Can we rely on materialities, objects or humans in archaeological analyses? What should our basic categories of analysis be? What do the humans and non-humans share that make them create a network? Symmetrical archaeology suggests that we should not give primacy to the human while we study archaeological remains. To this I agree (Normark 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2006a, 2006b). However, there is still the problem of defining entities; human or non-human alike. When we define entities, we take them out of their own becoming and we make them static. Humanocentric archaeologists believe that the events of the past are gone and that the materialities persist (see for example Olivier 2004). This is true to some extent, but is a broken vessel the same object as when it was a complete vessel? What is it that lasts? Clearly not the physical and chemical characteristics of materiality. The crucial but simple question for polyagentive archaeology is: what existed in relation to the past vessel before it broke into sherds, which also exist in the present sherds? In short; what can differentiate from within and still be a unity without adding an external transcendental quasi-object such as culture or practice or an essential form? We need to raise the level of abstraction and elaborate upon the idea of an ontology of virtuality (Bergson 1998, 2001, 2004; Deleuze 1991, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Grosz 1999, 2004, 2005; Pearson 1999, 2002).
Ontology concerns the entities that is believed to exist and that populate reality. DeLanda classifies the ontologies into three main groups. Some believe that there is no reality beyond the human mind (“idealism”). Others believe that the objects we observe do exist beyond us but they are sceptical to the idea that theories are independent from social constructions. A third group believes that there is a world completely independent from the human mind. The two first perspectives deal with phenomena (the way things appear in our mind), and the latter also discuss nuomena (the things in themselves). This latter ontology is a realist ontology to which Deleuze belongs (DeLanda 2000a, 2000b). However, Deleuze does not believe in essences or transcendental entities like the “naïve realists” do (DeLanda 2000b:1).
Deleuze/DeLanda creates a flat ontology in which the ontological differences are reduced to an ontology concerning emergent property. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts which makes it impossible to reduce the whole to the parts. By this is meant that the human being cannot be reduced to biology, biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, chemistry cannot be reduced to physics and physics cannot be reduced to mathematics. Deleuze flattens all the distinctions above into a virtual plane of consistency/immanence in which there is no opposition. The plane of immanence is pure immanence. Therefore, it has no substantial division, it is immanent only to itself. Immanence is substance itself. This also means that the mind is not separated from the bodily substance. The plane of immanence is a formless self-organizing process that diverges from itself and, on top of this plane, a rhizomatic network is formed (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:266).
A concept used in research should not be an empty form that needs to be filled with some transcendent content, such as a predefined quasi-object like the “Classic period Maya culture” that is filled with Long Count calendars, ballcourts, pyramids, stelae, etc. The lack of these entities would become an anomaly in humanocentric archaeology. The concepts should rather be affected by other concepts, bodies, etc. There is no need for transcendent concepts that explains what is beyond the immediate. This is because immanence is not just within, but also upon and of. A building is not just within a larger polyagentive network, it is formed from the network. A building functions and operates upon and through the network (DeLanda 2000b).

Bergson
Since a substantial portion of Deleuze’s early writings was inspired by Bergson, another philosopher focusing on immanence. I shall briefly describe Bergson’s key concepts of actual and virtual multiplicities.
Actual multiplicities are for example numbers, words and matter or anything that can be seen as a quantity that can be counted, added and divided because it is, in fact, juxtaposed in a homogenous medium (space). These are all differences of degree of an assumed essence. In this sense, time and space have been seen as different degrees of the same thing, space in one end and time at the other end. Time has become spatialized, in that it can be compared to space as its dialectic opposite (Bergson 2000). This is how philosophy and science have seen things, as differences of degree, as actuals (Bergson 1998). Bergson and his followers, argue that this is not the reality of the world. The world does not consist of static entities, the world is changing, it is becoming and this process cannot be reduced to anything static, such as numbers, words, entities or matter. If we go from the static to the moving, then we generate a cinematographic view of the world in which static frames follow each others, like periods follow each others in chronological tables. Time cannot be divided like space; it is a duration, a virtuality that differs in kind. The virtual multiplicity can be likened to the colours of a rainbow. We see that there are many colours, but they glide into one another. If we try to define the colours, we actualise them and make them static and spatial (Bergson 2004). Thus, duration is continuous but our mind makes it discontinuous, projected into space.
