Princelet St, Whitechapel

An experimental work in katachresis

Abstract

This work interweaves the archaeology of three rooms from very different historical contexts – the Greek city of Corinth, nineteenthcentury Wales and contemporary London. One aim is to raise questions of how archaeologists construct narratives around the remains of the past and to confront alternative ways of dealing with archaeological empirics. Another aim is to connect archaeology as a discipline with a much broader archaeological theme at the heart of modernity. Themes of power and performativity surface throughout in relation to individual agency and community.

Here is the piece as published in the Journal of Social Archaeology 2004 - JSA-2004.pdf

It is also at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/traumwerk, moving to http://documents.stanford.edu/traumwerk

see also some remarks on archaeology and performance and a theater company and archaeological theory

---

■ INTRODUCTION: ORIGINS

This article has two origins. The first is a project to understand the early Greek city state. In several works (most notably Shanks, 1999), I attempted an archaeological interpretation that began with ceramic design, production and consumption. Outwardly, this took the form of a study of artifact lifecycles. Close up, the study was a contextual archaeology in the sense of a spiral of associations tracked through archaeological material and all sorts of contexts – empirical, spatial, conceptual, metaphorical.

Traditional categories of rank and social class, resources, trade, state formation, urbanization and manufacture I found too connected with longstanding tendencies to emplot archaeological material in standardized metanarratives (here of the expansion of the city state as a component of ancient imperialisms, as well as the cultural florescence of ancient Greece). My interpretive and analytical categories were just too blunt (Shanks and Tilley, 1987). My work suggested that a revitalized archaeology of Graeco- Roman antiquity requires an approach that challenges many of these components of conventional narratives (economy, trade, colonization, acculturation, stylistic expression of ethnic and political identities) and indeed the narratives themselves.

In its early stages, the project worked with a relatively familiar historiography of the early Greek city state (expansion of the polity form explained through structures and discourses related to class cultures) and I presented a systemic model of artifact design. But the material led me into quite a different cultural field of faces, animals and monstrosity, corporeality, potters wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sovereignty, violence, alterity, gender, ships, armor, clothing and much more. Here, arguably, I came up against the limits of any interpretive project – too much is ultimately not open to interpretation, or at least overflows an analytical or interpretive project. Interpretation always risks overly reducing the richness of historical and archaeological detail to structure, plot, account, cause, effect.

Social archaeology is often considered as modeling the past. Some social or cultural process or logic is held to account for – to explain – what is observed in the archaeological record. Interpretation, as another mode of social archaeology, may be conceived as reading though archaeological traces to perceive some deeper understanding of what was going on in the past. Social archaeology may present a model of an ancient economy, or an interpretation of a prehistoric ideology: in both, the empirical traces of the past are, necessarily and indeed appropriately, reduced to a process, subsumed within the model, or seen through, treated as symptoms of some underlying reality. This reduction can be part of what I have called the fallacy of representation or expression (Shanks, 1999: ch. 2). In my work on the Greek city I added to analysis, explanation and interpretation manifestation – letting the material display itself (though this heretical empirics is not merely descriptive, see particularly Shanks, 1999: ch. 3).

This article continues such an exercise in empirics. Along the lines of the historiography of Benjamin (1999) or of Gumbrecht (1997), it attempts to compound its sources, layering them in the presentation rather than redescribing them as a working model, or seeing through them to what may be conceived as really going on. I want to try to hold on to the empirical texture of our archaeological sources. A broad context is therefore the search for a method that is specific to its object (Shanks and Tilley, 1992: 47–9, on this argument in Critical Theory). More generally, I am drawing on an old classical, indeed philological, tradition of source commentary and critique (see Shanks, 1996: ch. 4).

The second origin of this article is a collaboration, now over 10 years old, with an arts company, ‘Brith Gof’, that produces site specific performances. It began with the realization that archaeology and performance share a common problem of documentation – what comes after the event (of performance or of social practice), what is left behind and how this constitutes (or not) a record of the event. Among other things, our collaboration has focused on the character of performance, as part of the recent growth of the disciplinary field of performance studies (Pearson and Shanks, 2001). Performance, ceremony and ritual have, of course, come under close scrutiny in much recent postprocessual or interpretive archaeology and tied to issues of signification, of the embodiment and corporeality of social actors, agency and the constitution of social structure and social norms (consider Barrett, 1994 as an early example). This is a article about how we might work with notions of the performative character of social practice.

Let me now clarify with an indication of the article’s arguments.

■ ARGUMENT – ON PERFORMANCE

My topic is performance and the performative. For me, this raises some vital questions about (social) archaeology. First, because performance is a root metaphor for social and cultural process – for example, in the concept of social actors. Second, because both archaeology and performance share a concern with documentation – for example, the question of the relation of dramatic text to performance, of how performance may be documented, of how an archaeological project may be documented. Third, because archaeology may be conceived itself as performance, one where the remains of the past are mobilized in practices, often conceived as mimetic, of representing or restoring behavior.

