Rethinking Relations: Characterising connections in the light of posthumanism
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-06

From the turn to practice in the 1980s, through concerns with phenomenology and personhood in the 1990s and 2000s, to today’s interest in posthumanism, archaeology has become increasingly interested in relations as a central element of our ontology. Whether discussing Latourian networks, Ingoldian meshworks, or Baradian phenomena, relations, and being relational, are now critical to many of our modes of analysis. In this paper I want to think more about how we describe and discuss these relationships in the light of posthumanist thought. A danger in relational approaches is that the description of relations becomes an end in itself, and we lose sight of the historical processes through which things come into being, subsist and end. We also, I suggest, need to develop a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing different qualities of relationships. To address these issues I will draw principally on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but also from the philosophers that inspired them, including Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oliver Harris (University of Leicester)