Heritage, performance, design

“Let me tell you about Hadrian’s Wall…”

Michael Shanks

Stanford University

Revised version (2019) of the Reinwardt Memorial Lecture, 


Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam School of the Arts 2012

Introduction (2019)
This is a revised version of an essay presented as the annual Reinwardt Memorial lecture of 2012 to
the Reinwardt Academy, the specialist school of cultural heritage in Amsterdam School of the Arts
(AHK) . By way of an introduction let me sketch the context and aims of the talk, as well as offer
some updates for 2019.

This essay examines the ways we might experience the ruins and remains of the (archaeological)
past, how we might actively engage them, given current debates in and around what is not
inappropriately called the heritage industry. I draw upon a range of projects I’ve been involved in
since the 1990s to expand upon my key premise, that archaeologists do not discover the past, but
rather work with what remains, to various ends.

This premise, we might call it a pragmatic orientation upon what archaeologists do, indeed what
any of us do with the remains of the past, is well supported in the academic literature. An
orthodoxy, very much propagated in popular characterizations (Holtorf 2005, 2007) and promoted
by academic text books (Renfrew and Bahn 2012 for example), is that archaeologists discover the
past in their excavations and fieldwork, and establish knowledge of the past in their laboratory
science. A pragmatic understanding of archaeological work or process, in contrast, stresses
engagement, that archaeological work is a mode of production connecting past and present with a
view to the future (Lucas 2001, Hodder 1999, Shanks and McGuire 1996, Rathje et al 2012, Olsen et
al 2012, Preucel and Mrozowski 2012). There is a productive aspect to such work: remains are
resources for constructing catalogues, accounts, exhibitions, academic papers, narratives, movies,
artworks. And also a reproductive aspect: remains re-produce or, better, reiterate the past,
refreshing, introducing the past into the present, just as archaeologists may return to rework those
remains with hindsight, in the light of new discoveries of sites and finds, or in new models, with
new theories.

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I emphasize the creative component to such work. This is captured in the concept of the
archaeological imagination (Shanks 1995, 2012, 2019). A conjectural faculty or capacity to piece
together remains into meaningful forms, the archaeological imagination is a key component of
archaeological work, of our experiences of the past, our engagements with remains, sensory,
cognitive, and emotional or evaluative (Shanks 1992). We may call this affective and embodied
attunement to remains, to decay and persistence, to the possibility of recollection and
reconstruction, an archaeological sensibility. We encounter the past, excavate, observe, clean and
restore, gather and classify: imagination is a necessary component of this creative process or mode
of cultural production that is also well-conceived as the design of pasts-in-the-present, as will be
argued in this essay. The creative engagement with fragmentary remains, working with them,
denies a radical separation of a past that happened from our reworkings made of that past. The
archaeological imagination, conceived pragmatically and processually as working with what
remains, does not deliver things that are made up, fictive, illusory, that stand in opposition to a
“real” past; the archaeological imagination is the very faculty through which past worlds are made
real to us. The archaeological imagination frames our engagement with remains of the past, frames
our perception of the past, frames the possibility of making sense of the past.

Heritage is a key concept in connections made between past and present. What has come on the
heritage agenda since my presentation in 2012? I suggest that Alfredo Gonzàlez-Ruibal (2018 for a
survey) and Rodney Harrison (particularly 2013 and 2018) are great guides to the current issues in
the academic field of Heritage Studies. The politics of identity and representation remain central.
How are sites and artifacts, customs and values implicated in senses of identity, in people’s senses
of who they are — for in a nation state, in local community, in personal identity? Do you belong
here? Matters of origin, of indigeneity, of displacement and nostalgia are crucial concerns. Matters
of representation and agency – Who gets to appropriate and manage our remains of the past, our
cultural heritage, and to what ends? Whose interests get to be represented in the conservation and
promotion of particular cultural heritage, particular remains? This matter of agency cuts to the heart
of the cultural and personal politics of memory, identity, and representation of hegemonic and
marginalized interests.

The broader context is that of late or super modernity (Harrison and Schofield 2010, Gonzàlez-
Ruibal 2018, Chapter 1). Common experiences remain those of globalist interconnection (how
might we be distinctive individuals and communities given time-space compression and the
homogenizing effects of the global market that makes everything seem the same?), challenges to
governance and the nation state, especially from financial and corporate interests (just who is in
charge, if anyone?), conflict generating and arising from war, migration and immigration, diaspora
and displacement (consider stresses even in the traditionally strong liberal democracies of Europe),
radically disruptive experiences in everyday life, including those generated by information
technology.

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I don’t think it is overly simplifying to identify two key and connected matters directly affecting the
fields of archaeology and heritage.

• Pervasive commodification of all aspects of everyday life in what is appropriately called the
global experience economy.

• Universalizing modes of data acquisition and information processing In the service of corporate
business interests in profit and growth, in the service of governing and regulating populations.

Both generate deep senses of alienation, crises in senses of agency, rooted in a disconnection
between locally grounded experiences of self and community, and accounts and histories that
claim universal application. Consider how the universal human values of cultural achievement
supposedly represented by World Heritage Sites and academic treatments of the past can run
counter to locally-based experiences of cultural heterogeneity and diversity (Harrison 2013,
Chapters 6 and 7). Consider how a search for local roots can run counter to experiences of
displacement and rootlessness, with cultural niches and borders emphasized as a counter to
mobility, and prompting calls for bridge-building (as in the official agenda of the 2017 meetings of
the European Association of Archaeologists in Maastricht). Consider how a purchased and
commodified experience may not at all answer the search for authentic belonging (Shanks 1992,
126-130).

While Gonzàlez-Ruibal and Harrison rightly mark these features as characteristic of contemporary
modernity, they have deep roots. In my book The Archaeological Imagination (2012, also Shanks
and Witmore 2010b) I offered an examination of the evolution of an antiquarian into an
archaeological mindset from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries in and around the
borders between England and Scotland. I tracked detailed archaeological debates about how the
past might be reconstructed from remains and ruins, debates about accuracy, authority,
authenticity, insiders and outsiders, locals and experts, and ancient ancestries embodied in text
and artifact. Who was speaking for whom when they spoke about the past, and on what basis?
What did it mean to be an indigenous native? How did this matter of voice and (political)
representation relate to “globalist” forces such as the Roman Catholic Church, to imperialist
ambitions of the likes of the Roman and British empires? Deeply implicated were questions of
record and witnessing, legal and ethical matters - Whom and what do you believe about your past?
And on what basis? For the key concern was the mobilization of empirical research, grounded in
universal principles of reason, in the service of knowledge of history and community, of region and
nation state, and directly pertinent to government and administration. Harrison offers a concise
summary of such connections between knowledge practices associated with archaeology and
heritage and governmental apparatuses as they developed later from the nineteenth century (2018,
also Shanks and Witmore 2010b). The challenge of articulating local and global, of developing
locally rooted knowledge practices is taken up in this essay (particularly though the concept of site-

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specificity). And I do also briefly attempt to trace the genealogy of such a concern in and through
European Romanticism.

I will end this introduction with an outline of three foundations for addressing all these matters in
the political economy and cultural politics of heritage and archaeology. They are explored in this
essay and may be called, loosely, paradigms. It should be clear that they relate to my premise that
archaeologists do not discover the past so much as work with what remains.

Process and relations

Since the 1970s the field of Science Studies has established an understanding of science and
technology as situated practices, scientific knowledge a social achievement rather than a discovery
of the way things have always been, technology a mobilization of resources around people’s
perceived needs and desires as much as an application of science in the service of innovation and
to engineer solutions to problems. This is the context for the premise of a pragmatic understanding
of archaeology with which I began this Introduction.

