The notion of a symmetrical archaeology is a loose one, somewhat metaphorical, even evocative. It has links with philosopher and sociologist of science David Bloor's "symmetry principle" – that philosophers', historians' and sociologists' accounts of science should be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure of the scientific theories whose content was to be explained. This is to hold that the truth or rationality of "nature" (or any other object of interest such as "history") cannot speak for itself but needs representation in the work of the scientist, in the process of debate around experiment, evidence and argument. A symmetrical archaeology, as we have heard it outlined today, upholds such a methodological impartiality. This requires us not to presume that the way the past was will win through into our understanding because of the "force of evidence". Instead, the past has to be worked at. A successful account of the past is not so much a measure of accordance between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal and social achievement.
This is one of the major propositions of a symmetrical archaeology - that we need to look to the work of archaeologists in coming to understand the past.
A symmetrical archaeology also encompasses much more than this.
The notion of symmetry addresses the great divides and dualisms that have been, as Julian Thomas has recently shown so effectively in his book on modernity and archaeology, so characteristic of archaeology since its modern crystallization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, the radical separation of past (to be studied) and the contemporary location and viewpoint of archaeologists is one that regularly involves according primacy to the past. For the past, uncontrovertibly it would seem, can only have happened the way it did, and what did happen cannot be changed by the will of some later archaeologist. The objective reality of the past, so immediately present in archaeological remains, faces off the contemporary archaeologist possessed by a subjective will to know. Unbalanced and dualistic relationships, lacking symmetry, are also, in this modernist orthodoxy, maintained between science and popular superstition, between professional and popular archaeology, with, again, primacy usually being accorded to the expertise and knowledge of the professional. For otherwise there is perceived the danger of knowledge of the past succumbing to myth and propaganda. Other familiar and now much discussed dualisms in archaeology include those between people and artifacts, biological species and cultural form, social structure and the individual agent. Many such relationships are conspicuously gendered.
All archaeologists, whether they acknowledge it or not, negotiate these relationships in their daily practices. Much post-processual archaeology since the 1980s has been dedicated to exposing the relationships and correcting imbalances.
This is why archaeologists became interested in cultural signification, as well as ecological relationship, in the meaning of things as well as economic exigency, in gender relationships, in agency, not as the search for the individual in (pre)history (as a counter to larger historical and environmental forces), but as the recognition that social structure is both the medium and outcome of (individual) motivated practices.
People make history, but under inherited circumstances over which they have no immediate control.
Beyond post-processual agendas, the politics of every archaeological practice, local planning through to national agenda, touristic experience to trade in illicit antiquities, are now thoroughly intertwined with matters methodological and theoretical, in a globalist convergence of historicity, heritage, tourist industry, and archaeological epistemology! And, it should be noted, attending to such intimate association was quite simply taboo only twenty five years ago.
In this new negotiation of dualistic relationships, symmetrical archaeology is not a new kind of archaeology. It is not a new theory. It is not another borrowed methodology. Less about critique of archaeology, symmetry simply summarizes what I see as fruitful angles on these archaeological relationships between past and present, people and things, biology and culture, individual and culture.
Symmetrical archaeology is an attitude.
Symmetry draws attention to mutual arrangement and relationship. Symmetry, in this mutuality, implies an attitude, that we should apply the same measures and values to ourselves as to what we are interested in. A consonance of past and present, individual and structure, person and artifact, biological form and cultural value, symmetry is about relationships.
There are four components to this attitude: process, creativity, mediation, and distribution. I suggest these four components are quite counter-intuitive, at least to our conventional archaeological imagination.
As I said above, "A successful account of the past is not so much a measure of accordance between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal and social achievement."
Archaeologists, under this attitude and understanding, do not discover the past. Archaeologists work on what is left of the past. And this process, of course, is something that takes us far beyond the academic discipline and profession. An archaeological sensibility of attending to traces and remains is one that unites the discipline and profession with memory and many practices and cultures of collection.
Archaeology is a process of mutual self-constitution, under this attitude. Working on the past makes us who we are.
This is a dynamic process because there is no resolution; it just keeps on going. The process is iterative.
And there is thus a profound connection with design and making, with material culture studies. In this dynamic and mutual self-constitution of past and present, human and artifact, making things makes people.
Symmetrical here also holds that we are not essentially different to those people and those remains we study. We are all bound up in different kinds of relationship with the materiality of the world, whether working to make artifacts, ourselves, or to forge narratives out of memory artifacts. There is a continuity between the processes of making that archaeologists study, and the archaeological process of working upon remains of the past.
This symmetrical archaeological process is profoundly creative. The past is not a datum but an achievement. The past is the outcome of processes of uncovering and articulation, forging connections with and through the remains. The past is constantly being recreated because the past is a process, a trajectory, a genealogical relationship with present and future. This is simply to acknowledge that the past may only be revealed with hindsight, and that the past is not wholly encompassed by date, but flows and percolates through contemporary and future presence and effect. Such a creative process in no way compromises the ontology of the past - that it did happen. The creative and created past rather requires two connected acknowledgements. That the past did not end at some point, and that the past is what it was through connections that take the inquiring archaeologist beyond the confines of any particular and local context, into an anthropological and historical field of comparative examples and connections.
