False dilemmas? Or what COVID-19 can teach us about material theory, responsibility and ‘hard power’

Abstract

If there are any lingering doubts about the ability of non-humans to cause incalculable suffering by their own capacities, we need look no further than COVID-19, that microscopic, semiliving, spiky sphere of protein and RNA that has changed the world as we know it. By the same token, if there are any doubts about the locus of responsibility for harm in which nonhumans play a leading role, we need look no further than the 2020 public health crisis in the USA, in which moral outrage over the mishandling of the pandemic has been aimed directly at human (if inhumane) leaders. Why has the virus not been subject to moral judgement? Despite its irrefutable capacity to inflict harm, and thus the pandemic's distributed causality, there is no confusion regarding where accountability for preventable suffering resides. Nevertheless, we have taken this non-human object extremely seriously. And in so doing, we have heightened our attunement to 'hard power'-to the racism and injustices of health inequities that have left Black, Latinx and Indigenous bodies particularly vulnerable to morbidity and death. In their debate piece on the pitfalls of the 'new materialism', Fernández-Götz et al. (2020) advance two critiques of this disparate body of theory as it has been deployed in studies of Roman expansion. First, they proffer that the turn to 'things' absolves humans of responsibility for harm, including the damages inflicted by Roman conquest and subjection. Second, they submit that an undue focus on objects at the expense of humans works to marginalise 'hard power' and obscure inequality (in the Roman Empire and elsewhere), thereby undermining archaeology as a force for social change. Such critiques are, by now, familiar (Hodder 2014; Rekret 2016; Boysen 2018; Van Dyke in press). Yet the coronavirus crisis helps us to see that theoretical acrobatics may not be required to hold causation apart from culpability. It also teaches us that non-humans can, in fact, make injustice acutely manifest. In other words, the authors present us with two compelling dilemmas-but are they truly dilemmas? Before turning to this question, a historiographic observation is required. It is difficult to accept that the failure to confront dispossession, subjection, inequality and the predations of Roman conquest has much to do with the 'new materialism'. After all, Roman archaeology's 'postcolonial turn' of the 1990s emerged from similar critiques, and likewise foregrounded the infringements of imperial sovereignty, back when things were still fully passive and representational. Let us return to the coronavirus. Laidlaw (2010) and Krause (2011) can help us through the problem of responsibility. Both authors allow for a dimension of agency as distributed in the causal sense (in line with actor-network theory). But their formulations of agency bear differently upon questions of blame. For Laidlaw, the relational quality of agency is key to

Power, asymmetries and how to view the Roman world

“…This also touches upon the point, raised by Khatchadourian (2020), of diseases being essentially non-human historical agents with their own causality and historical trajectories. While this is undeniably true at the most basic level, archaeologists and historians are less interested in the history of bacteria and viruses such as Yersinia pestis or COVID-19 for their own sake, but because they affect human societies.…”

“…As Khatchadourian (2020: 1649–1652) rightly notes, “the failure to confront dispossession, subjection, inequality and the predations of Roman conquest” is certainly not a novel phenomenon. In our view, however, most ‘new materialist’ approaches have not (yet) sufficiently addressed the issue.…”

Ethics, Not Objects

“…However, we still need to hold the human shooter accountable! And it is absurd to hold the gun itself as equally responsible (for a similar argument using the contemporary example of the coronavirus, see Khatchadourian 2020).…”

A contemporary archaeology of pandemic

“…Considering current events, we situate this article alongside a growing body of anthropological and archaeological literature addressing the materiality of the coronavirus pandemic. Archaeologists quickly responded to COVID-19, critically approaching the impacts of its plastic waste (Schofield et al, 2021), the materiality of the virus as it impacted social inequality (Khatchadourian, 2020), and the ramifications for archaeologists themselves (Olsen, 2021). Initiating a body of work on COVID-19, Stacey Camp reflected on her personal experience and positionality to reveal how archaeological practice helped her process the disruption of the pandemic ( Camp, 2020; see also Angelo et al, 2021 ).…”