Senses, Materiality and Time

4
SENSES, MATERIALITY, TIME
A New Ontology
. . .no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is
experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do
from the laws of nature alone . . . the body itself, simply from
the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind
wonders at.
Benedict Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics
It’s May 2010, and I am in Monastiraki Square in Athens, together with a

colleague who is an architect and urban planner. It’s warm and pleasant,
and we take a stroll around the Square and its metro station, while she
narrates to me the latest episode in the story of Iridanos – the river which was
once a prominent feature in the topography of ancient Athens but which was
covered and forced underground since the second century AD. A couple of
years earlier, she recounts, the archaeologists who were carrying out exca-
vations prior to the construction of the Monastiraki metro station, and after a
particularly heavy rainfall, happened to hit Iridanos. Or rather, it was the
underground river itself which emerged unexpectedly. What’s left of that
river burst with an unusual force and flooded the excavation trenches.
Archaeologists, the architects in charge of the landscaping of the Square,
urban activists, and local residents were immediately involved in a heated
debate: should the flow of the water, now forming more like a small stream
than a river, be left exposed or should it be covered? And how could it be
reconciled with the technical aspects of the metro station and the urban
planning of the square? The compromise solution favoured by archaeologists
was to cover it, preferably with glass, so that it could be visible by the metro
111
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Leicester, on 24 Jan 2018 at 14:19:28, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139024655.005
112 ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SENSES
passengers and the strollers and visitors of the Square. The strong reaction by
the activists and residents that followed was rather unexpected. Amateur
videos started circulating on the Internet, recording the flow and the sound of
the water, and narrating the story of the ancient river ‘which was found
alive’. No, they claimed, we do not just want to see the water through glass,
we want to hear its flow too. It took a sustained public and media pressure
for them to have their way. Today, inside the metro station, visitors and
passengers can come close to the multi-sensorial fluvial history and topog-
raphy of Athens. But this is not simply an underground experience. As you
walk through the Square, and as you gaze at the Acropolis and what used to
be a Muslim mosque, you are attracted by a metal fence that encloses a well-
like feature. You turn your head downwards and you see and hear at the
same time the quiet flow of the water, the river that earned its right to be
heard.
The aim of this short chapter is to take stock of all the preceding
discussion, sum up the main findings and conclusions, and develop
further the key guiding principles and points for a new framework
on sensoriality. This summation and further elaboration is essential
before we proceed to the main case study, outlined in the next two
chapters. The theses proposed and advanced here will be presented
mostly as a series of aphorisms, evoking at the same time the histor-
ical, anthropological, and archaeological supporting material and
associated debates presented in the preceding chapters (see also
Hamilakis 2013).
THE SENSES ARE ABOUT THE NATURE

AND STATUS OF BEING
The exploration of the senses is not merely about bodily experi-

ence. It is not about sensory organs and the mechanics of bodily
stimuli. It is rather an enquiry on the essence of being, on life, on
the nature of the subject–object and mind–body dichotomies.
That is why so many philosophers, from Plato onwards and up
to Michel Serres today, felt the need to reflect on the matter. To
enquire thus on the possibilities and the shape of an archaeology
of the senses means to enquire on the ontology of the discipline as
a whole.
SENSES, MATERIALITY, TIME: A NEW ONTOLOGY 113
THE SENSES ARE INFINITE
The Western sensorium with its five senses and its implicit hierarchy is a
Western folk taxonomy, bequeathed to us since classical antiquity. It is a
way of imagining the self and the body, an imaginary that in colonial and
national modernity took on a rigid form, based on the desire to rule over
and tame the unpredictable and risky character of the senses, as happened
with the colonial conquest of place, people, and time. This prevailing
conception of the senses in Western modernity, however, carried certain
class connotations: it had mostly to do with the upper and middle classes,
whereas there were other, subaltern sensorial regimes that defied senso-
rial hierarchy and compartmentalisation. Furthermore, this fixity and
regimentation has been challenged in late modernity, especially since
the beginning of the twentieth century, by new social forces, new
technologies, new configurations of materiality.
Things are extensions of the human body; they can act as sensorial
prostheses. This is not meant to devalue their power and agency but
rather to foreground and highlight their ability to enable the body to
expand its sensorial capabilities. And since things were and are infinite,
sensorial modalities are also multiple and infinite. In the preceding
chapters, I discussed some of these sensorial modalities which are not
part of the Western sensorium of the five senses, and which have been
defined and analysed by anthropology, cultural studies, or other schol-
arly fields. The sense of balance and movement (kinaesthesia), and the
sense of cinema are two of them. We can go on adding, for example
the sense of place: the specific experiential mode associated with the
emplacement of human action, its grounding in specific locales, the
familiarity which such a grounding brings, the almost instinctive and
automatic sense of sensorial recognition of paths and routes and
features, the gathering and the harbouring of memories by places
(cf. Casey 1996). Or we could add the sense of intoxication, or any
other altered states of consciousness: here too, sensorial modalities
operate in distinctive ways, very different from other ‘normal’ situa-
tions: sight, hearing, attention in general can be completely trans-
formed, some of them could be heightened or numbed, tactility
could become more intense, and so on.
Some of the above sensorial modalities can in fact be proven to be
more diverse and complex than originally thought. For example,
kinaesthesia is not one sense but many: running is very different

