THE ILLUSION OF IMMATERIALITY: TOWARDS A POSTHUMAN VIEW ON MATERIAL ABSENCE ANDDIGITAL PRESENCE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-26

In this paper I want to explore different avenues of how archaeologists can contribute to and learn from theorizing the digital world beyond the traditional functionalistic way of applying computational methods. Firstly this concerns challenging transhumanism as  a-critical acceptance of technological innovations and hybridization of the human-tech being. Even when regarding this a worrying development, the wide-ranging human acceptance and openness to otherness can also be used as a window of opportunity for a better understanding of posthumanism. Analyzing the current ease of embracing the human-digital co-dependencies can create a platform of consideration for posthuman categories in the past and the vibrancy of what is seemingly deemed the ‘immaterial’. In discussing issues of immateriality in the digital present and in the past, I want to use phenomenology of the absent, or dark phenomenology, to help take a more holistic approach to these issues. Dark phenomenology relates to that which we cannot access in human experience, yet affect and shape us, and trying to get access is important to understanding of how we built perceptions of the world. Digital technology could be a very constructive tool in this, for its ability to open up possibilities of non-human experience. I want to explore these ‘dark sides’ through the example of an absent temple in Rome that is made accessible to us through a variety of representations and reconstructions, and show how experimenting with this might change our approach to object/human/divine relations in Roman cults and how we present Roman heritage towards a posthumanism framework. Not because this is considered a more realistic ontology, but because it can give us more insight in representation, how the past is understood and re-interpreted, and how the consequences affected our understanding of the Roman past and its remains.


Author(s): Mol, Eva (Brown University)