The concept of performance is often used to refer to heightened experience, to ceremony, formalized practice and play. It is connected to the liminal, experience at the edge and to identity, questions of who we are. I see less value in going further and ascribing particular attributes to a tightly defined concept of performance. Crucially, for me, performance and the performative are part of a contested cultural field; people do not agree about the word. The uses of concepts like power, community and discourse, also at the heart of this article, are similarly varied and often loaded. Rather than attempt to unpack and define precisely, I prefer to play on the ambiguities and stress the gaps and inconsistencies. For me, this is part of the significance of these concepts – they are essentially contested. Compare the mimetic and the eidetic, in relation to performance and the performative. The former concerns a set of questions about the real and the represented. The second takes the matter further. The eidetic refers, in psychology, to mental imagery that is vivid and persistent, though not memory or afterimage. I 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 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. 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. For me, this is 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. 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 in this article. I focus on textuality (on other modes of representation, see Shanks, 1991 and the work of the Metamedia Lab at Stanford, at: metamedia.Stanford.edu). Rosemary Joyce (Joyce et al., 2002) 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 represented by the collections of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fisher (1986). This article is offered in this context as another experiment in writing about the remains of the past. Specifically it deals with matters of narrative and chronotope, Bakhtinian concepts that Joyce places at the heart of the archaeological project.

■ ARGUMENT – PERFORMANCE AND POWER

The article interweaves materials associated with three rooms. I have approached each with an interest in how people, in these three sites, dealt – performatively and in everyday settings – with matters of identity and agency in the face of institutional structures and powers and changing forms of the cultural imaginary. Since I have given as one origin of this article my interest in the Greek city state, I mention here an argument that we might well look to performative moments as crucial components of those sociocultural changes – the city state is about the way you hold a perfume jar (on such matters in a model of class cultural conflict in the early city state, see Morris, 2000).

■ ARGUMENT – MODERNIST TROPES

This article is about the way that narratives are pursued and constructed and particularly in relation to archaeological themes of time, tradition and the modern world. Each room references mystery and discovery. The room in nineteenth-century Wales belongs with that period of the reworking of an urban-rural and modern-traditional distinction; it foregrounds the supposed mystery of rural tradition and its questioning. The room in London is an explicit trope of modernist detective fiction – the mystery of the locked room (Shanks, 1991: 58). It tells of the making of interiority and self in quotidian existence. The room discovered by archaeologists concerns the shaping of the quotidian past in a comforting form that answers questions of urban origins and civil values, questions interior to notions of Western civilization. In each room, mystery is both created and then resolved in mundane modernity just as it becomes disturbing. Modern distinctions are confirmed even as the interior force of otherness or alterity is acknowledged. The argument is to disrupt this tendency and to open space for other readings and perceptions. (I owe many of these points to an anonymous reviewer for JSA.)

Pencader Station, Carmarthenshire

■ ARGUMENT – EMPIRICAL METHOD

The three rooms are not analogies of one another, though the juxtaposition is not thereby arbitrary. This is a comparative study, but not in the usual sense. The three rooms have in common an archaeological theme such as that I have just described – the remains of something that lingers in different ways and something that may be called the performative. The technique I have used here is one described elsewhere as parataxis and katachresis (Pearson and Shanks, 2001: 25; see also Shanks, 1991: 188–90), a forcible juxtaposition designed to produce frictions. I have not taken an explicitly interpretive strategy of peeling back the layers, digging deep for significance. Rather, layer is piled on layer so that the weight will create metamorphosis or decomposition, as the pieces grind at each other, as catalysts (words, themes, images, metaphors, whatever) take effect and amalgams or connections emerge, where there probably should be none. So my aim is not primarily an epistemological one of establishing knowledge of these three rooms and their associated people and events. I am not developing a model of the archaic Greek sanctuary, or of nineteenth-century medical science, or of postmodern London, or of something between. The aim is more an ontological one of making manifest some of the features of these conglomerations of people, things and events. I see this as potentially complementary to the explanatory and interpretive strategies of a social archaeology. This rhizomatic method is outlined in the methodological chapter of my book on the Greek city state (1999).

■ A BEDROOM

It is a room 12 ft by 8 ft, at one end of the thatched farmhouse of Lletherneuadd-uchaf, in the parish of Llanfihangel-ar-arth, near Llandysul in west Wales. At the other end is a cow house. In the middle, a large kitchen, with dairy to the back. The windows in the thick stone walls are typically small, the interior dark.

A girl is lying on a bed which faces a fireplace, well-stocked bookshelves above, a corner cupboard, wardrobe and another bed to the left. A linen press partly screens the girl from the window. The floor is hardened clay. No fire has been set in the grate for nearly 18 months and the room is damp. It is March 1869.

The Rev W. Thomas MA and Mr John Jones, solicitor, of Llandysul, are visiting. This is how they describe the girl: ‘She had a silk shawl, a victorine round her neck, a small crucifix attached to a necklace and little ribbons (one blue on the right) above the wrists. She was lying on her back ...