sensorially from walking, and so is dancing. They all have their own
sense of rhythm and temporality, and in the case of running, the
conventional sensorial modalities operate in a highly distinctive man-
ner (Hockey 2006). Tactility, for example, using the feet and not the
hands, becomes extremely important, as the runner feels the terrain
and its pressure in her whole body. The intervening material thing in
this case, the running shoes, is perhaps the most important factor in
this activity, which can have serious bodily implications such as long-
term harm. And swimming and even more so diving, is also very
different from any other bodily movements, not only because of the
pressure of the water on your body but also because of the distinctive
temperature, the very peculiar sense of orientation and bodily balance
underwater, the sight filtered through the medium of water, and so
on. Furthermore, to use a term such as kinaesthesia in order to denote
the sense of movement is to forget that all sensorial interactions entail
motion of sorts, even if it is the blink of an eye or the turning of the
head towards a thing or a perceived source of sound (cf. Massumi
2002). All sensorial experiences are not only synaesthetic but also
kinaesthetic. All involve movement as well as the commingling and
the combined work of all senses. Sensorial modalities are thus innu-
merable and infinite, not only because of the infinity of things but also
because of the infinite number of contextual situations and locales
where sensorial experience takes place.
ARCHAEOLOGY CAN EXPLORE

THAT SENSORIAL INFINITY
The implications of the above thesis for archaeology are immense. In the
same way that anthropologists have identified sensorial modalities hitherto
unrecognised by the Western sensorium, archaeologists, having primary
access to the temporally diverse materiality of the world, to the infinite
number and range of things and technologies, can unearth and explore
sensorial modalities which have been ignored and suppressed by a Western
modernist archaeology founded on a Cartesian view of the world and on
the principles of the Western sensorium. This, however, will have to be
done without resorting to the enumeration, the singularisation, and the
compartmentalisation of the sensorial.
FROM THE BODY AND THE THING, TO THE FIELD

AND THE FLOW
The senses have been often explored and investigated as part of the
‘bodily’ turn in a number of disciplines, including archaeology
(cf. Borić and Robb 2008; Hamilakis et al. 2002, with references).
Despite the fruitfulness of this approach, there is a danger that lurks on
the essentialism of the body as an autonomous and bounded entity, as an
object. This boundedness has been the explicit or implicit assumption
made by both, approaches that focused on images and representations of
the body in pictorial and other media, and by the Foucaultian attempts
which treated the body as an object of suppressive power by various
authorities, discourses, and apparatuses. A similar phenomenon is wit-
nessed with regards to things, in a number of disciplines, from material
culture studies to archaeology. The ‘thing’ turn (e.g. Brown 2001;
Kopytoff 1986; Olsen 2010, 2012), inspired by a number of theorists
from Heidegger (e.g. 1971) to Latour (e.g. 2005) and Gell (1998), and less
so by Benjamin (e.g. 1999), has been certainly a welcome move. It has
forced us to pay specific attention to the textures of the world, to
attributes and properties of materials, and the ‘thingness’ and the agency
of things, and has at the same time shifted the focus away from the
philosophically problematic notion of the object, which assumes a sep-
arate entity, the subject, posited against it in a dichotomous manner. But
there is a danger that such emphasis on things will lead to the creation of
an artificial separation between things and bodies, things and environ-
ments, and amongst things, the landscape, the atmosphere, and the
weather (cf. Ingold 2005a). This is not a repetition of the well-known
Marxian critique of mystification and isolation of things-as-commodities
the history of which has been concealed, but rather a concern that the
overemphasis on things ignores all the sensorial and life processes that
take place in that space which is in-between things, humans, other
beings, and all other cosmic elements.
In this book, I have deliberately avoided making the body the main
analytical category, shifting attention instead to corporeality as the
condition of embodiment, or better to trans-corporeality, as the con-
dition of sensorial flows in shifting corporeal landscapes which also
encompass things. A sensorial approach will need to shift from the
body or from the thing to the field of experience, and to a carnal
materiality which recognises that a unifying element of bodies, organ-

