A POST-HISTORICAL QUERY ON DWELLING

Abstract

EAA (European Archaeological Association) Session #366—Chair: Paul Bouissac PREAMBLE—when I use the term ‘post-historical’ it is not in the sense of postmodern theory, but in the sense of Fredrik Barth (my mentor in fieldwork) who made the cons- picuous claim that historians have more to learn from anthropology, than anthropo- logists have from history (since anthropological knowledge is a bit ‘out of kilter’). I have presently moved on the assumption that the relation between archaeology and history might be evoked along similar lines. Mostly owing to the fact that archaeology, like anthropology, is a fieldwork-based science. Meaning that what is claimed as knowledge should at least partly be rooted in fieldwork. But then including artefacts. Moving from anthropology to archaeology has—for me—is based on three lines of query: 1) what does it mean to do fieldwork on books? 2) how to understand the gaps between a book as written, as made and as read? 3) how can we understand the spatial orientation in a book as a space unto itself (that contains its own reality)? In sum: can we understand the space within a book and the space beyond it, as a semiotic boundary, where the formation of memes can be studied, and foster a more sensorial readability of authors like Gilbert Simondon. I am thinking of the Mediaeval precedent that he gives to his notion of ‘information’ (i.e., with a formative impact). In this paper a way of diagramming the relationship between light, darkness and colour is proposed; in which some difficulties in Goethe’s Theory of Colour (1810) are being tentatively sorted out through the study of space (cf, brief for session #366): the study of the Book of Kells in the wake of a learning theatre with the Darkness Group at KHiO.