The past, in this attitude, is thus resource as much as source. Again, archaeologists do not discover the past, but treat the remains as a resource in their own creative (re)production or representation. And, as with any field of resources, this creative process of making the past what it is has its own politics. The politics of access and agency, of who is allowed to make what past and under what conditions.
The creative process of working upon what is left of the past is one of translation and mediation, of metamorphosis, of turning the remains into something else. The archaeological site and its finds become text or image, account or catalogue, recombined into a museum exhibition, revised into the narrative of a synthetic text book or TV program, reworked into the rhetoric of a lecture course for an archaeological program.
It has long been recognized that publication is an essential component of the archaeological project, simply because the future of archaeology, of the past, is impossible, inconceivable, without the past being "recorded". Here, in a symmetrical attitude, this translation into medium is recognized as dynamic process. With "the past" existing in its re-presentation. With text being the process of inscription. With medium being the process of mediation.
And again, this directs attention to the politics of such processes. Representation is simultaneously inscription, witnessing and speaking for the past, in its absence, in circumstances of evaluation and judgment, connecting past event with contemporary understanding. Archaeology is a representative act, as much as the political representative speaks for their constituency.
And, as processes of making, our attention is directed to the material practices of reference, representation, and mobilization - how the site and its artifacts are transported into new and diverse environments, connections and ecologies that are not of the "original" context of the site and artifacts, yet which nevertheless allow that site and artifacts to be recognized, potentially, for what they were.
The recontextualization, the remediation of archaeological remains, which is the basis of their very recognition as the past, brings me to the fourth component of the symmetrical attitude. That the creative process of mediation is about connection and relations.
The past becomes what it is through a trajectory of connections that take it far from its temporal origin in the chronometric past of dated location. The past is not to be seen as a datum under this symmetrical attitude, but as a network of relationships that continually reconstitute the past itself. This is just like memory. Memory is best conceived as memory work which only gains significance through recollection, the act of connecting memory trace with something now that prompts the reinsertion of that memory into our contemporary understanding, as we reevaluate the significance of the past in the light of what is happening to us now, and so come to retell the past in a new way.
It is not only contextual archaeology that has recognized that understanding is contingent upon relationship, putting things in context. Consider the different contexts of connections involved in this symmetrical archaeology - trajectories from past through present that constitute a megalithic monument as what it is, the work of mediation that turns the site into another artifact of quite a different order even, yet mobilizes that very monument in real debates about the way prehistory happened. This symmetrical attitude implies a relational perspective that deals in networks and systems of distributed phenomena, heterogeneous networks, in the term coined by sociologist of technology John Law, cultural ecologies that make a mockery of our accepted disciplines.
Symmetrical archaeology is not new discovery. It is not another "ism" for archaeologists to mimic. Its attitude, as I have briefly sketched it, has a distinctive and long genealogy. It is important to connect the symmetrical with a tradition of thinking that has made much of the four components of the symmetrical attitude. That this is an intellectual genealogy implies that there is continuity and connection without implying necessary identity or sameness.
So, behind the symmetrical, we can trace a Heideggerian line of interest in process rather than "being" that involves the likes of the pre-Socratic Herakleitos ("you can never put your hand into the same river twice"). Hegel's philosophy of internal relations, particularly as received by the early Marx, is another vital constituting moment (and see Randy McGuire's fine archaeological reception of this tradition). Nietzsche's own genealogical thinking, of course, is familiar, not least through Foucault's history of discourse. The deep and fundamental questioning of essentialist meaning by various western Marxists like Adorno and Benjamin is another familial connection. Bataille's anthropological interest in transgressive experience can be cited, as well as the deconstructive, Derridean focus upon systems of difference.
I have already mentioned much recent work in science studies (after Kuhn) as contributing to this attitude; Latour is to be mentioned here. Then there is a prominent school of sociology and history of technology produced by the likes of Thomas Hughes, Donald Mackenzie, and Michel Callon. Contemporary fine art sometimes spectacularly and subtly deals in material processes of human self-constitution and technical co-creation, as has been well recognized by Colin Renfrew. And, ironically perhaps in this company, the fundamentals of systems thinking and information science acknowledge, of course, the significance of relational connection and of emergent behavior. This brings me to technoscience and posthumanist thought (in the humanities) - dismantling the essentialist distinctions between humans and machines.
And I do hope also that a symmetrical attitude is recognized in much of post-processual archaeology - from explorations of signification and the meaning of things through to focus upon socio-technical networks, both as in my own work on the Greek city state.
So this is far from being another case of disciplinary borrowing. Symmetry is more a synthetic term that questions the character of disciplinary coherence and suggests some new kinds of cross-disciplinary articulation, some of which we have been pursuing in our Metamedia Lab at Stanford. Perhaps ultimately a symmetrical attitude hinges upon conceptions of historicity - what it is to be an historical agent. For its underlying premise is that historical process is best understood as the outcome of human creativity - a dispersed creativity belonging to collective assemblages that denies the conventional (Cartesian) distinctions between maker and artifact, design and realization, individual and cultural context.