Some notes on archaeological excavation and performance - 1

Archaeological excavation and performance:
adventures in encounters
of different concepts and situations - 1

Writing constitutes ourselves as reflexive beings; but, by the same token, reflection is faster than text and it is always frustrated by it. It is why we are forever unsatisfied with the texts that we write. We are always, in a way, before, after, and beyond the text. The text is our evil, our phantasm. The text is the feminine order that always finds a way to escape our desire (of possession) such as to keep itself as an object of seduction, of a constant call (or demand) for the work of another text. The text announces us the power of possession in order to dispossess us in the immediate moment after, when we smoke a cigarette and we look at the sleeping (dead?) body of our desire, laying on the bed of our life.

“(…) the invention of knowledge, and therefore its ability to make someone to know, is also what turns it into caducity.”
Jean Allouch
"Freud, Et Puis Lacan", Paris, E.P.E.L, 1993, p. 15.

I have read somewhere when I was young a story about someone who had broken a reality into pieces, to know it better, to unveil its hidden structure, and after doing that he was never able again to rebuild it back to its former disposition. Like the criminal who wants to get rid of the corpse and cuts it into parts, but does not find a way of inserting them all conveniently into a box; there is always some troubling piece of it, or remain, that tends to get out of the box and unmask the assassin, making impossible for him to close, to conceal completely his secret (his guilt) inside that locked box.
As the criminal, to solve our explanation problems we have divided reality into fields (sub-problems that we try to dominate, that we fantasize as our property), into disciplines, and now we see clearly how that obsessive regime of specialization trapped us in impotence. We transport a dead body that is getting out of the luggage by pieces left along the way.
How can we go deeper than a simple play of metaphors (the use, or transplant, of a concept born in a certain field to another one) in order to enrich knowledge, that is, our comprehension of the human being? How can we make a certain “tabula rasa” of acquired knowledge, embedded in the very language that we use, to discover new continents from a different combination of concepts? How can we formulate concepts and arguments to map and to travel in new environments? Is it still possible? I argue that it is, and that we never have had at our disposal so many instruments to do so. The problem is only a question of access to the means of production: not so much money, but mainly time free, and free availability of other’s thoughts to our own judgment (through publications, but also through dialogue and team work).

Why should performance and archaeology be two good fields to be melted, not to say meshed, together? Because the interferences and interceptions of both of them are not only suggestive (metaphorical, so to speak), but pregnant of new fields of study, of new ways of making a cartography of problems that attract our attention today. It is a question of displacement: taking steps into some crossroads, perhaps we may find new paths and invent new landscapes.
One of the few authors that has written interestingly about this crossing of different disciplines is Michael Shanks. To simplify my work, I will take as a basis here his short introductory text called “Towards an archaeology of performance” presented in 2002 to a session of the SAA Meetings, USA (http://traumwerk.standford.edu/archaeology-performance/Arch_HomeFS.html).

