4. The Material Presence of the Past

Abstract

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a "return to things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the (ontological) status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to bruno latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics.To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person (dead or alive) in argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square.In recent decades we have tended to think about the presence of the past in terms of representation, but presence might be considered from within an emerging new paradigm that offers a viable alternative to representation. To show this I will consider the spatial dimension of presence-a presence that is in front of me, a presence of things. I will claim that, while a turn from representation to presence marks a change in our focus of attention, it is not necessarily an alternative to representation. Attending to presence reflects a need for concrete actions when merely intellectual considerations fail to effect changes in the world. Thus, I will focus my attention on the material presence of the past-on things. I am trying to rethink the material aspect of traces of the past in a context other than semiotics, discourse theory, or representation theory, and to focus the analysis of those traces on an aspect that is marginalized or neglected by traditional notions of the source. That is, I mean to focus on the materiality and thingness of the trace rather than on its textuality and content.

(The impossibility of) acting upon a story that we can believe

“…But the more time I spent on the issue, and the more time I spent especially on the future vision of technology (Simon 2018), the more pressing it became to recognize that the future vision of unprecedented change simply defies story form. respect to material objects and animals (Domanska 2006;. Such understanding of posthumanism is linked to a discourse within the disciplines still known as humanities and social sciences.…”

Estética, nuevos materiales y funcionalidad eficiente: la agencia medioambientalista de los objetos de Marjan van Aubel

“…Es también una propuesta teórica que se distancia de otras perspectivas de estudio asociadas a la cultura material, como la científico-positivista, que pretende la descripción, taxonomización e historización de la cosa; o la propuesta semiótica, que realiza una lectura de los objetos como texto, símbolo o metáfora, lo que desemboca paulatinamente en una percepción desmaterializada de las cosas (Domańska, 2006). Destacan en esta línea Daniel Miller (1987, 2005 e Ian Woodward (2007), quienes acentúan que las cosas no solo existen -aunque a menudo no seamos conscientes de su presenciay configuran nuestra realidad perceptible, sino que además poseen un fuerte poder performativo en tanto agentes sociales.…”

“…It is also a theoretical proposal that distances itself from other study perspectives associated with material culture, such as the scientificpositivist, that proposes the description, taxonomization and historization of the thing; or the semiotic proposal, that performs a reading of objects as text, symbol or metaphor, leading eventually to a de-materialised perception of things (Domańska, 2006). In this line, we find Daniel Miller (1987, 2005 and Ian Woodward (2007), who stress that things not only do exist -although we are often not conscious of their presence -and configure our perceptible reality, but they also possess a strong performative power as social agents.…”

Las imágenes como un modo de acción: las estatuas de guerreros castreños

“…Pero la ejecución del epígrafe también les sirve como un eficaz mecanismo de apropiación, singularización y vinculación con un objeto que filtra temporalidades del pasado, permitiendo hacer de este, un pasado no ausente (Domanska 2006). En un mismo acto, pasado y presente están en juego: la reutilización de un objeto pretérito como monumento funerario que se le añade un epígrafe con su nombre, permite al individuo indígena negociar su identidad de un modo muy concreto en un contexto de discrepancia y reconstitución de la misma.…”