Mediated Meaning – Objects in Contention

My purpose here is to set out a schema for a form of engaged practice within the field of archaeology and material culture studies, a process that I call Object Enabled Mediation. More broadly, this is a case for practical action – phronesis – and a methodology for contributing to the objectives of social justice, however these may be defined. The methodology of Object Enabled Mediation rests on four key concepts: duration, singularity, displacement and trace. Each of these has been partly articulated in recent writing in archaeology. The catalyst for integrating these concepts as a schema for engagement has been Mieke Bal’s work on political art, developed through her close reading of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s installations (Bal 2010). Through this, I show that creative opportunities for engagement occur along the faultlines that run through a wide range of contemporary contexts; the provocative idea of heterotopia that has intrigued social science since Foucault’s incomplete formulation half a century ago. As a particular form of intervention within a broader range of mediation practices, Object Enabled Mediation builds on the special and particular properties of the material world; the “unruliness of things”, whether everyday artefacts, images, monuments or cityscapes. Working with things and images within the political space of the faultline requires a slowing down of time, duration, to enable the possibilities in memory to flourish. Mediation by means of the material world also requires the avoidance of closure through using the tension between singularity and particularity, avoiding for a while the completion that comes with narrative and explanation, when “truth value circulates like electricity through a wire”. Within this political space, the properties of the trace are crucial – the “negative presence” that evokes memory without direct representation, allowing affect and the engagement which breaks down the stereotype and restores personhood.