Power in a World Without Subjects and Objects
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-05

This paper adopts a relational, assemblage-based approach to the past which seeks to privilege neither object nor subject – rather animals, things, beliefs, plants, and people are placed on a potentially equal footing. Relational approaches have rightly been critiqued for a failure to engage with politics and power. In our own world power is writ large and we ignore it at our peril. Power is a critical political vector with obvious social and historical significance. I argue that all too frequently today power is understood to be exercised by male subjects over a multitude of increasingly powerless objects; objects including things, plants and animals but also women, minorities and the less privileged. Beginning with a flat ontology opens up multiple possibilities for demonstrating alternate ways of being in the world, but, if we fail to engage with power we rob such approaches of their true potential. In this paper I explore how we should conceptualise, understand and engage with power in a theoretical framework that rejects human exceptionalism and the subject:object dualism. 

Rachel Crellin (University of Leicester)