Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies: Moving from Seeing to Knowing to Being

       Our class last Tuesday marked an auspicious occasion: the first time in Global Rhetorics where I felt as though I had grappled with complex concepts, made meaning, and moved to a place of greater understanding. This is in no small part due to the time and work we put into preparing our second exploratory. The out-of-the-box assignment allowed my group to practice what Bernard Steigler refers to as “grammatization,” where human behaviors are formalized through writing and using technology, and the process of articulating these behaviors pushes us into productive places of discomfort.

Of our group members, I have the most interest in digital humanities and technologies and so offered to build our webtext proposal. In doing so, negotiating between what I envisioned and what I had the time and capacity to do, my ideas of digital reconstruction, rhetorical restraint, and manifest manners were challenged. Our class discussion continued along this thread to challenge my own view on how we look at artifacts, how we construct knowledge, and how we conceive being. In our proposal, the critical concept we latched on to was the idea of “rhetorical restraint” where Gries argues, “we must practice self-restraint in assigning rhetorical meaning to those rhetorical acts, which have yet revealed to us their original intentions and effects” (92).

In our own virtual representation of the Moche burial site, we hoped that viewers would practice what Richard Lanham refers to as “oscillatio,” moving from looking at to looking through, in a manner that illuminated the challenges of speaking for artifacts from another time and culture. Juxtaposing our virtual representation of the tombs at the height of the Moche civilization with the fragmented remains recovered by archaeological study was intended to facilitate rhetorical restraint—we may make claims about the purpose of these objects, the ways they enable concealment, duality, and inversion—but our suppositions are based on tenuous evidence and not entirely devoid of “Orientalist logic.”

The crux of this discussion for me centered in our discussion of agency, particularly the agency of artifacts. Although I had heard of object-oriented ontology before, I had always assumed that agency was an innately human quality. Gries’ claim, then, that “cultural artifacts speak through visual display and act rhetorically as they emphasize some meanings even as they diminish or conceal others” was foreign to me (108). She positions herself in a position of conflict between the need to observe, interpret, and make meaning and the desire to let objects speak for themselves. Rhetorical hermeneutics isn’t necessarily another form of colonization, but it ought to be tempered. An archaeological view (from my understanding) is one that recovers artifacts and attempts to reconstruct meaning—knowledge here functions as something that can be found or created. Crafting our proposal and presenting it in class led me to think more carefully on the assumptions I had as to the nature of knowledge. I’ve come to see that knowing and being are closely connected; in the case of the artifacts recovered from the Moche burial site at Sipan, knowledge is conveyed through materiality and presence.

Viewing being as a means of knowing ultimately influenced our proposal; we wanted to foreground the materiality of the reconstruction, in spite of its digital presence. To do this, we attempted to recreate Bolter and Grusin’s idea of hypermediacy, where an abundance of media in a variety of modes is presented to engender a sense of satiety and reality. What I’m still working through is what a consideration of the agency of artifacts does to my understanding of historiography.