isms, things, environments, and landscapes is their ‘flesh’ in the sense of
Merleau-Ponty (1968/1964: 139–140); their sensorial character and
nature which comes to life through trans-corporeal, affective entangle-
ments and engagements. This is an ontology not of things but of
sensorial flows and movements; not of bodies but of corporeal land-
scapes, of trans-corporeality; not of single actions but of continuous
inter-animation. This shift from the body and thing to the field and the
flow makes the mind–body and the subject–object dichotomies redun-
dant: the sensorial field and the sensorial flows encompass material
substances, airwaves, rays of light, gestures, and movements, as well as
discourses, affects, memories, and ideas, which, as far as sensoriality is
concerned, are of equal ontological status. At the same time, the
reversibility and the inter-corporeality of the sensorial, the handshake
which is touching and being touched at the same time, and the food
which becomes self, make it almost impossible to sustain the subject–
object distinction. This shift also rescues us from the ‘back door’
Cartesianism, evident in some attempts in sensorial archaeology that
place emphasis on the bodily sensory organs, on the mechanics of
sensorial stimuli, and on separate and discrete sensorial modalities within
the scheme of the Western sensorium. In other words, it avoids the
instrumentalisation of the senses.
By implication, such a sensorial approach not only avoids the
dangers of biologism and instrumentalism, but it also enables us to
reconfigure the body as constantly in the process of becoming, through
sensorial flows involving things, environments, and other beings. A
body is an organism but at the same time extends itself beyond the
organic, since the senses, despite their functional roles, are not abso-
lutely necessary for the organic body to operate. As the cultural theorist
Erin Manning notes in a study on touch and tango dancing, evoking
Spinoza amongst others (see the epigram of this chapter),
To ‘be’ a body is to become. To sense is to live in the beyond
of the mere organism. Sensing is not essential to the organic
body. I smell in excess of the strict composition of my flesh
and bones. But without my senses I am not aware of my flesh
as ‘body’. It is in this regard that senses are prosthetic: they are
in excess of the organic, yet they make organic palpable.
(2007: 157)
and elsewhere,
Through the senses, bodies become alchemical mixtures,
incorporeal concoctions of visions and touches, smells and
sights, tastes and sounds. Senses lead us without taking us by
the hand. Senses draw us towards an object as they modulate
our own responses, relaying insides and outsides into a con-
glomerate that deviates, always, from the implied borders of
our skins. There are no sense borders: sense is not a limit-
concept. To sense is to world unlimitedly. (2007: 155)
SENSORIAL FLOWS ARE RISKY AND

UNPREDICTABLE
The notion of the flow is of prime importance here. It refers to flows of

materials, information, substances, memories, affects, airborne particles,
bodily fluids, ideas, rays of light, waves of sound. As the philosopher Jean-
Luc Nancy (2013: 13) notes, ‘[N]othing ordinary, no order or ruling can
come to terms with or tame the anarchic exuberance of the senses, this
dizzying effect of sensations, these sensual and sentimental fevers, this
dissemination of the sensible’. Part of the unpredictability (and thus risky
nature) of sensorial experience is due to that notion of the flow, a flow
which cannot always be tamed and controlled: olfaction, for example,
cannot be easily controlled, as odour invades bodies at will, and you
cannot easily keep it out without blocking breathing too. Moreover, the
close links between matter, sensorial experience and memory, add to that
element of unpredictability. Memories can be unpredictable; they can
spring up involuntarily and disrupt and upset the consensual order.
THE SENSES ARE POLITICAL
There is, however, constantly a dialectic in operation between fluidity