Also since the 1970s the academic fields of Material Culture Studies and Design Studies have
addressed the character of things, exploring the rich heterogeneous associations, the
(im)materialities, the interplay of maker and material, agent and object hood at the heart of
making, creativity, cultural experiences. Joining the challenge to the radical Cartesian separations of
mind and matter, culture and nature, subjective experience from the natural physical world, person
from artifact, present interests from the remains of the past, archaeologists have asked how
artifacts can have agency, proposing a fundamental symmetry between human and artifact,
orienting their archaeological interests on objects themselves (in object-oriented ontologies).
Some archaeologists are less interested now in seeking the maker behind the artifact, in
determining the human intentions, values expressed or represented in and by an artifact, and are
more oriented upon exploring relational assemblages or actor networks (a representative selection
of recent overviews: Malafouris 2013, Witmore 2007, Knappett and Malafouris 2008, Olsen 2010,
Olsen et al 2012, Hodder 2012, Shanks 1992, 1998).

These shifts in Science Studies, Material Culture Studies, Design Studies are part of the current
resurgence of support for a process-relational paradigm, associated with American Pragmatists
William James, John Dewey through to Richard Rorty, A.N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Giles Deleuze,
Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers. We might consider the works of Bruno Latour (such as 1987, 2005,
2013) as exemplary in this field.

The modus operandi of this paradigm is to seek verbs, not nouns. Look to practices and processes,
dynamic flows of energy and resources, if you wish to understand any phenomenon. This thesis
challenges the primacy that is often given to representation, in the premise, for example, that
scientific knowledge represents the essential qualities of timeless nature, that archaeology

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discovers, depicts, represents the past. Instead, the call is to focus upon iterative relations and
engagements, capacities to produce, make, design. In this regard, archaeological work involves
creative processes that constantly re-articulate pasts and presents, producing all manner of things
without necessarily representing the past in a mimetic fashion.

Such a post-representational archaeology might seek to explore assemblages of relationships

(Shanks 2004 as a case study), in a resurgent interest in ontology, asking – Just what is an artifact?
(Shanks 1992a, 1992b, 1995c, 1999 for a Deleuzian nomadics of an ancient perfume jar; Pearson
and Shanks 2014 for a 1956 Chevrolet treated as active matter and “total social fact”).
Archaeologists might realize their ambitions as scientists in modeling, rather than representing the
past (Shanks and Devore 2020; see comments in the essay on eidetics). We might seek less to
represent and more to intervene in what is going on.

Performance and design

Mike Pearson and I proposed (2001) that performance/performativity is a powerful constellation of

concepts, theory and practice for understanding the dynamics of archaeological work with past
remains in our definition of theatre/archaeology as the re-articulation of fragments of the past, of
ruins, remains, memories, as real-time event. Performance comprises dramaturgy, scenography,
mediation, choreography, narrative and world building — workings in and around heterogeneous
assemblages of people, settings and scenarios, props, in and around the dynamics of presence/
absence (Giannachi, Kaye and Shanks 2012). Here it might be noted that Karen Barad, in her
account of quantum philosophy and particularly the experience of quantum entanglement (2007),
proposes that the implication of scientific practice in the ontology of objects of research requires a
performative paradigm, the world (re)enacted in the performance of science, just as the past is
(re)enacted in archaeological practices.

This creative agency is well conceived, I suggest, as design, with design treated as pragmatics,
project management, research-based (needs finding and framing possibilities), experimental and
exploratory, collaborative, transdisciplinary. Performance design is practice oriented. As well as
theatre/archaeology, a personal background to this essay is my ongoing interest in speculative
design (Dunne and Raby 2013), and my support for the work of Annemartine van Kesteren, Design
Curator at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in and around design as transformative
intervention (Van Kesteren 2017).

Experience and agency

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore (Gilmore and Pine 2007, Pine and Gilmore 2011) have viewed and
analysed the contemporary experience economy under a performance paradigm: we build theaters
of experience in the dramaturgy and scenography of everyday life. Experience, as a key component
of an orientation on process and relationality, is about lifeworld as engagement, connecting with
things, through modes and media, mediation; experience is eventful, mobilizing the constitutive

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imagination, rooted in the forms of the cultural imaginary that both frame and are produced in our
quotidian practice and understanding (Svabo and Shanks 2014).

Our capacity or agency to forge our own authentic and genuine pasts-for-the present and future
involves a phenomenological focus upon experiencing the past. Our archaeological agency in
working with what remains, to explain, to interpret, to make manifest, to engage, to enchant is
situated, local, compromised, differentially resourced. Strictly this thesis is “post
phenomenological” in that it questions the primacy of a self-contained human subject with an
essential identity experiencing an external object world. Instead we should conceive the
experiencing subject as distributed through environments (scenographies), events and
experiences-as-engagements (dramaturgies). This is the significance of the concept of
performativity (after Butler 1990, Austin 1971 and Searle 1979) — identities are constantly re-
imagined, re-performed, re-created, distributed through ongoing experiences, engagements,
relationships, assemblages of people and all manner of things. We are part of what we seek to
understand; the past is constantly remade in our ongoing experience of remains. This experience-
agency paradigm involves a focus upon (cognitive) information processing, affective qualities of
things and environments, inherent evaluative (emotional and embodied) dispositions towards
things, bodily engagement in experiencing and making. In this regard our archaeological
imagination is about thinking, sensing, feeling, with remains.

The three paradigms of process-relations, performance-design, experience-agency suggest that we

begin in medias res, with the particularities of experience, rather than from abstract first principles.
Accordingly this essay starts with a particular experience, a memory of a ruin in a landscape.

Let me tell you about Hadrian’s Wall …

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The allure of ruins

Image 1. Looking back at Crag Lough past Steel Rigg, Hadrian's Wall, in the English borders with
Scotland. 5.30 am on a July morning in 2011. An anxiety of attraction.

Northumberland National Park, in England’s border county with Scotland. It is 5.30 am on a July
morning in 2011. I am still on California time and the jet lag has me out running along what is left of
the Roman frontier, Hadrian’s Wall, World Heritage Site.

I am alone this morning, though Steel Rigg, down the hill in my photograph, will later bustle with
visitors. This is now a ludic landscape of leisure and recreation. The igneous ridge of the Whin Sill
makes this the most picturesque of landscapes, in the care of the National Trust, the charitable
organization dedicated to conserving coastline, countryside and heritage properties, and one of
the largest landowners in the UK.

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But the attraction, the allure of this vista bothers me. It is just as the picturesque should be, but it is
too right, too prepared, too easy to photograph. The framed view, with the wall leading off into the
distance over the rolling craggy terrain, overpowers everything else and makes it generic, even
clichéd.

I am very aware of the genealogy of this aesthetic and its politics. The compositional grammar of
landscape, developed in high-cultural fine arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, puts
me off. The careful framing, theatrically, as of a proscenium arch, with strong perspective (linear
and atmospheric), layered planes and lofty viewpoint locates me back and up from the
composition, as in an auditorium, and never fully involved. At the same time the composition pulls
me into the frame, particularly through the depth of the perspective, but somewhat artificially,
because this is aesthetic device, not embodied engagement. Some stock narratives or scenarios
are embedded in such landscapes: return and retreat into repose; historical adventure; escape into
melancholic, lost pasts; the walk to Eden; recreational pleasures. This aesthetic offers a resolution
of tensions and contradictions between past and present (the remains of Rome here in this
carefully conserved countryside), between city and country, real and ideal, distance and intimacy,
the everyday and the allegorical (ruins of imperial aspiration). Any working community is absent;
the viewer is abstracted from what is being represented, removed in an escape from social and
historical reality, from the anonymous popular masses, from messy vernacular human and natural
detail that would upset the aesthetic.

