University College Dublin October 2009

http://www.ucd.ie/archaeology/tarasymposium2009/

Thank you for inviting me to make a few comments on the Hill of Tara in this extraordinary gathering of knowledge and expertise, truly a sign, I think, of the numinous quality of this place. I am fascinated by its archaeology, the built environment of early farming communities and after, the reception of the prehistoric landscape: such interests took me into archaeology some 30 years ago. But I’ll leave such matters today to those, and there are some old friends of mine among you, who are far more expert than I am, though I will pursue one theme popular in contemporary social archaeology — that of approaching monuments like the Hill of Tara through a lens of performance, in every sense. No, instead I want to take up the heterogeneity of the Hill of Tara, its multiplicity, its complication, that is, the way it wraps up so many matters.

And I hope it will be clear that it is entirely appropriate that I am here in California on a pleasant Fall morning, present with you through this digital connection, because I’m going to return to some favorite French and postmodern/poststructuralist concepts — the undecidable, and heterotopia. Foucault, we are told, loved San Francisco, and Derrida was Professor at UC Irvine — that most antiseptic of campuses in Orange County. And if Ian turns the camera round I’ll be able to see something of you all, though dim and grainy on my desktop.

This fabulous enfolding: earthworks and stones, the artifacts and associations, lineage and mythography, voices of bards and saints, British Israelites and archaeologists. What is to be made of this e-vocation?

Clearly The Hill of Tara is more than just an archaeological site and landscape — even the word landscape, we should recall, is highly charged with the visuality of modern and modernist attitudes towards land, property and inhabitation. We could certainly refer to Pierre Nora’s notion of lieu de mémoire: this place is deeply associated with Irish national history, as a material manifestation of memory practice (and performance).

Now one scientific impulse is appropriately to distinguish the site, its features, sequence and finds from such reception, from what has been made of the Hill of Tara.

Let me say that again. “What has been made” of the Hill of Tara. In the light of its “numinous” qualities, that this place “echoes” through time, in the reworking of the land and architectures, in the reworking of narrative and association, was there ever a time before “reception”. Is it possible to conceive of a site or sites existing prior to reception, prior to what is made of the place? Of course, we typically want to distinguish the fact from the fictive. But I want to question whether there is actually a valid distinction, that is, an essential distinction.

I am not foolish enough to argue that there is no difference between reality and fantasy. But I believe that we live in mixed realities, rich collocations of fact and fictive. I suggest that the Hill of Tara is an example of a heterotopia — beyond real and imaginary, it enfolds both; and this is a substantive and empirically verifiable feature of the place. This is why we are gathered here today, after all.

I am making again that key point about our (archaeological) understanding of the past — that it has been crippled by a series of radical oppositions in our thinking, our research, values and understanding, and where one pole is privileged over the other:

• what happened in the past taking precedence over the subsequent traces

• the traces taking precedence over our record of them

• the life of the past (as we suppose it occured) over its decay and our rediscovery of it

• the real past over its retelling.

Presence/absence, materiality/inscription, past/present, those we are interested in/our attempts to understand, what happened/what is left over, life/death, fullness of cultural experience/loss and repetition. We are meant to think of how absurd it would be to challenge these distinctions — that somehow the traces of the past could hold something the past itself did not possess — that we might suspect the past did not actually happen the way it did, that the past is not internal to itself, but somehow extends beyond its present, genealogically, into its past and into its subsequent history, its future (!?), that the stories about the past might infect historical reality. But this is what happens on the Hill of Tara, like many other places — heterotopias. And this is just what Derrida does — puts to one side these privileged terms and treats the pairs symmetrically.

With good reason.

For archaeology, and archaeology is the material cornerstone of history and our sense of history, the past is, of course, here with us, living again as we make it our own. And who, arrogantly, will dare to claim they know what really is happening, now or back then? Who will lay claim to a time machine — the only vehicle that will securely reveal the secrets of the past?

We know that all we actually do have are traces of the dead, that we only work on flimsy remains, between past and present.

Derrida worked on ways of dealing in this undecidability, the tension between fact and fictive, trace and evocation. His was an archaeology of ghosts.

And this is the key term — undecidability. Uncertain spaces between. Heterotopias are undecidable spaces. Short circuits. Ghosts, vampires - alive AND dead; neither dead nor alive. Secrets we must refuse to believe, even if they are true. Undecidables threaten because they poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. Undecidability is the horror of indeterminacy. The failure of the life/death presence/absence opposition. And what threatens and transgresses its category fascinates us. Like the Hill of Tara. It doesn’t fit.

Tactic — don’t decide. Play both sides. Dis-place past and present, original and trace, original and reception, the fact and the fictive.