and fixity, between sensorial flows and interactions, on the one hand, and
objectification and regulation, on the other. The same applies to sensorial
and bodily memories. Most war memorials, and many monuments
reshaped and reconstituted as archaeological ‘record’ by modernist
archaeology out of the diverse material traces of the past, are examples
of such attempts at objectification, fixity, and regulation, aimed at pro-
ducing and perpetuating a consensual mnemonic and sensorial order.
These attempts are constantly at risk, however. They are subject to the
involuntary as well as voluntary mnemonic effects activated by the senses,
to the subaltern efforts to produce a dissensus. The senses are political.
THE SENSES ARE HISTORICAL
Another way of talking about the political nature of the senses – the
sensorial clashes and the diverse sensorial regimes in operation at any
one context – is to remind ourselves that the senses have been histor-
ically and socially constituted. Recall that phrase by Marx (1975: 302)
that the formation and the social and cultural constitution of the senses
are the ‘labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’.
Class, race, gender have been always, to a large extent, sensorially
defined and constituted. This historicity and the cultural specificity of
the senses make claims by some archaeologists that because we share the
‘same’ body with humans in the past, we can have access to their
phenomenological thinking, entirely unattainable and hugely prob-
lematic. This historicity also warns us that a generalising and universal
theoretical framework on the sensorial and on the archaeology of the
senses is destined to failure. We will need instead to understand, in each
context, the social and material conditions which enabled and activated
specific, often diverse, sensorial regimes.
EVERY SENSORIAL PERCEPTION IS FULL

OF MEMORIES
There is another dimension of the historicity of the senses which we

often forget: sensorial perception is shaped by memories; it is never a
pre-reflective, pristine experience. The materiality of the world is
sensorially perceived through all previous mnemonic experiences, not
only of that specific materiality but also of all other materialities and all
other experiential encounters. Even when people in the past were
encountering a specific feature, thing, event, or being for the ‘first’
time, their contemporary perception of that encounter and its future
recollections would have been shaped by previous encounters and
experiences of similar nature, or experiences associated with it even
by virtue of their sharp dissimilarity. Thus, archaeological and other
writings on the phenomenological perception of materials and features
which are written as ‘first time’ encounters, and attempt to describe

how these things appear to the archaeologist’s body, can be misleading.
SENSORIAL REFLEXIVITY SHOULD BE THE

STARTING POINT OF ANY SENSORIAL ANALYSIS
The archaeologist-phenomenologist too, of course, has his and her

own mnemonic experiences, and they would come into play at any
sensorial analysis of things and features. Thus, the only way out of this
conundrum is to start any attempt at the sensorial understanding of
another context, in the past or in the present, by excavating our own
sensory stratigraphy, not simply as individuals but as embodied com-
ponents of social collectivities, as actors within distinctive corporeal
landscapes in late modernity, which carries its own often troubling and
problematic sensorial heritage. Such sensorial reflexivity, which should
mirror the genealogical inquiry into the sensorial regimes of Western
modernity as a whole, is not simply a matter of intellectual and
scholarly honesty. It is also a scholarly methodology, a way of under-
standing in a direct, immediate, corporeal manner the links among
sensorial fields and flows, materiality, and biographical times and social
histories.
THE SENSES ARE MULTI-TEMPORAL – THEY

ACTIVATE THE MULTI-TEMPORALITY
OF MATTER: A BERGSONIAN ONTOLOGY
Sensorial mnemonics demand a closer attention to matters of time and