I am very aware that this is a landscape of a particular conservation vision and effort in the mid-
nineteenth century, when John Clayton, local landowner, wealthy from the remodeling of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the industrial conurbation to the east, bought up sections of Hadrian’s Wall
to protect them from both neglect and active reuse through quarrying, and set about rebuilding the
monument, excavating its remains, managing its farms so as to preserve the past.

The anxiety is compounded by my suspicion of nostalgia. I know this land because I grew up here.
Many friends and family feel they were forced to leave the North East of England to escape the
depressed economic conditions of a region that has lost the industries that brought it prosperity in
its heyday. I have ended up a world away in the west of the United States and only return to
research and write, to revisit increasingly fragmentary memories and associations.

Returning to write about the Borders. This has long been a troubled region. Immediately before me,
looking back down into the image, is the eighteenth-century Military Road, much of it built on the
Roman wall itself. The Jacobite rebellions of the Scottish Stuarts in 1715 and 1745, supported by
Catholic France, had threatened the Hanoverian monarchy in England. Their failure brought
widespread state effort to control land and community. Military infrastructures, roads and forts,
were built, the land was mapped, local culture was suppressed and people evicted from their
homes in Scotland. And for centuries these had been ‘debatable lands’, contested, undecided,

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between the warring states of Scotland and England. Here the banditry of clans of ‘Moss Troopers’
held sway, at least in the ballads and folklore collected from the eighteenth century by the likes of
Bishop Thomas Percy and Sir Walter Scott, following their romantic interest in nationalism and
regional identity. My research digs into these pasts, in debt to the wealth of archival work of local
historians and two centuries of archaeological endeavor (Shanks 2012).

Of course a photograph on a walk by a World Heritage Site in a National Park cannot convey all this.
Or can it? What would such an image, or set of images be? Perhaps I should resist the temptation
to take a photograph that actively directs attention away from the historical realities of the
landscape. But I do also feel the invitation, the allure of the mist over Crag Lough at Hot Bank, there
in the distance. A challenge to re-present.

A genealogy of heritage
Constituted in the eighteenth century and here before me in a landscape are the trace elements of
a sensibility, a set of sometimes contradictory dispositions towards pasts-in-presents. Matters of
property, ownership and access are at the core, and conditioned by how the land is perceived and
experienced, whether by owner, worker, or visitor. The land, its buildings and artifacts are
immediately connected with events, stories and histories, folklore, and even an aesthetic of
engagement, the picturesque. Certain hegemonic interests may prevail as they do here: the vision
of John Clayton, for example, to own and conserve this landscape, or the policies of General Wade
who modified the landscape two hundred years ago and more in that effort of military suppression
that I have just mentioned. The establishment of a state National Park and the inheritance by the
National Trust of a legacy countryside to be conserved for a visiting public introduce the problem of
representing and reconciling stakeholder interests. This has involved the development of
management practices related to local, national, and international policies and recommendations,
regional economic planning for tourism, for example, or the implications of listing as a World
Heritage Site according to a notion of outstanding universal value to humanity. Expert professional
authorities, such as academics, offer interpretation and analysis that guide the presentation of the
land, its cultural and natural aspects, to resident communities and visitors. The reception may of
course vary, as may the degree of consultation and collaboration between managing authorities
and their constituencies or clients. All of this relates to the qualities of engagement with a land like
this. Some may feel alienated and excluded. The question might be asked, for example — How
relevant is a Roman imperial past to the modern North East? Others may appreciate the free and
open access to landscapes enhanced by historical and archaeological depth and richness, and how
these can contribute to community and individual well-being (consider the extraordinarily sensitive
appreciation of these matters in the works of Richard Hingley 2012, 2015a, 2015b).

This has all, of course, come to be called heritage management, but mainly over the last 50 years,
since the acknowledgement of a growing heritage industry. I fear that associating these matters

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with the relatively recently formalized concept and practice of heritage can disguise their origin,
genealogy and scope. Elsewhere I have described this field as an archaeological or, more precisely,
an antiquarian sensibility and imagination that reaches back to the constitution of modern
industrial Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Shanks 2012). This is why I have
begun with a particular image taken early one morning, and with a concern that troubles me, this
anxiety of allure. Acknowledgement of the genealogy of this experience of the past, this active
reconstruction of the past is, I am going to suggest, a means to deal with it and some of the related
concerns in contemporary heritage. In particular the challenge is to reconcile the heterogeneity of
local experiences of the past-in-the-present with the universal values attributed to heritage by the
likes of the World Heritage Convention of 1972 (Labadi 2015), and by what Laura Jane Smith calls
authorized heritage discourse (2006), the paradigm of concepts, values and practices defining
heritage shared and reproduced by hegemonic transnational and state cultural agencies like
UNESCO, the professions involved in heritage management, and mainstream academia.

So I want to associate the heritage industry with broader shifts in the qualities of archaeological
experiences over the last two centuries. To this end I turn to the concept of ideology.

Ideology critique and contemporary modernity

In our book of 1987, Reconstructing Archaeology, Chris Tilley and I adopted a critical stand on the
heritage industry. In what was becoming a standard basis of critique, we foregrounded contrasts
between history and heritage, professional and popular, reality and illusion, authentic and
superficial, past and present, proposing that heritage institutions and productions tend to prefer
the congenial and popular, even populist reception of the past over historical and archaeological
authenticity. Steel Rigg becomes a vista upon the greatness of Rome seen at its most northerly
extension. We did not, however, champion the interests of the professional expert in offering such
an authentic past, and instead questioned the neutrality of academic and professional discourse.
We emphasized how heritage productions can be part of a broader and modern phenomenon of
commodification and alienation, where dynamic relationships, here between past and present,
buildings and remains and experiences today, can be broken, reduced to static components
defined according to their commodity value. In the heritage industry, the past is considered made,
managed and paid for just like any other commodity, we argued. This abstraction of what can be
rich experiences or engagements is their human impoverishment. It is the alienation of the past
from its dynamic constitution in people’s social practice and cultural experience today.

I think it is a fair summary that since then the field of Heritage Studies has questioned these
oppositions (Fairclough, Harrison, Jameson and Schofield 2008, Meskell 2015; consider particularly
Harrison’s synthesis and manifesto for critical heritage studies (2013)). It is acknowledged that
there has been too much emphasis upon heritage being predominantly about the rights and
responsibilities of property ownership. The focus has been too much on sites, buildings, artifacts,

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and collections as the legacy of the past to the future. It is now accepted that recognition of
intangible heritage (Smith and Akagawa 2009), such as cultural memories and traditions embodied
in festivals and events, entails looking at cultural production as much as cultural products, even
when such practice is indeed associated with the appropriation, as cultural capital, of the past by
contemporary sectional interests.

Take again the experience with which I began—encountering an ancient monument in a managed
landscape. I am undoubtedly in a heritage environment, but the past is not easily separated from
the flow of my ongoing experience. The Roman past is authentically present, as are the traces of
many other pasts before and after. I am not looking at a distortion of the past, for example, in
contrast to the academic accounts with which I am very familiar. It is not easy to claim that this is a
commodified past to be contrasted with one that finds its origin in the life experiences of a local
community.

