archaeology offering a way of imagining the possibility of rich and rewarding assembly
an allegory for our session here at TAG
The archaeological site - we are thrown in medias res - and every site is an achaeological site
the assemblage is a group of artifacts occurring together (regularly - we have been here before?)
these things were not intended to go together - a collocation of oyster shell, situla, ox scapula
a garbage heap
debris
flows of silts and soils
questions of pragmatogony - where have these things come from, what are their origins?
is it the past, people, socio-cultural processes, past events, processes of entropy and decay
are they "remnants", traces, vestiges - or the past itself?
but what then are the articulations? the bonds of the assembly?
it is disturbing/disturbed
a modern(ist) and forensic suspicion of space and site
"at a scene of crime, anything might be relevant" (and to what?)
questions of doubt
of the indeterminacy of space - "anything can happen in the next half-hour" (never mind flash mobs - Stingray 1966)
questions of signal and noise
figure and ground
the ground is necessary for the figure to emerge - the necessity of negative space (or indeed the Hegelian negation)
the necessity of noise - for without it there could be no discrimination - noise as the Lacanian real
questions of cut and integument - the layer as precisely defined by the "surface" - the surface as (Derridean) supplement
aside - the inscriptional techniques of Robbe-Grillet - the strange indeterminacy of the world
but choices are made
- how many grains of sand make a feature?
noise and loss
choices are made
but there is always more - and how do we retain the noise, the negative space, so that we may return to the choice?
that the thing is always mostly invisible
the melancholy of the archive - of assemblage becoming fragment, becoming dust
the impulse and necessity, the premise of mediation
this is the past in the present
but for mobilization, it has to be re-presented, dis-placed
more work to be done - labor and tools, instruments, methodologies, discourses
collection
accounts, lists, catalogs
imagery and representation
modeling and world-building
haunted media - a kind of strangeness (as displacement, the uncanny (the return of the past), metamorphosis - a "sea-change", mediation - the stranger as ambassador)
but "the thing" remains and resists
in a re-collection
is it a representative? an expression? of what? - humanity, event, identity, its maker?
is there resemblance between the assemblage, and what? - the past?
there is always more to say
and there are questions of Making in this pragmatogony
the making of the thing
the making of "the past"
and the work performed by the thing - the thing as gathering
(and remember that the assembly "assembles" - no agency or will)
is there not a lacuna - a gap, an absence, a non-disciplinary space - the lack of theory of making, of design
of how the gathering takes place - precisely in the assembling of material, tool, hand and "design"
and its site specificity - (happening in events of making, discard, cutting through the earth, the quantum intervention of the archaeologist/interpreter/user)
for we are immediately thrown into questions of craft and industry, in that genealogy of political debate since the 18th century about arts and crafts, the control of skill and technical knowledge, the alienation of industrial labor, of political personhood, agency and the prospect of lives worth living
tacit and embodied knowledges, with yes, bodies understood as distributed phenomena
Paul Sermon - touching with the eyes
invisible work
erased work
as a key part of making
lost knowledge (steam trains and NASA)
projection