As performance, archaeological excavation is site specific by nature. No site (or part of it) or territory is, in its features, a repetition of any other one, no action taken in a particular site is ever similar to previous or to future interventions in the same place. Temporality is also critical, in the sense that an interesting excavation or performance is always deployed in time, and unpredictable in its most interesting effects. In excavation as in performance, there is not a previous idea of what is exactly going to happen: improvisation is at the heart of both, although the modes and frames of that improvisation may vary a lot.
An excavation and a performance are ceremonial, precisely because they never repeat themselves, they are unique experiences; therefore they are based in a concentration of attention, of people, of shared intentions, following a certain number of implicit rules, and occurring inside a certain break in time and space, in which people cut from common life to focus on a collective meaningful situation. Both imply and at the same time enact a certain kind of shared references, and they institute a certain number of statuses, even though these are ephemeral. But even being contingent, the succession of acts and tasks need, in a certain way, to be accepted by a community, and in these sense both field archaeology and performance are ritualized actions.
Actually, in common they have the shared intention of unfolding something, they desire to bring forth certain realities, to be instaurators of an “order” or “meaning” (or sets of meanings) that would not exist without them. Indeed in an excavation, ritual applies more to the excavators themselves (inside and outside the working field) than to the excavated; of course, any dig is a “theatre” of permanent negotiations of power, but it creates an environment, an “isolat” or “social island” that tends to function in the logic of an “expedition into the wild”, even if it occurs inside the urban space.
There is always in archaeology a side of passion (concentred in time and space and involving emotional people, not “digging machines”) and in every archaeologist a certain kind of frustrated Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is the repressed side of archaeology, that which needs to be constantly denied in the name of academy, rigor, and seriousness. This is also very important to understand why archaeologists try constantly perform variously, adapting to a great diversity of publics, from their serious scientific colleagues, and sponsors (money is a sacred matter indeed), to children, layman and tourists searching for excitement and fantasy. Each occasion forces us to perform accordingly to what we figure out to be the expectations of our interlocutors. Mostly what we want is they attention and their help, if possible, to keep doing what give us pleasure: as simple (and as complicated) as that!
From that standpoint, every archaeologist needs to be a good actor (in the common sense of the word) or he/she will not survive as a “professional” or will be dismissed into a subaltern position in the system. By the way, there is a certain schizophrenia in this constant changing from a face of scientist to a figure of an adventurer.
It is this surplus of excitement in the changing of masks that we find constantly in an excavation between, for instance, the day and the night, between the moments of work and of relax, and indeed it is the great reason for a tendency in a field season to drink as much as possible and to sleep as little as possible. Or to read as much as possible (my option) and to meet interesting people in a situation of “psychological availability” that is unique in the course of my yearly activities.
Times of rest and isolation (in weekends) in an excavation are moments of “recharge” of batteries so indispensable to the archaeologist as the retirement of the actor from the scene (from its excessive exposition and discipline) in order to pursue the “spectacle” in the weeks to come. Indeed, any excavation is a public exposure where the actions taken in that stage have all the characteristics of “artifice” and “truth”, of spontaneity and elaboration that simultaneously reproduce and transform our daily life as acting agents in the rest of the year.
Those who are not archaeologists or who have never been in an excavation as amateurs or volunteers, are definitively “out” of the experience that I have just alluded to. In this respect, we could say that a big issue of today, as of any other epoch and situation, is the ability or situation of being “in” versus being “out”, of feeling included/excluded in a group of shared experiences.
These systems of inclusion/exclusion are very subtle and belong to the sphere of that huge parcel of reality that is not object of the explicit, the social visible (be it a “law” or a mere rule), but of the emotions, interactions and expressions “institutionalized” in the unconscious and “embodied” since the first moments of our biographic life. This is why, in spite of all criticisms made to psychoanalysis (criticisms made easy by the vary diversity of ways of thought that claim to be the “good” heritage of Freud), its inspiration is still not only alive but indispensable, as one of the great epistemological revolutions of our time (as it is feminism, for instance). Thinking outside (ignoring, if that is possible in any cultivated person) these “forces” or “influential fields” is, probably, to reduce drastically our comprehension of the human, as it would be to ignore Marx, Durkheim, Mauss, Bourdieu, or any other great thinker. The work that they have produced is always our point of departure, or lane to try to reach new targets.