What faces me looking down towards Steel Rigg is a very real and vital landscape, not a thin
heritage fake. It is a mélange of pasts and presents, a rich set of potential experiences subject to
competing claims. The mist that morning mingled with hauntings personal and shared, the
mnemonics of the ruins and marks on the land amidst old voices carried on the wind, just as in the
fabricated eighteenth-century epics of James Macpherson’s Ossian (Shanks 2012). Given the
qualifications I’ve just outlined, how might we deal with the tensions and contradictions, the
anxiety of allure, as I describe it?

I repeat the importance of realizing the genealogy of these heritage concerns in a long history of
engagements between past and present through early, industrial, and high/late/super modernity.
Chris Tilley and I approached the growing heritage industry of the 1980s from a twentieth-century
tradition of Western Marxist ideology critique. In particular we drew upon the critique of what
Frankfurter Schule members Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944 (1979) called the culture
industry—networks of facilities producing standardized cultural goods and experiences. I still think
we were right to treat heritage as always potentially and often actually ideological. By this I don’t
mean that, as ideology, heritage is a set of false ideas. To introduce the concept of ideology is a
means of directing critical attention at the way such a culture industry conditions, affects, mediates
our experiences and relationships with others, with the world around us, and with the past.

Let me explain. The concept of ideology is regularly associated with false consciousness, the
distortion of reality in the service of sectarian interests, legitimation of power promoted through
state apparatuses (for example museums and ministries of culture). Such a position could hold, for
example, that the celebration of the fine estates, homes and pursuits of the landed aristocracy so
associated with the National Trust in England is an aspect of what is typically called an authorized
heritage discourse (Smith 2006), a legitimation of existing class relationships behind the wealth
and property. Attention is diverted from class relationships to the entertaining spectacle of lifestyle.

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David Lowenthal, for example, strongly promoted the argument that heritage is not history, being
representation and not the reality of the past (especially 1996, also Hewison 1987). This concept of
ideology separates and opposes real and illusory pasts (history and heritage), authentic past and
superficial reception, expert authority and those in need of education about the distinction
between the real and the illusory.

I am suggesting that we misconstrue our rich archaeological experiences when we reduce them to
a distinction between the real past and our present and secondary representation of that past. The
richness of archaeological experiences involves affective as well as cognitive engagement with
what remains, with what has endured. I am not prepared to set myself over those less
knowledgeable about the history of the landscape who come to to enjoy the views from Steel Rigg.
Such experiences are real, are rooted in all sorts of more or less sophisticated understanding.
Heritage productions, such as a managed visit to Steel Rigg, are never just populist, commercial,
superficial fictions, but always work with historical narratives, sources, and authentic empirical
detail.

Close (phenomenological) attention to the complexity of experience suggests that ideology is

better conceived as referring to certain ways we connect with the world around us, and particularly
the conditions under which knowledge is created and mobilized. This is the significance, for me, of
the notion of ideology critique, because critique, especially since Kant, is well taken to refer to
investigation into the conditions of possible knowledge. Ideological practice frequently involves
reification (turning relationships into commodities, as just mentioned, for example) and alienation
(being disconnected from what we make and create, when we don’t recognize something as being
of our own making). Perhaps the key distinction is between ideology fixing things, alienating them,
reifying, turning relationships into things, and a more critical understanding of reality which
recognizes that knowledge is constructed, is the result of processes that are subject to change and
negotiation. This concerns agency: critique is about the creative construction of social and cultural
realities. People are creative agents and make the world they live in, but under conditions that they
have inherited, and over which they may have no control. Foregrounding experience and the
archaeological imagination in such creative agency suggests also that we conceive critique as an
active pragmatics as well as (passive) commentary.

So I suggest three premises. First, we begin with the complexity, cognitive, affective, and sensory,
of our experiences in and through the archaeological past. Second, in understanding heritage we
do indeed recognize that it is a culture industry first and foremost, with agencies, institutional and
corporate structures working on the remains of the past, and with individuals and communities as
cultural agents, experiencing, engaging, working on those remains and in relationship to those
institutional and corporate structures. Third, ideology critique directs our attention to the nature of
these productive relationships.

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There is a history to our archaeological experiences, our engagements with what remains. The
development of modern Western nation states has been associated with the radical reconfiguration
of tradition as a primary relationship between past and present. With Chris Witmore I have explored
elsewhere (2010b; Harrison 2013) the relevance of the notion of ‘risk society’ to understanding the
manifold of modern relationships with time, our senses of history, and the roles we may play—our
agency. The term ‘risk society’, associated with the pioneering work of Ulrich Beck (1992) and
Anthony Giddens (1991), is shorthand to describe escalating shifts in modernity centered upon
concern with manufactured risks and threats, and people’s relationship to them. Giddens
emphasizes changes involving an end of tradition that came with industrial modernity, in the sense
of the past no longer being guarantor of contemporary security, and with individuals being
increasingly held responsible for their own security in a world experienced as more and more
subject to risks to self, family and community. We are no longer simply subject to fate and nature,
but the cumulative effect of certain behaviors, policies and values is now considered to have a
deleterious effect on the stability of our human cultural ecology. Considerable attention is given to
the involvement of individuals, institutions and corporations in changes that seem to threaten the
very core of human being: genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, climate change and
environmental damage, the instabilities of a global monetary economy, international security in the
face of terrorism and nuclear proliferation. And we are more than ever concerned with the past-in-
the-present, with the potential loss of the past, its conservation, in the context of changes in the
way history itself is conceived and experienced.

Ideology critique involves attending to the conditions under which knowledge is produced.
Included are the practices of documenting, recording, inscribing, and representing the past. It was
two centuries and more of work done on the past that was presented to me on my outing that
morning: historical and archaeological documentation and narrative that I knew of, as well as
physical restoration and conservation. The allure that morning is the result of the success of a
certain argument or case that a particular experience of the present past is of value, as well as the
affective energy associated with that argument. And the cases are made through apparatuses of
data acquisition and processing, knowledge-making that render the world calculable,
understandable and manageable.

I will expand on this examination of the affective experience looking at Hadrian’s Wall. We can
follow Foucault here in seeing how the archaeological imagination is translated into knowledge
building practices, often in the service of administration and government (Harrison 2018).
Hadrian’s Wall is now protected by the state. A state-sponsored inventory of archaeological sites
and remains, embodied in archives and museums, researched by academics and experts,
authorized in legislation, can be used to establish their relative value, how significant they are in
human history, and so inform urban planning, for example, by suggesting what is worth preserving,
and what is disposable. More broadly, archaeological and anthropological collections have offered

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the means of classifying history and people into social, cultural, class, ethnic, gender categories
that can again be used as the basis for stories about the past as well as bureaucratic
administration.

So archaeological remains have come to be organized in a global time-space systematics of

timelines and distribution maps rooted in universally applicable systems of classification and
categorization, embodied in the fittings and architecture of museums, in the visitor facilities of
historic landscapes. World Heritage Sites are authorized as places are held to represent the
pinnacle of human achievement and civilization: the human experience captured in what are often
monumental ruins. Hadrian’s Wall is a World Heritage Site. Visitors may decide to come to witness
its authorized value.

This system of ordering and managing remains has nevertheless, indeed necessarily, come with a
growing awareness of threats both to the remains of the past and to the possibility of creating any
kind of meaningful knowledge of what happened in history. It started here with the likes of John
Clayton, using his wealth to conserve the Roman past. Every nation state now has legislation to
protect ancient sites and artifacts, under a not inappropriate perception that the remains of the
past are at risk from urban expansion, looting, fueled by a market for antiquities, war, too many
tourist visitors, and sheer neglect. Ruin and loss are key aspects of the contemporary
archaeological imagination.

