Bruno Latour, Aramis, and Excavation

This week in my graduate historiography seminar, we’re reading Bruno Latour’s Aramis or the Love of Technology.  The book is set like a mystery (albeit a very peculiar one) centered on the death an innovative automated train system called Aramis.  Latour investigates the network of human and non-human actors who took Aramis from an idea to a working prototype before an equally complex combination of factors brought to program to an end.  Latour combines imagined dialogue between a professor and his skeptical assistant who receive funding to investigate the death of Aramais, alongside short theoretical interludes and snippets of interviews, documents, and other primary sources.  The individual parts of the book rarely run more than a page or two and are set in different fonts.

Aramis is not a particular recent book and Latour’s work has become fairly well-known among academics. His work sought to understand the history and sociology of science and technology in the dense network of human and non-human actors which emerges around the development of a project, concept, technology, or idea.  Its applicability to archaeological work is apparent as archaeology relies upon a similar network of human and non-human actors to produce knowledge about the past.

As I have spent time digitizing notebooks from excavations at Polis-Chrysochous on Cyprus in the lead up to fieldwork this summer, I have noted that the language used in the notebook can tell us a good bit about how our archaeologist positions himself or herself in relation to the other members of the project, the method, and the material being uncovered in their trench. I’ve noted elsewhere that the personal character of the notebook as a device for recording details from the trenches evokes models of heroic science or the heroic innovator. Latour notes that the heroic narrative represents “a narrative of light and shadow in which the original object is complete and can only be degraded or maintained intact – allowing of course for a few minor adjustments.” (p. 119). The narrative preserved in these highly individualized source, represents the the excavator as creating archaeological knowledge almost by individual force of will.

The personal nature of excavation notebooks integrates with the larger project because the individual excavator is aware that their narrative must be understandable and have a relationship to other narratives being produced in parallel by other excavators. While these other narratives continue in the heroic style (to greater or lesser degrees), some aspects of the vocabulary show intentional overlap in a gesture toward making individual discoveries mutually understandable. The excavators themselves produce knowledge heroically but also create the basis for a network where that knowledge has meaning.  For example, trench plans while highly individualized also include common features. Excavation terms are common to multiple notebooks, but their deployment remains idiosyncratic.

Keying the data into the even more common format of the computer database presents a more concerted effort to bring the notebooks into conversation with one another by striping more of the heroic, individualized content from the notebook’s form. Individual scripts are gone, replaced by standardized digital fonts; the database encoder breaks the narrative of the notebook writer into modular fragments that can be recombined across multiple trenches and intermingled with the text from other notebooks.

Latour has more to tell us about the emergence of networks because of his willingness to recognize the place of non-human actors in the creation of networks.  The site of Polis-Chrysochous itself, for example, the material remains present under the ground is a powerful actor in the formation of the network.  The proximity of the individual trenches and the similarity of the material uncovered also pressures our heroic excavators to resort to a common language to communicate their discoveries. Moreover, the relationship between our excavators is ultimately a material and spatial one (and the space of excavation persists through time!).  A Latour notes: “The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language and their metalanguage.” (p. 167)

While at the same time the material reality of the excavation space, the objects, and the proximity of actors to one makes clear that “To the multiplicity of actors a new multiplicity is now added: that of the efforts made to unify, to simplify, to make coherent the multiplicity of viewpoints, goals, desires, so as to impose a single theory of action. In the strange arithmetic of projects, everything is added; nothing is take away, not even the rules of the metalanguage, not even the arithmetic’s variable rules by which addition and subtraction are defined!” (p. 167-168).

How cool is that?