In performance and in archaeological excavation, can we say that “the medium is the message”? In rigor, no. Because there is no medium and there is no message. It is the very “acting out” of social actors – as Shanks underlines - that create them as such. Under that perspective, a dancer is made by her/his ability to dance, and that ability to dance is the outcome of a long training, that allows the body of the dancer (his entire person) to go beyond what others have made before. But the very motivation for that training would be unthinkable outside a context, an environment that stimulates and gives value (even if implicitly) to that activity of “getting out of the soil”, in order to use the “body” as an expressive “tool” of feelings, ideas, unexpressible things by another way. So, there is no “implicit meaning” in the act, something that would precede the act itself, and that would persist or prevail (as fixed “heritage”) after the act itself. Performance is the art if the unrepeatable; such as an archaeological excavation.
Everything that remains for the future are recordings, i. e., something of a different order of the act /action itself; and recordings in archaeological practice are really fundamental as part of an accepted scientific protocol. Recordings of every kind are the only thing that in theory allows us to judge the quality and accuracy of the observations of other colleagues. But a theory of what should be recorded and conserved/published is difficult, not so say impossible, because each kind of archaeological situation, according to a plan and an improvisation, would demand a particular kind of record, instead of the mystification that reigns in this domain.
Actually, even very accurate and well chose, any recordings are always incomplete vis-à-vis the total experience that an excavation is. And yet… what do we mean by “incomplete” and “total”? What kind of nostalgia inhabits us that makes us feel the gaps more important than the rest, the remain, the record, more important than the act itself? Why are we always longing for something that resists time and contingence, something that may remember and commemorate the very unique celebration? Why are we always waiting for the presentation instead of representation? In the heart of this feeling lies our feeling of death, death of any sense, death of god, and of a stabilised symbolic order. A metaphysics of the invisible supported by the fantasy, the lack that Lacan refers to.
That lack ultimately is the impossible relation of the subject to the object-cause of its desire. To quote Zizek, “what the fantasy stages in not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such.” (S. Zizek, “Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture”, Cambridge/Mass., London, The MIT Press, 1992, p. 6).
So, in performance and in archaeological excavation we pursue an impossibility; but it is this very impossibility (going, or ascending, from representation to presentation, from the present to the totality of time/space, that is, for the heart of the Being) that keep us in action, that maintains the pursuit, the pulse of life. We can not escape that experience of search (of illusion) and of nostalgia (disillusion, disenchantment).
Shanks is right (op. cit, p. 2) when he writes that “performativity challenges a representational fallacy (…) – that what we are studying are representations of some other “essencial” reality (social, cultural, whatever). That the patterning in the archaeological record somehow “represents” a past society.”
Yes, indeed. But performance itself also works on this same metaphysics of representation. Only, it has replaced the text (the dramatic text written by an author, a playwright, the core of the meaning, that the actor was supposed to incarnate) by the action of the performer, that is, by something which, being “produced” at the moment, is not trivial, and calls attention to an absence: to the presence of the absence of meaning. What the performance performs is the dissolution of a pre-existent order (or text, or truth, or whatever), the presence of the lack. And, in doing so, the performance is still in a metaphysics of absence, it performs the nostalgia of the subject abandoned forever to its “divinity”, i. e. to the absence of any stabilised order above him/her. He tacitly repeats the words of Christ in cross (possibly, the symbolic apex of our Western Christian culture): “Father, why did you abandoned me?” That is, Truth, the real, the object of my desire, the ultimate “explanation” that lies at the secret bottom of all my questions, why I am not able to reach it? The same with the archaeologist in his/her Sysiphus kind of complain: “Past, why did you abandoned me?” Performance, in its insane desire to return to ritual, to contact with something hidden, to tie the visible and corporeal to the invisible and incorporeal, is a metaphysical statement in act: by myself, in my body, I will reach the expression of my soul, and that expression I will attain the soul of the others, i.e., something common to all attending and participating. The delirious, ecstatic side of any performance is more than obvious: even when trying to chock, it is always a reiteration of the sacred under the form of the performer’s movement and action in space.
The underpinned nostalgia of a primitiveness, so frequent in modern and post-modern art, but also in the public quest for the past, for rituals, for moments of ecstasy, the development of many diversified “New Age” sort of movements are signals or symptoms of the same. It is the well known quest for the pure, the original, the edenic, the healthier, the holier, the healing action/situation/attitude.
It is a nostalgia of presentation, i.e., the teophany of the model, of the sacred, of the absolute, versus the representation, i.e., repetition, image, mimesis, simulacrum. This theophany is not transcendent, but immanent: we are longing for it in every simple thing. We look at the objects, but the gaze results from the way they ”look” at us (see Peter Schwenger, “The Tears of Things. Melancholy and Physical Objects”, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, and Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire”- Livre XI, Paris, du Seuil, 1973, esp. chapter IX: “Qu’est-ce qu’un tableau?”, etc.)

(to follow)






Photos: Ernesto Timor
Web page: http://www.ernestotimor.com/pages/_01_unfixed00.html