Here we experience a threat or risk to the past itself, as well as to the possibility of creating rich
histories in the future. Systems for administering the remains of the past introduce a new dynamic
between presence and absence, between the presence of the remains of the past gathered in
museums, and the absence of past lives themselves, between archaeological finds and vast aeons
of human history begging to be filled with what has been lost or is forever gone. In contrast to
societies that experience the security of tradition, a past that serves as a reference for the present,
the past in contemporary society is often and conspicuously not a secure given at all. It is subject
to contemporary interests and concerns, infused with the interests of knowledge, a will to
knowledge, and also with erosive threatening interests. We have become aware that we need to
work on the past simply to have it with us; if nothing is done, it may well disappear, especially
when some want to break it up and sell it off to collectors or to build a new shopping mall. The
natural environment is not now seen as a given, but as a thoroughly socialized and institutionalized
habitat, a hybrid under the threat of human-induced climate change, pollution and over
development, raising concerns of culpability and blame, responsibility on the part of humanity to
care and curate. So too the remains of the past are a matter of concern, demanding planning and
foresight, another risk environment affecting whole populations’ needs and desires for history,
heritage, memories that offer orientation as much on the future as the past.

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The dual temporality of archaeological experiences, matters of fragile persistence and duration,
and actuality, the connection between past and present, here stand in contrast to senses of
tradition. The paradox or contradiction is that the control that systematic knowledge affords, for
example, in managing the erosive impact of development or of the trade in illicit antiquities on the
possibility of a past in the future, comes at the cost of a sense of ontological security. It is not just
that the past (in the present) is threatened; senses of personal and community identity are
threatened, when the continuity of the past is the source of such identity. In such circumstances
state, business and non-profit agencies such as the National Trust in the UK can offer a sense of
security in the protective legislation, but perhaps more in the categorization, regulation, and
administration that goes with the expert systems of information, knowledge, and interpretation.
The growth of systems of calculation, management and control is intimately connected with
growing matters of political, social, cultural and indeed ontological insecurity.

The security threat which individuals face today is, at base, a threat to their very identity because of
the ways in which these abstract systems of knowledge work. When who you are, including your
history, is no longer given by traditional institutions and cultures, but is constantly at risk, if who
and what you are is subject to changing expert research, to loss of employment, to war, to
displacement from where your family traditionally belonged, the challenge to individuals is to
constantly construct and reconstruct their own identity. The growing absence of traditional sources
of authority, a durable and persistent past, in answering who we are, accompanies a growing
emphasis upon the individual to take responsibility for self and decisions, to monitor their self, to
self-reflect and to assert their own agency, exercise discipline in being who they are, project their
identity in and through social media. This responsibility is, of course, full of risk. You might not get it
right. You might not even be able to create a coherent and secure sense of self identity, not least
because you may not have the resources: the possibility of asserting individual agency is seriously
circumscribed by horizontal and vertical divisions in society, by class, gender and ethnicity.

Why am I connecting these conditions of the cultural production of the past with ideology critique?
Here I introduce a key aspect of an archaeological ethics: care. I care about the past on the basis of
its crucial importance to our present and future. I believe that many others share a care and
concern to identify and facilitate the creation of experiences of the past and the present that make
life richer. We can bear witness to lost and forgotten pasts. We can facilitate many more people’s
creative involvement in making pasts their own. Such an ethics of care is about wellbeing,
empathy, compassion with others, and is less focused on establishing and defending claims to
knowledge and (intellectual) property.

Critical romance
Let me stay a little longer with Hadrian’s Wall. This is a heartland of the picturesque and the
romantic. But the romantic is too easily reduced to an aesthetic formula, that algorithm of

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ideological engagement with place that I just outlined. It is too easy to reduce the allure of the
picturesque to the visuality of the property owner, or to the tourist gaze, alienated and parasitic
(how could I not mention here John Berger’s ever so influential treatment of the picturesque
(1972)). Just as I suggest that we need to connect contemporary heritage to its origins in
seventeenth and eighteenth-century modernity, so too we need to recognize a long and complex
genealogy of romantic engagement with time and place.

Image 2. Lindisfarne, Insula Sacra, Northumberland UK. The later medieval priory, after an
eighteenth-century aesthetic.

Consider an archetypical northern romantic, the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth walked. His
poem (ostensibly and not actually) about Tintern Abbey (1798), probably the best known work by
one of the foremost English poets, deals not with the picturesque ruins, famous as a tourist

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destination in his day at the banks of the River Wye, so much as the synaesthetic and constitutive
imagination (Shanks 2019):

…all the mighty world 


Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, 

And what perceive 

(lines 105–7)

Revisiting the river above the ruins is an instance of how place engenders certain responses in us,
particularly through memory, and is dependent upon our creative apprehension that organizes the
very substance of experience:

Once again 

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 

That on a wild secluded scene impress 

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect 

The landscape with the quiet of the sky’

(lines 4–8)

As he walks and looks, Wordsworth deals in the topology of time—the folding of time, how pasts
and presents meet in the composition of the ‘figure in the landscape’:

…

for thou art with me, here, upon the banks 

Of this fair river.’

(lines 114-5)

And how such encounters are ultimately incomprehensible—sublime—prompting us to restlessly

experiment with our responses, representations, reflections:

I cannot paint 

What then I was.

(line 75–6)

Not for this 


Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts 

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, 

Abundant recompense.

(lines 85-8)

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This primary concern with the process of working on the past in experiences of place and
temporality is just what I am exploring in this essay.

Walter Scott, writing about the landscapes to the north of my border vista, invented the romantic
historical novel in the first decades of the nineteenth century and can be credited with much that
came to be associated, authentically or not, with Scottish identity. But his poems and novels do not
just offer simple romantic melodrama so much as a serious investigation of the shape of history, of
historicity, our involvement in social and cultural change. English neo-romantic writers and artists
after the First World War—favorites of mine include Paul Nash and John Piper — have been
associated with an elite, nostalgic and conservative nationalism, celebrating an anti-industrial rural
Englishness of countryside, village and parish church. But in a tour-de-force of heritage
commentary Raph Samuel (1994) points out their political subtlety and critical consciousness of
the options open to the arts in the 1920s and ‘30s and after (also, more particularly, Harris 2010).

Again, I suggest we resist the temptation to reduce Scott and these other romantics to easy
formulaic judgement rooted in oppositions between real and represented, truth and ideology, and
instead appreciate, with empathy, the potential complexity of experience and its mediation in
poem, novel, print, painting.

This is how I summarize a critically romantic attitude (1995b, Pearson and Shanks 2001):

• local self-assertion as opposed to universal systems (offering definitive solutions);

• an attention to the ordinary and the particular;

• an interest in the darker side of experience in the sense of that remainder which always escapes
the claims of a rational system;

• defamiliarizing what is taken as given, revealing the equivocal nature of things and experience;

• reality conceived, genealogically, as historical process;

• an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy, because of the impossibility of any final account
of things.

My point is again that we are in a long tradition of work upon the tensions between past and
present, and upon our creative agency in history. Romantic experiment is part of a discourse
predisposed toward reworking the given, reworking the past, fighting Byronically for a past-in-the-
present, with Scott working on manuscripts, publishing stories, reaching out to ordinary audiences
on topics of historical plot and everyday ways of life in times past and present, with landowner-
industrialist John Clayton rebuilding, intervening in land management, in city planning, building
museums, gathering collections.

