I got sent this too. It's relevant if you're thinking about theory of Classics.

Hope everyone had a fun summer.

/Alun

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephanie Koerner [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 24 September 2003 18:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: tag 03 session inviation 


Dear Alun Salt, 

If you are planning to go to TAG 03 in Lampeter (17-19 December), 
would you be so kind as to consider taking part in the session on 
time described below. Among other things we hope to reopen 
some issues posed by archaeological discussions of time several 
years ago - in light of subsequent developments, and to consider 
implications for such theoretical and methodological questions as: 

- What enables us to isolate the unities (epistemic entities) with 
which our research deals? 
- How do we decide on appropriate analytic scales, or attribute 
causality to successive events?  
- Can we investigate historical thresholds, ruptures, and 
transformations without resorting to meta-narratives concerning 
social progress or notions of teleological purpose in general?  

I look forward to hearing from you and being in touch about the 
session and related projects.  

With all best regards, Stephanie

Time, Ethics, and the Historicity of Human Life-worlds

Organizers:
Andrew Gardner (Institute of Archaeology, UCL, 
{ HYPERLINK mailto:[log in to unmask] [log in to unmask])
Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester; 
[log in to unmask])

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" ([1940] 1992), Walter 
Benjamin argued for change in relations between academia and 
human affairs centering on critiques of historical meta-narratives, 
which render invisible violence done to the variability of human 
conditions of possibility. In Benjamin's ([1940] 1992: 252-253) view, 
the most difficult challenge was the notion of homogeneous empty 
time. There are good reasons to hold this view. This notion is 
crucial for (a) the equation of reality with epistemic necessity, (b) 
dualist paradigms for socio-cultural change, and (c) the division of 
all spatio-temporal scales between categories that conform with its 
modes of dichotomising universals and particulars. In these 
connections, it underwrites, for instance, (a) the reduction of 
cultural variability to imaginary measures of evolutionary progress, 
(b) a number of problematical current core-periphery models of 
globalization, and (c) the reduction of human agency to images of 
"timeless, featureless, interchangeable and atomistic individuals, 
untethered to time or space" (cf. Gero 2000: 38).  

Time is a fundamental ontic construct. Ontologies concern 'being', 
how the sorts of things that exist came to be, and why these rather 
than other sorts of things exist. Since antiquity, the most influential 
ontologies have stretched between two opposing poles, with 
absolute unity and permanence on one side, and disunity (pure 
flux) on the other. Questions about change (in particular, historical 
change) are rendered problematical by this dichotomy. The most 
influential approach has been that put forward by Aristotle [384-322 
BC] in the Metaphysics ([1908] 1960), which centers on the 
question: If something can be said to be subject to change, what is 
the essence of that something?  He offered three alternative 
answers: (1) the unchanging aspect, (2) the changing aspect, and 
(3) both, that is, the interaction of changing and unchanging 
aspects. In essentialist ontologies the important answer is (1), and 
the others have to be reducible to it.

Focusing on the unchanging essence of things leads to the 
disregard of questions about how things come into being, and the 
reduction of ontology's task to classification. It means that 
ontology is supposed to focus on questions like: What (underlying 
substances) makes particular items what they are? What 
distinguishes them from one another? What timeless substances 
distinguish different categories of entities?  It demands that 
answers to these questions add up to universally valid 
generalizations about the range of categories in terms of which all 
things existing at all times can be classified (McGuire and 
Tushanska 2001: 45-47). And it demands the division of all spatial 
and temporal scales into categories that conform with its modes of 
dichotomising universals and particulars.  

These modes of reasoning have underwritten the most influential 
19th and 20th century theories about the conditions of historical 
(and archaeological) knowledge and related paradigms for human 
agency and historical change. In these connections they impact 
upon an extraordinary range of approaches to the question: 'If 
agency is important for understanding particular human activities, 
must it be included explanations of long-term socio-cultural 
change?'. 

In the 1980's archaeologists began to engage in discussions of the 
relevance of contemporary social constructionist perspectives on 
time to the field. Since then an extraordinary range of changes 
have taken place, for instance, in (a) approaches to the conditions 
of archaeological knowledge; (b) the use of analogy; (c) the 
impacts of practice on theory; (d) interpretive categories relating, 
especially, to the critique of subject-object, nature-culture, 
individual-society, mind-body, Western-Non-Western, science-
values, epistemology-ontology; (e) spatial and temporal analytic 
scales; (f) human agency and historical processes; (g) the status 
of ethics in archaeological epistemic and ontic premises; and (h) 
the public roles of archaeology (Koerner 2003).  Importantly, there 
is now considerable agreement that archaeological treatments of 
time are not simply an academic matter, but pose complex 
sociopolitical and ethical issues.  Perhaps not surprisingly a 
number of researchers have taken up serious discussion of the 
fields relevance to the challenges the critique of meta-narrative face 
in an 'age of globalization'. 

This session aims to provide a context for reopening discussion of 
approaches to time in light of the above mentioned (and other 
suggested) developments and issues. It may provide a context for 
re-evaluating archaeology's commitment to exploiting 'time-depth' 
by exploring the range of 'times' humans construct, and the social, 
political and ethical implications of their use. We hope that the 
session will initiate lively discussion, for instance, of change in 
perspectives on the ontic and epistemic significance of field 
practice; a range of current sources of theoretical insights; and the 
changing public roles of archaeology. 


References

Aristotle 1941 The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. by B. Jowett 
and R. McKeon (ed). London: Oxford University Press. 

Benjamin, W. Theses on the Philosophy of History, in the 
collection edited by H. Arendt, Illuminations. London: Fontana 
Press, 245-255.

Gero, J. 2000. Troubled Travels in Agency and Feminism, in 
Dobres, M.A. and Robb, J. (eds.), Agency in Archaeology. London: 
Routledge, 34-39.

Koerner, S. forthcoming 2003. Agency and Views Beyond Meta-
Narratives that Privatise Ethics and Globalize Indifference, in 
Gardner, A. (ed.) Agency Uncovered: archaeological perspectives 
on social agency, power and being human. London. 

McGuire, J. E. and Tuchanska, B. 2001. Science Unfettered. A 
Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology. Athens: Ohio 
University Press. 

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