Preface

The spark for this book originated during a visit by Harman to Lubbock, Texas in February 2014 to give the prestigious Haragan Lecture at Texas Tech University. Over the two-day course of this visit, we conversed on a number of occasions about philosophy, archaeology, and the concept of time, the challenge posed by object-oriented ontology (OOO) to anthropocentrism, and the various ways in which archaeology was engaging with OOO while taking leave of a modernist historicism. Witmore invited Harman to discuss time in relation to OOO, while contemplating a few archaeological examples, in an open interview that was audio recorded. As the conversation went on, it became patent that we shared an understanding of time as generated by objects rather than encompassing them.1 By the interview's end, we agreed that this axiom - objects generate time - warranted a deeper exploration in light of both archaeology and OOO. The first fruits of this endeavor appear here as Objects Untimely.

That we consider the objects to which the present book is devoted as untimely can be justified on multiple grounds. Against the current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux, associated in philosophy with New Materialism, OOO asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges.2 Against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology resist the very temporal delimitations which have defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. Against the current tendency to treat time as deep, this book articulates a time that is counterintuitively superficial; as Chapter 1 will explain, this has nothing to do with Plato's contrast between time and eternity. Finally, it is also anything but timely to consider a field routinely defined as "the study of the human past through its material remains" on the grounds that all that exists are objects here in the present, and that they cannot be reduced to their pasts.

It is true that within the history of ideas, there is a sense that the exchange between philosophy and archaeology has been far from balanced. For the archaeologist who holds that philosophy seems to have rarely concerned itself with the archaeological endeavor, it would be easy to cast blame upon their fellow practitioners. Not only could they argue that archaeologists - laboring in the shadows of history - have given philosophers little cause to see their soil-encrusted objects as anything other than yoked to the past, burdened by allegory and historical expectation. They could also resign themselves to the all-too-common opinion that theoretical concerns within archaeology are little more than derivative, insofar as the archaeological application of philosophical ideas rarely comes back to impact philosophical developments.3 The philosopher who comes to ponder this imbalance could just as easily denounce their own field for an overemphasis on the human subject, one that has contributed to a neglect of things. This is a neglect that, in the case of archaeology, was further intensified by the tarnish of entropy, the banality of random detritus, the grimy dregs of oblivion, or the treatment of downcast ruins as a canvas where deeply held fantasies might be satisfied. To be sure, a closer look would reveal the inadequacies of these exaggerated impressions. One could contend that the allure of archaeology is critical to modern philosophical thought.4 But more than this, there are also numerous philosophers who have given serious consideration to the field - R.G. Collingwood, Merrilee Salmon, and Alison Wylie, among others - in terms of the philosophy of history, science, or language.5 This book does not seek to balance scales. But if forging connections and mutual understandings comes about by actively engaging in generous and open-minded conversation, it will already help to pique curiosity by showing that both fields are not what one expects them to be.

Objects Untimely takes shape over the course of five chapters. In Chapter 1 we explore the grounds for the book in more detail, with a brief discussion of time and objects in archaeology and philosophy. We move from a consideration of archaeological clockmaking through the example of Ancient Corinth to the place objects hold with respect to the past. Turning to philosophy, we find a recapitulation of Harman's longstanding thesis that Martin Heidegger possesses no conception of time at all; the Heideggerian temporality of thrown projection is contrasted, in particular, with the philosophy of time found in Henri Bergson. Against the New Materialist conception of reality as being in constant flux, there is a discussion of the occasionalist tradition in which reality consists of a series of static though ephemeral poses that quickly pass away into something else. As another way of accounting for the irreversibility of time, the discussion moves on to the views of Lynn Margulis on serial endosymbiosis: when two previously autonomous organisms form a symbiotic union, we know we have stepped forward into a new world. Against this philosophical background, we contemplate a number of archaeological examples in which time arises from objects rather than the reverse.

In Chapter 2, "The Antiquity of Time," Witmore explores the fraught relation between archaeology and history, both of which ostensibly deal with the past, to offer a different understanding of archaeology and the time that is generated by things. Over the course of six discrete sections, Witmore moves through the line of disciplinary history, following a path whose route complicates the sequential model of time: through a temporal topology of the storied citadel of Mycenae, with the times of things found in the course of the citadel's excavations, onward into Michel Serres' notion of time as percolation, and finally towards a different definition of archaeology as exploring the antiquity of time alongside objects themselves.

In Chapter 3, Harman and Witmore shift to a dialogue format to discuss the implications of Chapter 2, beginning with the idea of an archaeology that is not primarily the study of the human past. For Witmore, archaeology is very much a discipline of the present that works with what is still available to us in order to imagine what might have been. The discussion ranges from the traditional Three Age System of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, to James G. Frazer's apparently linear conception of magic and then religion giving way in turn to science, to a possible tension between the notions of time as percolation and as topology found in the writings of Serres. Among other topics, Harman and Witmore discuss how periodization is established in archaeology, the discursive topography of the discipline, and how a situation where politics has become first philosophy drove some kindred spirits twenty or so years ago to return to things, under the influence of Serres and Bruno Latour. In closing, the authors discuss Harman's assessment that archaeology is best viewed as a "cold" medium in Marshall McLuhan's sense, since certain aspects of the discipline are lacking in completeness of detail.

In Harman's Chapter 4, "Objects as the Root of Time," he presents his view that time belongs to the surface rather than the depth of reality. This implies no denigration of time, since for OOO the surface of the world is the only place where anything can happen. After a summary of the fourfold model at the heart of OOO, of which time is one part, Harman responds to three specific critiques of the OOO model of time, as formulated respectively by Peter Wolfendale, Peter Gratton, and Arjen Kleinherenbrink. From there the chapter shifts to the much-discussed theory of the unreality of time proposed by J.M.E. McTaggart, supplemented by the OOO critique that his perspective shares too many of the assumptions of classical Empiricism. After giving an analogy of intermittently moved chess pieces to depict how objects are not actually in a state of constant flux, the chapter closes with a discussion of so-called "process philosophies," a term that mixes two very different types of theories: (a) the true philosophies of constant temporal flux, as with Bergson and his later devotees Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, and (b) those of Alfred North Whitehead, Latour, and even Heidegger, who are fully aware that reality changes frequently, but whose models of time focus instead on the internal complexity of individual instants.

Chapter 5 returns to dialogue format, recapitulating some of the alternatives to linear or sequential time already discussed: percolating, topological, and cyclical. What, Witmore asks, might OOO add to these alternatives? Harman offers three answers: (1) an epochal conception of time grounded in the constant change of human generations; (2) the possibility of a calmer relation to time (given that much of what happens proves to be unimportant) as opposed to the almost crazed models of constant flux that are currently in fashion; and (3) a conception of time as frequently reversible, given the constant possibility of reviving or retrieving seemingly dead past realities. Pressing forward into the central problem of how changes along the surface of reality can have retroactive effects on its depth, it is argued that all causation can be interpreted as the retroactive effect of a whole on its parts.6 Against the recent tendency to...