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Here art, literature, cultural work are informed practice (or praxis), not simply illustration and
reflection, but aimed at throwing light upon the past in experiences, active engagements, in
authentic work upon the past, challenging reification and alienation. We might recall the words of
romantic political economist Marx and industrialist Engels, that philosophers only interpreted the
world, whereas the point is to change it.

Image 3. Jedburgh Abbey, Scottish Borders. After John Piper.

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Image 4. Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland UK, as rebuilt by John Clayton in the nineteenth century.
After Paul Nash.

Working with what remains

Archaeologists work with the remains of the past. As does the heritage industry. Both are more
about the past-in-the-present, and with a care for the future of the past, than they are about the
past per se. This was the basic proposition of my book Experiencing the Past (1992), and Laurent
Olivier has outlined archaeology as memory practice in his marvelous reading of Bergson and
Benjamin (2011). Focusing on processes and practices that connect past and present reveals how
many different cultural fields share an archaeological sensibility or archaeological outlook. These
are embodied practices, which is why I called my book Experiencing the Past—they are compounds
of skills, cognition and psychology, emotional disposition, social and cultural contexts—hand,
heart, and mind realized in fieldwork, writings and narratives, images, collections, exhibitions, and
a whole lot more. Working with what remains — this craft of archaeology (McGuire and Shanks
1996) is so pervasive that it is quite possible to claim that we are all archaeologists in the modern
world, given the way that any relationship with the past has become questionable.

In working with what remains, we are all archaeologists. Or potentially: not everyone can engage in
archaeological practices, working with what remains, with the same agency. So while academic
archaeologists are few and subscribe to a narrow disciplinary discourse, they have access to
resources and funding far beyond those of ordinary people; the disciplinary standing of an

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archaeologist is often associated with this capacity to organize and manage excavations of the
past. State agencies, such as ministries of culture, and international agencies such as UNESCO,
have extraordinary capacity to manage engagements with the past. A small community may have
very limited sovereignty over its past outside the remit of state agencies. This matter of agency cuts
to the heart of the cultural and personal politics of memory, identity, and representation of
hegemonic and marginalized interests.

According primacy to experiences of working with what remains implicates those studies of
science, especially after Thomas Kuhn (1970), that seek an understanding of science by giving
precedence not to formal structure of argument, to theory and philosophy of science, but to
mundane scientific practices and processes, running labs, finding funding, delivering research
papers: science as productive work, with knowledge as social achievement (Rathje et al 2012 for
archaeology). How might this inform the way we do archaeology, the way we work with what
remains in archaeology and in heritage? Or, to put it another way, how might we act if
archaeological science is not merely the discovery of the past, but creative and productive
practice? I suggest we look to a performance paradigm.

In 1993 I met Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas, Art Directors of theatre company Brith Gof. In a
tradition of European performance that draws on Artaud, Brecht and Grotowski, they begin (though
Cliff died in 2002) not with dramatic scripts, but deliver performances designed for particular
locales—works of site-specific physical theatre (Pearson 2010). As a calling card back then in 1993
Mike brought me, as an introduction to his work, a video, titled Pax TV, that dealt with the death of
a mother in a house in Wales through a complex composite of vertically tracking camera shots of a
bedroom, floating frames of scenes from completely different contexts, with recited texts that ran
across the screen. It was a complex and layered evocation of an everyday event, and presented in a
way that raised questions of how media can ever offer a fitting record or document, act as a fitting
legacy of even something so ordinary as death and memory. At the heart of Mike and Cliff’s work
are questions of the performance of the past, the object and origin of performance (in a script, to
represent an event?), the adequacy of any medium to document performance. They are concerned
with how the past is actively mobilized in the present, memories and documents performed,
revived, re-enacted, restated, so as to conserve something of the past that might otherwise be lost
and forgotten. Created in Wales, a country and culture in tense relationship with hegemonic
England, their artwork was also explicitly intended as ideology critique in the sense I have just
outlined—seeking to raise matters that are overlooked or suppressed, with deep human richness
(Pearson 2007, 2013).

And performance, happening in the now, is always in a state of disappearance. It is over as soon as
it happens, leaving temporal lacunae, then, now, after. Performance always implies an archaeology
—of what comes after the event. And Cliff and Mike had a challenge: twenty years of their

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performance artwork had left little in the way of archive. They were very interested in how
performance and documentation can be connected, working on what remains of performance.

So we started to explore how performance is a paradigm of certain kinds of cultural production and
practice closely allied to archaeology and heritage.

Image 5. Pax: the mother, the earth, the angel. A work for TV by Brith Gof. BBC broadcast 1994.
Video still.

Performing ruins—site specifics

Cliff, Mike and I met in Lampeter, home to a small campus of the University of Wales out in the rural
west. Locally there was an upland landscape, appropriated and massively transformed by a
government agency, what came to be called Forest Enterprise, in the second half of the last century.
The farms were compulsorily purchased, people were moved out, and the land was buried under
vast plantations of Sitka spruce, the Clywedog Plantation. It was 1992, the harvesting had begun
and the ruined buildings were coming to light again. The sycamore hedges had grown out to turn
the farmyard of Esgair Fraith (‘speckled ridge’) into a shaded copse damp with the moss of decay.
Friends introduced the place to us—a picturesque destination for a weekend outing, and a mute
witness to dispossession and loss, to forgotten community trauma.

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The place was remote, miles from a public road up a forest track. Historically inconsequential on its
own, home to only a few poor families since the nineteenth century (these uplands were not
prosperous farming country), the ruin represented a regular feature of rural Wales. Many
communities had been so treated, forced out and away to make room for cash-cropping
plantations or reservoirs serving English conurbations or for industrial operations. But the ruin and
the unpopulated upland landscape can be made to offer picturesque vistas that do not so much
conceal their historical trauma as divert attention, reframe, remove events.

Esgair Fraith became a reference for us, to which we repeatedly returned. How do you visit such a
place? What do you do there? How do you tell others? Questions of performing land and the past
(Pearson and Shanks 1996, Pearson 2011).

Image 6. Esgair Fraith (Speckled Ridge), Clywedog Plantation, Llanfair Clydogau, Wales. Farm
buildings acquired by compulsory purchase and forced eviction for UK government agency Forest
Enterprise. Buried lives.

One major work of intervention in the old farm at Esgair Fraith itself was Tri Bywyd (‘Three Lives’), a
site-specific performance by Brith Gof, in Welsh and English, run over three nights in October 1995.
Two temporary architectures, designed by Cliff McLucas (after Bernard Tschumi), were introduced at
the farm: 16 meters high steel scaffolding cubes, running through the ruin and among the trees.

23 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

They were made up with floors and rudimentary features—stairs, furniture, lighting. These three
‘houses’, including the site itself, became the setting for three interpenetrating and episodic
performances, each involving three sections of thirteen two-minute parts, with physical work,
commentary and spoken source materials (records, police statements, newspaper accounts), and
amplified sound track. There were five live performers, including two local actors who had known
Esgair Fraith in the 1930s and ‘40s. Other items: a dead sheep and various artifacts, including
flares, book, buckets of milk, sheets and a pistol. A hundred people were seated in an auditorium
built of scaffolding running through the neighboring conifer plantation. Buses bringing the
audience were parked in a quarry over the ridge, where also were sited the electricity generators.

