Will the real materialisms please step forward?

Abstract

New Materialisms, as we learn from Govier and Steel, bear but a peripheral resemblance to what readers find in the article, Archaeology and the New Materialisms (henceforth “ArchaNeMs”). If one remains convinced that ontologies in the style of Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism or, as the authors champion, Karen Barad’s agential realism are the only materialisms worthy of this label (Cipolla, 2018: 66n2; Govier, 2019; Harris and Cipolla, 2017: 191n74), then they are not mistaken in this assertion. As Govier and Steel suggest, there is much to these materialisms for archaeologists to contemplate. The compelling and sophisticated ontologies of Bennett and Barad admirably bid farewell to half-hearted renderings of the material world as “a recalcitrant context for human action” (Bennett, 2010: 111) and shatter the flagrant dualism of a passive, inert matter and an active, creative human mind. However, by subscribing to a heterogeneous world of ceaselessly quivering material configurations traversing one matter-energy (Bennett, 2010) or a dynamic relational ontology rooted in performatively intra-active phenomena (Barad, 2007), such ontologies appeal to a reductive hierarchy of existence that leaves little room for things as autonomous entities. It was in seeking an alternative to these New Materialisms that ArchaNeMs was written. For Barad, autonomous objects are but evanescent materializations caught up in an unceasing flow of relations (2007: 150). Things, therefore, are dismissed as merely derivative. This philosophical precept leads Govier and Steel to dedicate a large portion of their article to debunking things, the building blocks for ArchaNeMs, on the grounds that they are illegitimate pretenders to the title of New Materialisms. Indeed, by framing things as second-order entities the authors are, as a perfunctory matter, able to maneuver ruined aqueducts or abandoned herring factories wholesale into Barad’s critique of “thingification,” where such things “do not preexist,” but are “agentially enacted” (Ibid.). Yet, it is against such default taxonomic tendencies that ArchaNeMs grants such ruins dignity as autonomous