus fears that if reason does not rule then “chaos of brute idiocy” (Rosaldo 1989:98) will take over (Latour 1999). If human agency is important for understanding particular social activities, must it be included in explanations of long-term sociocultural change? Can archaeologists investigate fundamental historical thresholds and transformations without resorting to teleological narratives? (S. Koerner 2004).
Sensus Communis: A Common World Is Not a Given
Today pluralistic notions of alternative realities or the new cosmopolitanism are questioned (Lash 1994; Beck et al. 2004; Latour 2004). Truths are not contested because of different worlds, but because they matter to people living in the same one: “Precisely because it matters, truth is fiercely contested” (Rouse 1996:416). Wars are not fought over different worlds, but over different experiences of what matters in the world opposing communities are saying that we have in common: “A common world is not something we can come to recognize, as though it had always been here . . . A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we have to build, tooth and nail together” (Latour 2004:455).
Are Plato and Aristotle still useful in relating research agendas to appeals to social, moral, and ecological accountability? Can the materiality and mutuality of practical reasoning, ethics, and poesis stand up to the challenges of Aristotelian paradigm treatments of rationality, logic, and social and moral accountability? The answer may help archaeologists understand “whether anyone is in a position to decide which viewpoints are too extreme to be included in the dialogue” (Layton et al., eds. 2001:19; cf. Lash et al. eds. 1996; Latour and Weibel, eds. 2002).
In practice, the arguments for the complementarity of analytic, hermeneutic, and critical theory (Preucel 1991; Wylie 2002; Shanks 2004) generate gulfs between ethical theory and social theory (cf. Lash 1994; Barnes 2000), and associated appeals to social and moral accountability lack substantive content beyond concerns of the I with who I am and how I would like to be, or with what is in my interest and/or those who share my interests. No one wants “timeless, featureless, interchangeable and atomistic individuals,” but the problem relates to arguments for replacing a human self that is prior to its embodied and material preconditions, with one that focuses on historical experiences (Foucault 1980; Bourdieu 1990; Butler 1993; Dobres and Robb, eds. 2000; Gero 2000; Gardner 2004; see Gardner, chapter 7). Reducing agency to embodied material preconditions hides our different experiences, and reducing thought to practice results in having to abandon human selves, an intelligible conception of the we, and intentionality altogether. Without intentionality we cannot account for how human beings interact and the diversity of forms that we can take—apart from methodological individualist and collectivist notions of interests.
Some are willing to take these risks in order to replace foundationalist notions of agency and structure by a cosmopolitan pragmatics of translation between speech communities (Beck 1992; Rorty 1989, 1991). But can we speak about translation from one to another before establishing a convincing sense of shared meaning among the same we (Lash 1996)?
Our suggested alternative centers on the materiality and mutuality of practical reasoning and human capacities for creative symbolic expression, how people anchor their fields of practice to one another, and to a common sense of what is good and ought to happen. Much of our above discussion of the poet-orator’s conception goes against the grain of the analytic, Continental, and sociological traditions. Building on the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Vico, we showed how to address contexts of indeterminacy from relational rather than essentialist perspectives. We can use our capacities for poesis to rationally make our implicit experiences explicit, logically express how we are able to do so, and openly discuss the rationality, logic, and ethical accountability of relational (reflective) approaches. In terms of issues a1–e1 listed above:
(A1) OBJECTS OR DOMAINS OF ANALYSIS Indeterminate here is the ontic status of the objects of human sciences, including human interaction, social change, and cultural divergence (Barrett 2000; Johnson 2004). How humans interact, alter their historical circumstances, and change themselves affects how they give and ask for reasons.
(B1) METHODS FOR GENERATING CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS OR INTERPRETING AND UNDERSTANDING (A1) The indeterminacy of (a1) does not make causal explanation impossible in principle, but no indefeasible distinction can be made between the mechanisms involved in generating theories and explanations versus practice and prediction (see Bentley and Maschner, chapter 15). This indeterminacy is crucial for understanding (a1) in ways that challenge models of divisions between observable external practices and invisible mental states, as well as views of social life restricted to ecological or social structures, or practices. The problem is not how to eliminate the indeterminacy of human beings’ beliefs, but rather how to make the evidence explicit and to specify the different views on why that evidence matters.
(C1) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE HISTORICAL LOCATION OF THE RESEARCHER AND (A1) AND (B1) Postan (1939:34) believed that in applying the historical method to social science, microscopic problems should be made macroscopic, and the general should be revealed in the particular. However, given the indeterminancy of both universalizing macro- and microlevel accounts, the micro- and macroscale circumstances of researchers’ locations are also indeterminately linked to (a1) and (b1).
(D1) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE CONTENTS OF (A1), (B1), AND (C1) AND THEIR SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXTS Considerations of these relationships are doubly indeterminate. We can focus on relationships between multiform microlevels of the content of (a1), (b1), and (c1) and the structural dynamics of macroscale conditions of contexts of research, or on the impacts of the complexity of microscale contexts on macropatterns respecting approaches to (a1), (b1), and (c1).
(E1) RELATIONSHIPS OF (A1), (B1), (C1), AND (D1) TO MATTERS OF SOCIAL AND MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY There is an indeterminate relationship between gathering numerous diverse independent lines of evidence on one hand, and appealing to moral accountability in interpreting this evidence on the other (Wylie 2002; Fowler et al., chapter 24). An ontology of human agency—centered on humans being mutually susceptible, accountable, intentional, and creatively expressive (poetic)—will not necessarily offer intelligible conceptions of a we, or the intentionality of human selves, beyond notions of the interests of individuals or social systems (or cultures). To act by choice is to act voluntarily, and without some sense of voluntarism there are no grounds for talking about accountability or responsibility. The space of voluntarism can be seen as “the medium through which social agents identify each other, communicate their expectations of each other, and thereby (causally) affect each other’s actions” (Barnes 2000:2)—the vehicle of their sociabilities, ethical accountabilities, and histories.