temporality. The sensorial approach which I am advancing here does not
subscribe to the chronometric, objectivist time of modernity but sees
time instead as immanent to sensorial experience. It is material memory
itself, memory evoked and activated through the sensorial interaction
with matter (cf. Kwint, Breward, and Aynsley 1999; Seremetakis 1994a;
S. Stewart 1999) which points to a different perception of temporality,
and enables us to imagine alternative sensorial-cum-temporal possibil-
ities. Let me conjure up two specific examples.
Figure 5 depicts a material trace from the Sanctuary of Poseidon on
the island of Poros (ancient Kalaureia) in the Saronic Gulf, Greece.
Amid the ruins of the sanctuary, there is this ancient (possibly fourth
figure 5. An ancient (possibly fourth century BC) architectural block from the
Sanctuary of Poseidon, Poros island, Greece, with twentieth-century graffiti on it
(source: author, 2007)
century BC) limestone block, part of the wall of one of the public
buildings that used to surround the temple in ancient times. The block
has been in place since antiquity, but at the end of the nineteenth
century, a large, extended family settled amid the ruins, building a
farmstead and making the site their home, until they were evicted by
the archaeological service in 1978. The children of the family, who
would play amongst the stones, inscribed on the rough surface of the
stone their initials (as they did on others at the site), often noting their
age and the date – graffiti that are now clearly visible to visitors. Note,
for example, on the top-right corner of the block the initials Β.Γ.Μ.,
the date 1952, and the age, ΕΤΩΝ 14 (fourteen years old; cf. Hamilakis
and Anagnostopoulos 2009; Hamilakis et al. 2009).
Not far away, at a much more celebrated locale, the Athenian
Acropolis, there is another interesting architectural fragment (Figure 6):
a marble piece from the classical – fifth century BC – temple of
Erechtheion, onto which an inscription in Arabic script was carved in
1805, when the Acropolis was under Ottoman rule and used as a fortress.
The block was then embedded in one of the vaulted entrances to the
Acropolis. The inscription praises the Ottoman governor of Athens and
his achievement in fortifying the Acropolis (cf. Hamilakis 2007).
figure 6. A classical – fifth century BC – architectural fragment from the

Erechtheion on the Acropolis of Athens, with an 1805 Ottoman inscription (photo:
Fotis Ifantidis, reproduced with permission)
I have discussed these pieces elsewhere in relation to material memory