Now, following Bergson’s reworking of Darwin’s ideas, he points out two tendencies of consciousness. One is intelligence and the other is instinct. Intelligence has not evolved out of instinct; they are rather different tendencies of the same need to manipulate matter. Intelligence does this by externalising itself out of duration, to spatialize the world and time, to be able to find those actualizations from where it can analyse, calculate, and even to communicate through signs and language. Instinct, on the other hand, follows duration, and is well more adapted to an understanding of life, but it will never seek it (Bergson 1998). From this comes the argument that what we see and analyse are just statics, actualizations of the virtual. Our own language inhibits us from understanding the becoming of the world. The virtual is continuous, but the actualizations we describe are not, they are just representations.
So, when we for example study a transcendent quasi-object, such as “ethnicity”, we use actualizations, such as dress in iconography and language affiliations in hieroglyphs and view them as differences of degree of an essential ethnicity, add them with other actualizations, “cultural markers” such as ceramic sherds or architecture, that we think are of another degree, but still of the same kind (ethnicity), to be able to get the “big picture”. We will never succeed in this endeavour. We cannot set fragments together and believe we know the totality. The attempt to find the continuity in the actualizations, such as ceramic sherds, hieroglyphs, iconographic elements, etc, will fail to see that there is no continuity there. Therefore, we have added something external, a quasi-object, such as “Maya culture”, that frames our investigations and we believe that this quasi-object is continuous or eternal. However, the continuity comes from within the virtual, but we will never reach it empirically. This was also the case for the past human agents and this opens up for a way to study virtual ideology, in which conflicting views of the world come from our different constructions of the actualizations, based on an ontology of virtuality. Since we are stuck with these actualizations that affect us in several ways, we should focus upon these and not claim any continuity between them. However, what they do have is a capability to affect their surroundings in networks of actuals. This capability has been labelled polyagency by me (Normark 2004a, 2004c, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, in preparation).
Have virtuality and polyagency replaced the quasi-objects, and become yet other quasi-objects? One might well think so. Virtuality is something invisible to the human intellect who only understands solids and beings. Polyagency is shared among the actuals (polyagents). However, this sharing is either immanent (the virtual) or in-between (polyagency), and never truly external or transcendent. Virtuality already exists in relation to anything material or intangible. It is what lies beyond the human condition. We can only see traces of it as actual multiplicities, as polyagents. Polyagency is in-between the actual and the virtual; this has no social significance and therefore it is not a quasi-object. It is important that virtuality is not understood as the least common denominator from where we can reconstruct everything else. Thus, it does not aspire to be like Pickering’s (1995) “mangle”; a theory of everything. We cannot say anything about social organisation, political history, or cosmology from a pure polyagentive approach. However, being a complex ontology of ontologies (Aijmer 2001), it may be useful to integrate “human agents” or other analytical levels for those who prefer that, with Turner’s (1994) critique of quasi-objects in mind.
Deleuze
DeLanda (2002) has made a list of 7 main components in the ontology of Deleuze. Bergson’s ideas, which also are part of the polyagentive approach can be fitted into (1), (6) and (7). The first (1) component is the abstract intensive spatium where intensities become organized. It is a virtual continuum of multiplicities in a non-metric (non-Eucledian) space. This is also the machinic phylum, the body without organs, and the plane of immanence in some of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts.
After this follows four components that partly relate to the concept of polyagency (which lies in-between the virtual and the actual). However, polyagency primarily relates to the interaction between actual (spatial) entities, such as the interaction between a human agent and an artefact. From an archaeological perspective, the polyagentive processes that affect entities are similar to those that form the entities from a pure physical perspective. The process needs to be actualized, made into a detectable trace for the archaeologist.
The following components of Deleuze’s ontology are part of the physical processes and do not exactly correspond with polyagency. The components are; (2) Intensities that form multiplicities and individuations. This is the becoming of the world; (3) A line of flight that creates a communication between the virtual multiplicities; (4) Linkages and movements form a system or a network; (5) A self-organizing formation of spatio-temporal dynamism by singularities (the intensive). The intensive processes are followed by; (6) The differentiation of the intensive into qualities and extensions (actual multiplicities/polyagents) or the geometrical/measurable (Eucledian) world we perceive; (7) Centres of envelopment, such as codes, which creates differences between the organic and the nonorganic. This is the fluid and monistic frame for how matter and materiality emerge.
In order to understand the decentralized human being in a posthuman approach, I believe it is still useful to partly maintain different non-hierarchical ontologies from a constructionist perspective that may have been relevant to the past human agents (Aijmer 2001). These constructions derive from actualizations, but they are all joined in a rhizomatic network that unites different multiplicities that can be interpreted from different ontologies. However, from the pure polyagentive ontological perspective, a flat ontology of virtuality is of basic concern.
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