How can my use of archaeological reports to think about futures be connected to ideas I've been reading from Isabelle Stengers in Reclaiming Animism, where she discusses, as a philosopher of science, what can happen when ideas when they are written down; somehow I think they are.
Stengers says, ' Indeed, once "written down," ideas tempt us to associate them with definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing. This is all the more so in a world that is now saturated with texts and signs that are addressed to "anyone" - separating us from the "more-than_human" world to which ideas nevertheless belong. In order to reclaim animism, however, it is not sufficient to entertain an "idea" that would allow us to claim that we know about it - even for people like myself it is crucial to realise that my experience of writing is an animist experience, attesting to a "more-than-human" world.'
And,
'Reclaiming means recovering, and, in theis case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any expereince we care for, as "not ours" but rather as "animating " us, making us witness to what it not us. While such a recovery cannot be reduced to the entertaining of an idea, ertain ideas can further the process - and can protect it from becoming "demystified" as some fetishistic illusion. Such an idea is the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "assemblage" (the often discussed translation for the French "agencement".)
I write in my most recent assignment about this idea of assemblage,
Stengers suggests that ‘Another word for this kind of agency that doesn’t belong to us is animation.’ (2012, p7) Though I find this hard to really apply to some of my other research thoughts, the idea of agency that doesn’t belong to us is powerful and definitely feels part of this enquiry. From these dispersed agential thoughts, I return to the archive as landscape. I am the archivist is this landscape archive, and I re-activate the pieces I find by sitting slowly along side them. The mud, the rubbish, the rhyne water are, I suggest, referencing Stuchel (2019) ageing slowing through their material agency.
Perhaps this is it - those ideas and findings, in the form of archaeologists reports, were written down.They are taken from one time to another, to another, from discovery and analysis, to my reading, to my interpretation and rethinking of them. I access them, and think with them. I see the connections to land and living that are described in those reports and they energise me into thinking and making, that is I think, animating. When I am reading the written words, I am not reclaiming, I am making them work with my imagination to speculate on futures, to use them as a guide which has generous space set within it to permit my imagining.
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