as an active process of reworking the multi-temporal past (cf. Hamilakis
and Labanyi 2008), but here I want to discuss them briefly in connection
with the entanglement of sensoriality with material memory and time.
What time are these objects? How can we date these two pieces using our
conventions of chronological, successive time? Is the fragment from the
Acropolis ancient or early nineteenth century? Is the fragment from
Kalaureia of a classical date or of the twentieth century?
It is in the thought of Bergson (and in a Deleuzian take on Bergson)
that we can find some important insights in our attempt to understand
the implications of these things and practices for temporality (e.g.
Bergson 1991/1908; Deleuze 1991/1966; cf. Al-Saji 2004). Bergson
problematised the relationship between matter, memory, and time, a
problematisation that allows us to think beyond the linearity and the
modernist conception of time as a cumulative process. In modernity,
we encounter time as linear and successive, cumulative and irreversible
(cf. Fasolt 2004). This is the chronological and chronometric time – a
mentality which is reminiscent of the modernist idea of progress as
a linear process of advancing forward. Bergson instead developed a
notion of experiential and mnemonic time, based on the links between
matter and temporality and on his thesis that every perception of a
present moment is replete with memories. He recognised that a fun-
damental property of matter is its duration, its ability to last. As such, it
embodies various times at once: the time of its original creation and
production, as well as all other moments and instances such as the time
of its subsequent modification and redeployment, and the times of its
reanimation and reactivation by sensorial and experiential processes.
Past and present thus are not successive moments in a line but rather
co-exist side by side (cf. Deleuze 1991/1966: 60), in the same way that
every sensorial perception is at the same time past and present. They are
both ‘modalities or dimensions of duration’, as Grosz (2004: 176) put it
in her study on Bergson. As Deleuze notes,
The past and the present do not present two successive
moments, but two elements which co-exist: One is the present,
which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which
does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. . .
In other words, each present goes back to itself as past. (1991/
1966: 59)
In that sense, every given present carries with it all pasts, but, of course,
through the selective process of memory, only specific pasts are con-
jured up at any specific present moment (cf. Al-Saji 2004: 214).
Our two architectural blocks embody such a conception of time in
an immediate and direct way. Archaeologists, through their dating
techniques, fix things into a certain moment in the past, often prioritis-
ing their initial production and genesis, at the expense of all other
moments in their life. In this case, these two fragments are dated
conventionally to the classical era, broadly defined. The insistence on
this temporal attribution is not unrelated to their position within
national imagination, as well as Western imaginary as a whole, which
have declared classical antiquity as one of their ‘golden ages’ and a
foundational moment in their charter myth. Archaeology as a mne-
monic practice has chosen to remember selectively the instant of the
classical, the reshaping of these fragments of geology into architectural
blocks used in temples and sacred buildings during classical antiquity. As
such, the subsequent moments in their life – the time of the Ottoman
phase of the Acropolis, and the time of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century use of the Sanctuary of Poseidon as a farmstead –
are deliberately forgotten.
But material memories are not easy to erase. Their durational
qualities allow them to intervene in the present, to claim their
co-existence side by side with the contemporary conceptions of these
fragments as archaeological objects, dated to the ancient past. These
fragments, as all material things, are multi-temporal. Their multiple
temporal instances include all other moments in which these fragments
became the centre of sensorial attention, and acted as participants in
corporeal engagements and interactions. The fragment from the
Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis was half-buried in rubble in
recent years, and was condemned to invisibility and oblivion. And yet,
through its photographing as part of scholarly and other interventions
and projects (such as our Other Acropolis photoblog1), it has acquired a
new visibility, a new sensorial prominence. The same applies to the
block from the Sanctuary of Poseidon. In this case, the fragment and its
multi-temporal agentic qualities forced us to not only notice it, record,
and draw it, but also make it an essential part of the itinerary in our
guided tours.2 Groups of visitors would gather around it to hear about
its various temporal moments and stories, photograph it, and trace with
their hands the engraved letters and numbers on the stone. This artefact
continued living, not only through these sensorial engagements but
also in a literal, organic sense, through erosion and decay, and through
the lichens that have colonised the grooves – processes that are making
the inscribed dates and names increasingly invisible. In a few years’
time, this inscription will be decipherable only by the sense of touch,
only through the hands. The senses are multi-temporal, they are past
and present at the same time, they entail the simultaneous co-existence
and communion of perception and memory. Furthermore, if the dura-
tional qualities of matter enact and activate multiple times, then such
enactments become possible through multi-sensorial engagements
involving materiality and, more broadly, the flesh of the world.
The implications for this reconceptualisation of time in archaeology
are immense.3 In fact, it entails the recasting of archaeology as a multi-
temporal, corporeal, and sensorial practice, and the abandonment of
the ‘archaeo-’ in its title (cf. Ingold 2010b). Such a new discipline will
be attentive to the sensorial lives of things as multi-temporal entities. It
will be an undisciplined discipline, not only because of the risky and
unpredictable nature of the sensorial, but also because of the activation
of the political lives of matter. The co-existence of multiple times
simultaneously would render problematic the use of archaeology as a
refuge, as an escape to a distant and remote, ‘harmless’ past. Efforts to
ignore politically risky and threatening temporal moments would run
into difficulties. Material memories would spring up unexpectedly,
disrupting sensorial homogeneities and thus producing dissensual pos-
sibilities, despite the attempts at a complete erasure. After all, processes
of erasure and ritual purification have been going on at the Athenian
Acropolis for two centuries (cf. Hamilakis 2007), and yet that fragment
from the Erechtheion managed to survive.
ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE SENSES ARE ALSO

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF AFFECT
If the senses are not essential for the workings of the organic body, what
are their primary roles? Sensoriality shapes and organises social life and,
perhaps more importantly, activates and evokes affectivity. The senses
enable the body not only to produce social and material effects but also to
be affected. They allow us to be ‘touched’, to be ‘moved’. Sensoriality
thus cannot be separated from affect. In the preceding discussion, I used