The trace is an undecidable, the past displaced into what remains, both present and absent. The material distributed across what is said of it, how it is re-presented. The undecidable trace is the origin of the meaning of the past — both present to us, but lost too. The mystery.

Think too of authentic and original against counterfeit, fake, fictional. The signature or seal, representing one’s authentic presence and identity, has to be repeatable, iterable. Like the past. It has to be repeated. Otherwise it wouldn’t be recognisable. Faking it is a necessary part of authenticity. And we are fascinated by forgery.

The past keeps returning, but different, in the new associations of the traces and remains, the retellings and reworkings, our hindsight. This is the necessary iteration of the past — it will never be pinned down, there is no bottom line on what happened in the past, because the remains are a return of the past, the same but different (this is the distinction between repetition and iteration).

Ironically perhaps the past is constantly deferred into the future — we will never know, though we may work upon the remains and establish degrees of confidence in what we make of them. Constant deferment.

Strategy. Don’t explain the past, the Hill of Tara — unfix it. Rework new associations.

I see an essential honesty and humility in all this, and one that is in sharp contrast to those grand designs that wish to organize and control the evidence, to supposedly get to the truth, to find out what supposedly really happened — which is actually only what they want you to think because it suits them to have it so.

This critique is at the heart of what is being called a symmetrical archaeology.

I mentioned performance. Let me say how performance is also an undecidable field. Many archaeologists now emphasize embodied engagement with monuments, architectures, landscapes and artifacts. Sometimes this is called a phenomenological approach, though dealing with the choreography and scenography of space, with the dramaturgy of social practice and behavior has much wider reference. In the light of the symmetry between past and present that I am discussing, science studies, by which I mean recent ethnographies and histories of science, technology and society, also can involve treating archaeology itself as performance. Here the view is that archaeologists do not discover what happened in the past: they work on what remains, and the past is the outcome of this activity. The past then, in this performance of archaeology, is not a datum, but an achievement, and subject to performance measures and indicators. (Irony — the past is actually here the product of future-oriented practice — archaeology is as much about the future as the past - the freeway through the valley of the Hill of Tara.)

Is this performance of archaeology representing the past?

Compare the mimetic and the eidetic, in relation to performance and the performative. The mimetic concerns a set of questions about the real and the represented. The concept of the eidetic takes the matter further. The eidetic refers, in psychology, to mental imagery that is vivid and persistent, though not memory or afterimage. I am a Classicist and note the fascinating etymology, with roots in the Greek eido and its cognates (to know, see, experience; that which is seen, form, model, type, image, phantom) and hold that performance is also eidetic because it raises questions of what is real and what is simulated, what persists, what is at the heart of experience (knowledge, impressions, physical materials). The eidetic is again ironic – in its act of representation performance is this and that, simulated and real. Performance is ironic in drawing upon theatrical metaphors; for while we might suppose a script, performance has no such sole origin and there is always the gap between script and act, as well as between performer and audience. What is being acted out in performance? We should answer that there is only ever the irony of reiteration without an origin, simulation without an original. Baudrillard’s simulacrum. And in these iterative chains the question of performance is immediately the question of how we may speak and write of performance. Performance is about re-iterating, re-mediating, re-working, re-presenting, re-storing.

So at the Hill of Tara — geneaological chains of re-visiting, re-working, re-performing. And now — the archaeologists come to visit.

For me, this is precisely archaeology. We seek in vain a representation that will explain the ruin of history. In dealing with remains, the archaeologist is always working upon relationships between past and present that circle around the impossible irony of trying to turn action and experience, material form and body, remediated, into representation. There can, of course, be no finality to mimesis, only constant reworking and restoring. And, in the symmetry, performance and the performative are always archaeological: that is, there is always, with performance, the question of origin or precedent (what came first? what holds precedence? script? event? character? author? audience?) and the question of document and trace (what remains? what is left after the performance? how is its material and physical presence to be represented?).

How then, as archaeologists, are we to represent performance, that is, conduct our social archaeology? I have attempted an answer to this question elsewhere in many places. Let me here simply ask us to look close at hand. We often focus on textuality and the image: archaeology has developed a powerful repertoire. Rosemary Joyce has recently done an excellent job of reframing archaeology in terms of this determinate practice of writing. She is contributing to that reflexive selfconsciousness about the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology inaugurated by the collections of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fisher (1986). But we are also taken back to pre-diciplinary practices in the antiquarian tradition that knew no essential or absolute distinction between folklore and landform, plant species and place name, archaeology and mythography.

But look to your object. The Hill of Tara, heterotopic undecidable, is testament to millennia of affective engagement, reiterative chains of mimetic and eidetic performance.