Infra Dig: A Response to Gavin Lucas

"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. . . . Amongst the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the scandalous reception accorded to materialism."

—Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" ¹

"Base 8 is just like base 10, really. If you're missing two fingers."

—Tom Lehrer, "New Math"

Lucas's compelling critique of archaeology's words for itself leads me to ask two questions: 1. "Is what makes a word a word the fact that it's being used as a word or the fact that it's shaped like a word?" ² 2. What's time to a pig?

The second question is the punch line to a joke: Guy walking down a country road passes a farm. Farmer is standing underneath an apple tree, holding up a large pig; said pig is eating apples from the tree's branches. Guy asks the farmer what he's doing. Farmer replies, "My pig likes apples. I'm giving him some help here." Guy says, "But doesn't that take a lot of time?" Farmer says, "What's time to a pig?"

What the farmer means is "My pig has no sense of time. Your question is therefore a silly one." The joke is a joke because it reorients the subject of the question from the farmer to the pig—we understand time to be of concern to people, rather than farm animals; but the farmer, an egalitarian sort, is there to remind us that while pigs are not people too, they are part of history, and indeed may be occupying it far more fruitfully, ahem, than bipeds. Further, the fact that to a pig time means nothing is not only the point but, insofar as it is (qua punch line) the trump card, a position to be envied. The ostensible becomes a shell game (pig for farmer), and the ontological gets to kick the epistemological (knowing about time is mocked by time meaning nothing). At a further level, the ontological becomes, as it were, brute fact: this is what the farmer means when he chooses not to say "When's time to a pig?" The logical absurdity of giving time shape, according it what-ness, is laid bare by virtue of colloquial necessity. Humans can only speak to each other by making such mistakes.

The "'discovery' of prehistory" entailed, Lucas says, "the discovery of a new method of understanding the past: the analysis of material culture" (111). Lucas's central move thus links prehistory to ontology, which he sees as the fallout of prioritizing "material culture before text" (111). However, this form of privileging material culture ("in the specific context of archaeology, material culture was to have the upper hand" [111]) evinces the same limitations Lucas sees in the privileging of history as narrative. Indeed, to apply Lucas's canny observation that there is no difference between material culture as an object of scrutiny and as a method (prehistory "blurs the distinction between method and material" [111]), there is no difference between his understanding of an object as a shape or a mark, and as a sign. Another way to put this is to say that Lucas is torn between making plain "the radical project of modernity" as an "attempt to put material culture on an independent basis for understanding the past" (115) on the one hand and "highlight[ing] the close relationship material culture has with textuality, or discursivity" (115) on the other. Lucas does indeed see the relation as close; in fact he confuses them. Proceeding on the assumption that material culture involves a form of interpretation distinct from reading while at the same time failing to distinguish between a mark and a word, he is bound to both schism and...