affect and emotion interchangeably, but it is affect that I want to fore-
ground here, making the most of the ability of the word to function as a
verb and a noun at the same time. As such, it bypasses the subject–object
divide, and connects with the sensorial field as a space of flows and
encounters, as a sensorial contact zone. Emotion has been linked to
individual and psychological states, whereas affect entails collective
entanglements and relationships (cf. Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009; and
on emotion and affect in archaeology cf. Tarlow 2012). According to
Gregg and Seigworth (2010a: 1)
[a]ffect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to
act and to be acted upon . . . Affect . . . is the name we give to
those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally
other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond
emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement,
toward thought and extension. . .
Brian Massumi (1995: 88) notes that whereas emotion is subjective and
personalised and can be thus described as ‘intensity owned and recog-
nized’, affect is more fluid and cannot be owned, maintaining thus its
autonomy. Let’s listen to what the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has
to say, when talking about those highly charged instances of mundane
life which she calls ‘ordinary affects’:
[O]rdinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and
to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual
motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies.
They are things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensa-
tions, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating,
in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion
and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency,
and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up
in something that feels like something . . . They are the stuff that
intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the form
of a life . . . [They are] more directly compelling than ideologies,
as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than
symbolic meanings. (K. Stewart 2007: 1–3)
It is through affectivity that sensorial flows and interactions animate the

flesh of the world (cf. Gregg and Seigworth 2010b). An archaeology of
the senses thus cannot but be at the same time an archaeology of affect.
SENSORIAL ASSEMBLAGES
It is often assumed that a sensorial approach may be applicable to small,

face-to-face interactions but is not that relevant when discussing large-
scale social phenomena, social ‘structures’, and institutions. And yet,
the sensorial cannot be divorced from the political. The senses as bio-
power and bio-politics are as important and relevant for the exploration
of empires as they are for small prehistoric communities. After all, our
historical excursus showed that sensorial order and hierarchy was a
fundamental building block of modern empires. Structures of power
and institutions derive their authority partly from their (inherently
unstable) ability to generate and reproduce consensual regimes, and
regiment and regulate the economy of affect and of sensorial memories.
But there is another concept which I want to introduce here, and
which can expand further the possibilities of a sensorial approach:
sensorial assemblages.
The notion of assemblages is used widely in a number of fields, and it
is also central in modernist archaeology, where it is used to describe a
collection or association of objects and material finds. The concept has
been problematised and given new life and potential by Deleuze and
Guattari (e.g. 1987/1980), and more recently by Manuel DeLanda (2006).
It is a response to other concepts, popular in social sciences and in
archaeology, such as systems, networks, or social structures. Assemblages
are not bounded wholes; they are non-hierarchical, heterogeneous, con-
tingent rather than permanent and stable, and rhizomatic rather than
dendritic, that is, they do not follow a linear and hierarchical order. The
pollinating insect and the flower is a good example for such an assem-
blage. Deleuze (2007: 176–177) notes that ‘[i]n assemblages you find states
of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you
also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs’.
Here, I expand this thinking further by introducing the notion of
sensorial assemblage. By that, I mean not only the pairing of a body with
a thing (the hand holding a jar) but, furthermore, the contingent
co-presence of heterogenous elements such as bodies, things, substances,
affects, memories, information, and ideas. Sensorial flows and exchanges
are part of this sensorial assemblage and at the same time the ‘glue’ that
holds it together. While the notion of the sensorial field helped us shift
from the sensorial organs and the individuated sensory modality to the
dynamic, synaesthetic interaction, the notion of the assemblage fore-

grounds the co-presence of diverse entities, and at the same time connects
the material with the sensorial and the mnemonic. Sensorial assemblages
can be brought together and constituted for specific performative
events. They can be temporarily territorialised in specific locales, and
later dispersed, de-territorialised, and re-assembled (re-territorialised) else-
where. In the example of the architectural block from the Sanctuary of
Poseidon discussed above, several sensorial assemblages came into being
at various moments.When, in guided tours, we gathered visitors around
the block and started discussing its history, inviting them at the same time
to touch the stone and trace the inscribed names and dates with their
hands, we produced a sensorial assemblage which included the stone
block, the embodied presence of visitors and guides, the conjuring up of
the memories of the children who created the graffiti, the tactile experi-
ence of the stone, and even the various photographs produced at that
moment. That was a temporary sensorial assemblage. Had we decided to
make this a permanent sight for visitors, complete with information panels,
fencing, a path which would have regulated bodily movement, then we
would have laid out the conditions for the regimentation of specific
sensorial and mnemonic experiences, the production of permanent sen-
sorial assemblages.
Sensorial assemblages produce place and locality through evocative,
affective, and mnemonic performances and interactions. At the same
time, natural or human-made features in these localities, permanent or
not, or buildings and architecture, can become part of sensorial assem-
blages. Such devices produce distinctive sensorial affordances, and often
regulate and regiment sensorial experience and interaction. A settlement
or a city, a monumental structure, a temple or sanctuary, a ‘palatial’
building can be a component of a sensorial assemblage where authorities
attempt (often unsuccessfully) to establish specific sensorial regimes, and
a distinctive, power-laden bio-political and consensual order. These
attempts do not go unchallenged by the various participants in these
sensorial assemblages.
The implications of this concept for archaeology are obvious:
rather than dividing archaeological finds and traces into conventional
assemblages on the basis of their material or artefactual nature (pot-
tery assemblages, or animal bone assemblages, for example), sensorial
assemblages will be identified and recognised based on the ability of
their heterogeneous components to animate sensorial exchanges