The three located lives. One. 1869: Lletherneuadd Uchaf, a cottage farm by the village of Llanfiangel
ar Arth, near Pencader, west Wales. Site of the death of Sarah Jacob, who, it is said, survived
without food or water for two years, one month and one week. She died when nurses from St Guy’s
hospital London locked her in her bedroom and watched her starve to death (she had most
probably been living off milk from the dairy at the back of the traditional longhouse which she
visited during the night). Two. 1995: Esgair Fraith, Llanfair Clydogau, Lampeter. A local farmer driven
to suicide. Small economically unviable farms in rural Wales have driven many to the city; it is little
reported that those left behind find it difficult to make a living, to find partners and family life, and
regularly fall into depression. Three. St Valentines Day, 1988: 7 James Street, Butetown, Cardiff
docklands, site of the murder of Lynette White, and associated with miscarriage of justice in the
notorious and false conviction of ‘The Cardiff Three’.


24 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

Images 7. 8. 9. 10. Tri Bywyd (Three Lives): site specific performance by Birth Gof, October 1995, at
Esgair Fraith, farmstead, west Wales.

25 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

What’s the point here? Let me comment upon site-specific performances. They are created outside
the traditional theatre and auditorium, in social situations or architectural contexts, both used and
disused: they are industrial, ludic, religious; mundane, exceptional; inhabited, abandoned. The
specificity of performance is in the degree to which use is made of the particular nature—historical,
environmental, architectural, spatial, functional, organizational—of the site in the themes,
dramaturgical structures and staging arrangements. Site-specific performance uses size, shape,
proportion, atmosphere, occupancy and history to inspire creative engagements that confound the
conventions of theatre going and conspire to create new experiences for audiences (on site
specifics see Kaye 2000 and Pearson 2010).

Site-specific performances work upon the complex coexistence, superimposition and

interpenetration of architectures and narratives, historical and contemporary, of two basic orders.
One is of the site, its fixtures and fittings; the other is brought to the site, the performance and its
scenography. There is that which pre-exists the work, and that which is of the work: past and
present interwoven. Such works of performance are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts
within which they are intelligible. Performance is here the latest occupation of a location at which
other occupations are still apparent and cognitively active in their architectures, material traces and
histories. Thus, meaning is generated through the friction of the two. In his conception of site
specifics and scenography, Cliff connected host (site) and ghost (pasts performed), to which we
can add visitor.

In this architectonic approach, the scenography might sit at an oblique angle to the site and even
appears to extend beyond it. Despite its temporary and spectral presence, it might have separate
conditions of surface and micro-climate that change from moment to moment. Significantly, the
site is always apparent through the performance—the ruined farm within the temporary scaffolding
of the two houses brought to it (Tri Bywyd: the hosts and ghosts). ‘Site’ both allows and
necessitates the use of materials and phenomena unusual, unacceptable or illegal in the
auditorium, leading to the suspension and transgression of its prescribed practices and bye-laws,
since it involves technologies, techniques, apparatus and equipment not conventionally theatrical
that confound audience expectations. It necessitates the employment of particular scenic and
corporeal techniques to overcome the material difficulties of the site, and of creating a three-
dimensional mise-en-scène. The performance Tri Bywyd involved visitation and access to restricted
places: here scenography is architectural design that may create ergonomic problems for the
performers and a need to optimize their physical engagement.

As a mode of experience, performance is both a doing and a thing done—pursuit and event. As
pursuit, performance involves heightened and rhetorical articulations, assemblages of body and
voice, enacted through script, choreography, strategy, instructions. As event, performance happens
in scheduled occasions and involves the assemblage of concepts, persons, actions, texts, sounds,
places and things, juxtaposing and mixing unrelated fragments and phenomena without natural

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affinities or linkages. (See McKenzie 2001 and Taylor 2016 for excellent introductions to
performance as it relates to this essay.) In these processes of scenography and dramaturgy,
performance is a mode of design. The concept of performance is complicated by the reference to
performativity in identity construction (after Butler 1990). In this conception, performance is an
active or transitive mode involving attribution (of identity) and iteration, with social and cultural
forms such as gender, identity and memory, emerging from practice and interaction rather than
preceding them.

Overall, performance is practice that attends to questions of presentation and representation,

entailing sets of physical, vocal, technical and scenographic procedures and techniques of
exposition. Performance is a kind of engagement and communication that resides primarily in the
contractual arrangements and social suspensions between performer and audience, as well as in
the design work of scenographer and dramaturge. Performance can embody, enact, illustrate and
indicate without, however, any need of an audience: performance can be the staging of the subject
in process, as in the concept of performativity, as much as of the actor acting.

The nature of performance is rhetorical—presenting a case through the assemblage of different

and diverse components, making anything significant as representation, elaboration or decoration,
as a functional or cognitive instrument. Typically it is characterized by omission—selecting, eliding,
making part stand for whole, or action/event stand for something else. In this, performance may be
extremely schematic, improvised, contingent, and only barely perceptible within the everyday.

As a forum of encounter, intervention and innovation, as a form of cultural production, as a field of

rhetoric, performance may resemble a devised world, set aside from or adjacent to the quotidian,
all the elements of which—site, environment, technology, spatial organization, form and content,
rules and procedures—are conceived, organized, controlled and ultimately experienced by its
different kinds of participants. At once both utopia and heterotopia, performance may proffer extra-
daily occurrences. Freed from its theatrical roots, performance becomes both a lens for the
apprehension of potential active engagements between, for example, past and present, and an
array of pragmatics for their implementation.

Performance is always already disappearing. There is only ever act and aftermath, and irresolvable
tensions between event and document or script. The answer to the question of where performance
comes from, its origin, can only be that performance belongs to chains of iterative enactment and
re-enactment, with no ultimate origin. For there is no script that can completely specify a
performance.

This is why performance has long been a powerful way to understand social practice. People are
well conceived as social actors or agents performing roles on private and personal, and public and
institutional stages. While social norms or structures and cultural values and forms frame practice,
they only exist in re-enactment. Moreover, social practice requires material props and stages that

27 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

prompt and set scenario and possibility, and thus engage audiences. We are creative agents
inheriting values and expectations, facilities and constraints embedded in the material and social
fabric that pre-exists us and that will endure beyond our mortality.

This tension between act, event, site, artifact and their documentation (scripting) is archaeological.
While the past happened and is now irretrievably passed, as archaeologists we only can work on
what remains, making record and document of trace and vestige. The past is gone and only exists
by virtue of a project to care about it, to look to the future of the past in working on ruin: in this,
archaeology is always about the future. Performance and archaeology share this same relation
between event and aftermath. We visit and collect the past, transforming it irrevocably as we
engage and displace, for there is indeed no going back upon an excavation: we take the leap into
the future and destroy.

Performing ruins: this is to work upon what remains in a mode of cultural creativity and production.
It was these convergences, homologies, analogies between performance and archaeology that led
Mike and me to propose an explicit hybrid—theatre/archaeology—the re-articulation of fragments
of the past as real-time event in the present. In a series of experimental works and performances
we have probed the interconnections of host-ghost-visitor—sites, memories and traces, in
encounters and visitations, with time folded upon itself as we rework records, documents, archival
remains—performing ruins (Shanks and Pearson 2013).

Assemblage - toward design

Together with theatre company Brith Gof and my own Department of Archaeology at University of
Wales, Lampeter, we researched Esgair Fraith and the two imported cases as part of the
production, generating documents and evidences mobilized in the performance itself, read aloud
on sound track and live by performers. I took many photographs during the technical rehearsal, in
situ, in medias res, rather than from the point of view of the audience. The event itself was
documented in a graphic work commissioned by Nick Kaye for his book about site-specific art. Here
Cliff McLucas juxtaposed components of the three case files (texts, photography, line drawings) on
a timeline of the performance and under the title ‘Ten feet and three quarters of an inch of
theatre’ (McLucas 2000).