In specifying satisfactory approaches to human interaction, social life, and history, archaeologists must refer to much else besides practice (Barrett 1994; Dobres and Robb 2000; Schatzki et al. 2001). Archaeologists need viable alternatives to the study of representations that follow from treating the archaeological record as both a theoretical and methodological principle.
Archaeologies of the Diversity of Contexts of Humanity
These sorts of topics relate to problems that beliefs that the archaeological record represents past social systems pose for addressing agency and structure (Barrett 1994; Gosden 1994; Thomas 1999; Dobres and Robb 2000; Gardner 2004). John Barrett (1994:4; 2000) says that addressing these problems is important for replacing essentialist options for archaeological description and interpretation. If agency is mentioned at all, it is defined in terms of functionalist or structuralist conceptions of the individual as metaphysical node through which society operates. Such an individual is not a useful unit of analysis to start with (see Gardner, chapter 7).
An archaeology whose object of study is “the range of contextual mechanism by which different forms of agency have gained their various historical realities” facilitates other changes in our thinking about human behaviour and the conditions of archaeological knowledge (Barrett 2000:61). This is especially because it leads to a decentering, away from individuals as authors of their conditions, to a consideration of agents as interpreters capable of drawing upon and acting upon those conditions. An archaeological engagement with the past now becomes an attempt to understand how, under given historical and material conditions, it may have been possible to speak and act in certain ways and not in others, and by so doing to have carried certain programs of knowledge and expectation forward in time (Barrett 1994:4–5).
Combined with the formal dimensions of the poet-orator’s view of philosophy’s tasks, such an archaeology may be able to specify the scope of practice without reducing it to behavior, as well as relating the materiality and mutuality of practical reasoning and a conception of agency in which poetic expressions play key ontological roles. Replacing notions of representation by an open-ended notion of mutually susceptible and accountable expression lets us pursue some of the promising implications of notions of social agency without abandoning rationality, logic, and the importance of intentionality to processes of individuation and a “we” (Lash 1996).
Common experience informs us that we are mutually accountable and mutually susceptible social creatures, that our interactions are informed by our experience, and that we act voluntarily (Barnes 2000), all of which are made more understandable by focusing on ethics. Our relationships to the world are created through our ethical relationships to one another as mutually susceptible, mutually accountable intentional participants in a “we.” We poetically make our shared epistemic and ontological commitments to that “we” explicit. We transform ourselves and our surroundings through the ways in which we anchor our fields of practice to one another, and to beliefs about what matters in the world that we live in in common (Brandom 1994; Barnes 2000; McGuire and Tuchanska 2001; Latour 2004).
Considering communities not as the sum of atomic individuals, but as creations of mutually accountable and susceptible beings relates to Norbert Elias’s (1991:12, 17–19) argument that human communities are very particular sorts of wholes. Openness, changeability, and internal tensions characterize the histories of all communities. The wholeness of communities is not given—a function of interacting atomic entities, consisting of natural and cultural parts (Hobbes 1962; Locke 1975; Kant 1963). It has to be created.
In such a view, human beings are not interchangeable nodes through which social systems or cultural histories operate. Human life worlds can be envisaged as prisms of fields of experience, including ethical fields in which others are apprehended as centers of meaning and value (Husserl 1970). Ethical fields cannot emerge without (embodied and materially embedded) others, but they are prior to the concrete images that make up historically contingent “mutual and material” “structuring conditions and structuring principles” (Barrett 1994, 2000; Gosden 1994). Through their objectification in images, ethical acts can make experiences of how things are and ought to be explicit on the very scales on which human meanings and values are generated. Single ethical acts can transform life worlds.
This implies that the conditions of possibility for human agency are neither static nor unalterable. Our efforts to understand the world continuously transform our memories of the past, plans for the future, and ourselves. And change in the ways in which ethical fields are anchored to one another gives rise to what we call historical rupture, disjuncture, and transformation. Thus, although a “common world is not something [that] has always been there” but is “something we have to build” (Latour 2004:455), a philosopher-king is not required to do so.
Materiality and Mutuality: The Rationality and Logic of a Decentered We
The poet-orator offers fresh approaches to matters of social and moral accountability without resorting to claims about epistemic authority that hinge upon political sovereignty. Poetry can engage in struggles to negotiate conditions of possibility for diversity of human ways of life, without making claims about having settled differences among interlocutors’ views on what is true and/or what matters. In this respect alone, poetics already has advantages over the methods adopted by philosophies that seek a conclusive solution above or beyond what is at issue in historically situated contexts.
What the ancients called strongly reflective poesis can record responses to despair and to hope, can facilitate remembering, forgetting, and planning for the future. It makes virtue and vice explicit as mattering, not just banal, by creatively making things public—open to public reflection, debate, and counterresponse (Arendt 1958). Poesis is intrinsically about a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than reduction to one final, decisive, and decontextualized one. What matters is well put by Vico (1948):
So that, as rational metaphysics teaches us that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS/405)
We wish to express deep gratitude to volume editors Alex Bentley and Herb Maschner, and to John Barrett, Peter Machamer, James E. McGuire and Barbara Tuchanska, Merrilee H. Salmon, Alison Wylie, Cordelia Warr, Julian Thomas, and Brian Wynne.
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