and interactions. Pottery will be linked to food remnants cooked or
consumed in those pots, and to the hearths or other features linked to
food preparation and consumption. Along with these, the same sensorial
assemblage will include the exchange, circulation, and flow of food
substances, and their smells and tastes, as well as their mnemonic effects:
their ability to recall and evoke previous collective food events, and to
generate prospective remembering for the future. Archaeological meth-
odologies thus should encompass not only the separate analyses of the
distinctive categories of archaeological material but also, and most cru-
cially, the analysis of the sensorial assemblage as a whole.
FROM ONTOLOGY TO ONTOGENY
In recent years, archaeology, along with several other fields, has engaged
in discussions of an ontological nature, a welcome shift from past debates
to do primarily with the epistemology of the discipline (e.g. Alberti et al.
2011; Harris and Robb 2012; Olsen 2010). These are mostly explorations
of diverse ontologies, diverse world views held by people outside
Western modernity, views which may not be commensurable with the
ones espoused by Western modernist archaeology. I contend, however,
that this ‘ontological turn’ will need to expand and include the ontology
of archaeology itself; in other words, the debate on what archaeology is,
on its origins, status, and relationship with other archaeologies, beyond
the Western modernist one. The sensorial approach advocated and
developed here is an intervention not of epistemological but of onto-
logical nature. It constitutes a new paradigm for the archaeological, and
for scholarly fields that deal with materiality and time. In effect, these are
elements and building blocks for another discipline, albeit an undisci-
plined one. The senses allow us to engage in a process which will not
only be ontological but also ontogenetic.

Senses, Materiality and Time

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Senses, Materiality and Time

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

4

SENSES, MATERIALITY, TIME

It’s May 2010, and I am in Monastiraki Square in Athens, together with a

THE SENSES ARE ABOUT THE NATURE

The exploration of the senses is not merely about bodily experi-

THE SENSES ARE INFINITE

kinaesthesia is not one sense but many: running is very diﬀerent

ARCHAEOLOGY CAN EXPLORE

FROM THE BODY AND THE THING, TO THE FIELD

materiality which recognises that a unifying element of bodies, organ-

SENSORIAL FLOWS ARE RISKY AND

The notion of the ﬂow is of prime importance here. It refers to ﬂows of

THE SENSES ARE POLITICAL

There is, however, constantly a dialectic in operation between ﬂuidity

THE SENSES ARE HISTORICAL

EVERY SENSORIAL PERCEPTION IS FULL

There is another dimension of the historicity of the senses which we

which are written as ‘ﬁrst time’ encounters, and attempt to describe

SENSORIAL REFLEXIVITY SHOULD BE THE

The archaeologist-phenomenologist too, of course, has his and her

THE SENSES ARE MULTI-TEMPORAL – THEY

Sensorial mnemonics demand a closer attention to matters of time and

figure 6. A classical – ﬁfth century BC – architectural fragment from the

I have discussed these pieces elsewhere in relation to material memory

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE SENSES ARE ALSO

thus cannot be separated from aﬀect. In the preceding discussion, I used

It is through aﬀectivity that sensorial ﬂows and interactions animate the

It is often assumed that a sensorial approach may be applicable to small,

dynamic, synaesthetic interaction, the notion of the assemblage fore-

their heterogeneous components to animate sensorial exchanges

FROM ONTOLOGY TO ONTOGENY

You might also like