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Image 11. Tri Bywyd (Three Lives): documentation of the site specific performance by Brith Gof. Cliff
McLucas 1998, published 2000, with photography by Michael Shanks.

The three houses in Tri Bywyd do not repeat the same message in different forms, or conform to a
single narrative form or model; they are not analogies of one another, though the juxtaposition is
not thereby just arbitrary. This is comparative work, but not in the usual sense. The three houses
share an archaeological theme of traumatic event and evidences that persist, though they may be
misrecognized and suppressed. We also encountered them in our own personal experiences of
west Wales, in our getting to know the region that became home. The technique of juxtaposition
involves the rhetorical tropes of parataxis and katachresis—forced juxtaposition of dissimilar

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components and designed to produce frictions (parataxis—this and this and this and so on;
katachresis—mixed, forced, what could be deemed inappropriate metaphor: Dai the farmer shot
himself just as Sarah Jacob drank her milk). Tri Bywyd, like other works of Brith Gof, did not take an
explicitly interpretive strategy of peeling back the layers, digging deep for meaning. Rather, layer
was piled on layer geologically through the encounters, the visits, the performances and in the
graphical documentation so that the weight creates metamorphosis or decomposition, faults and
shifts as the strata grind at each other, as catalysts (words, themes, images, metaphors, whatever)
take effect and amalgams or connections emerge, where there probably should be none. So the
aim of this katachresis is not primarily an epistemological one of establishing knowledge of these
three sites and their associated people and events. We were not proposing an account of the farm,
of nineteenth-century medical science, of a murder in Cardiff, or of something between. The aim is
more an ontological one, non-representational, of making manifest the features of these
conglomerations of people, things and events. This is an associative, connecting method of
assemblage I have elsewhere described, after Deleuze and Guattari, as rhizomatic (Shanks 1992).

Our purpose is to address the question of how to engage with a contested locale in a way that
avoids reducing the encounter(s) to a single and exclusive version of narrative or account. The
challenge is to maintain an irreducible richness that enables multiple engagements, letting the
place be itself, open in its multiple manifold to encounters that differ according to time and visitor.
In this our site specific performance work is post or non-representational.

This quest for the local and specific, for senses of presence, of being there, therefore prompted
experiment in empirics, documenting the specifics of site. Our attention has focused not so much
upon illustrating a site, but upon how we might engage and represent quiddity, the ‘whatness’, the
qualities of materials, and haecceity, ‘hereness’, site specificity, those locational qualities that form
a sense of place. This has involved eclectic experiment in many media, analogue and digital.

Let me draw again on Mike Pearson’s take on performance. In its essentially expressive rather than
explanatory mode, performance can assemble and order material of diverse origins: from the
biographical to the bureaucratic. In his dramaturgy Mike chooses dynamic articulations, jumps,
ruptures, elisions, asides, non-sequiturs, illogicalities, circularities and repetitions. Performance can
render miscellaneous materials—from the anecdotal to the informational—to the same order of
significance, and this it does without need of citation or footnotes. Its rhetorical devices facilitate
shifts in viewpoint, attitude and emphasis. Performance deals well with accounts of people and
events. It can build drama out of mundane sets of circumstance, and summon sites to situate them.
Performance can draw together narratives, data sets and disciplinary perceptions, both like and
markedly unlike. In their juxtaposition, overlay and friction at a certain place, they reveal its multi-
temporality, and through disciplinary convergences enhance its appreciation.

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Such dramaturgical possibility lay behind another experiment in katachresis. In Three Rooms, a text
and web site (2004), I juxtaposed a sequence of evidences and archaeological remains of three
rooms: a garret in the east end of London from which its occupant, David Rodinsky, mysteriously
departed suddenly in the late 1960s, never to return; Sarah Jacob’s farmhouse bedroom in rural
west Wales in the nineteenth century where she lay for over two years without, apparently, taking
nourishment, as mentioned above; and a dining room in a sanctuary of the 7th-century BC city of
Corinth in Greece, times of great social change in the Mediterranean involving the invention of the
body politic of state citizenry. The juxtaposed fragments were textual mise-en-scènes —
arrangements of items before the reader/viewer, three forensic portfolios to be interrogated. And
there was no reason behind their juxtaposition, other than they had each figured at some time in
my research interests.

The architectonics of this performance writing (foregrounding the relation of performance to

document) explicitly brought into question the way that narratives are pursued and constructed,
particularly in relation to archaeological themes of time, tradition and the modern world. Each
room references mystery and discovery. The room in nineteenth-century Wales belongs with the
period of the reworking of an urban-rural and modern-traditional distinction. It underlines the
supposed mystery of rural tradition and its questioning by scientific authority (the investigating
nurses dispassionately record the stages of Sarah Jacob’s starvation). The room in London is an
explicit trope of modernist detective fiction – the mystery of the locked room. It tells of the making
of ‘interiority’ and self in quotidian urban existence. The Corinthian room discovered by
archaeologists concerns the shaping of the quotidian past in a comforting form that answers
questions of urban origins and civil values, questions inherent to notions of Western civilization
(Corinth is one of the first city-states in the Mediterranean and a pivot in the extension of Hellenic
material culture). In each room mystery is both created and then resolved in mundane modernity,
just as it becomes disturbing. Modern distinctions are confirmed even as the interior force of
Otherness is acknowledged. But the arrangement, specifics, and concomitant dramaturgical
possibility disrupt this tendency and aim to open up space for other readings and perceptions.

Autosuggestion, a work of theatre/archaeology exploring the archaeology of the contemporary past

(Pearson and Shanks 2014), featured a 1956 Chevrolet in a classic hot rod rebuild by car designer
Bill Barranco. Nine scenarios, personal, anecdotal, apocryphal, archetypal, were presented in live
performance — from Mike Pearson’s own toy car of the 1950s in Lincolnshire through the potential
scenographies and dramaturgies of automobility — urban, rural, looking in and looking out,
transiency, upholstery, performance, state and industry, labor relations, crime, itinerary, and,
perhaps above all, memories. Polyphony and polyvocality, a collage of a miscellany as an inevitably
inadequate answer to the question of the ontology of an artifact — “Just what is an automobile?”
The performance and document were developed as part of the five year experimental Revs
Program at Stanford, investigating the future of automotive heritage given the under-researched

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significance of the automobile to recent history, and the ways the design of the automobile is
evolving.

Image 12. Autosuggestion: a work of theatre/archaeology, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks 2013.

Deep mapping and chorography

My essay Three Rooms (2004) aimed to disrupt certain narrative forms: the encounter between
rural tradition and urban rationalism, the mystery of the locked room, the assembly of citizens.
These are chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981), stock associations, typically narrative, of temporal and
spatial relationships, place-events, room-evidence-scenarios. In a series of performance works and
writings relating to urban (2013) and rural experience (2007), many with Mike Brookes, Mike
Pearson has exemplified a range of tactics, pragmatics, techniques of performance and
performance design that leverage the local and the vernacular, the heterogeneous and the
interstitial not to represent the urban and rural, but to probe (in a McLuhan sense), to make
manifest the dynamics, the constraints and the potentials of particular engagements with site,
locale, city and country.

In an earlier experiment that ran from 1999 t0 2000, Three Landscapes, encounters with three
regional landscapes were juxtaposed: the volume—Monte Polizzo, a native prehistoric site under
archaeological excavation in Sicily; the surface—Hafod, an eighteenth-century estate in Wales; and
the line—the San Andreas Fault of California. This was a collaborative project in deep mapping

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involving Cliff McLucas (architect-scenographer), Dorian Llywelyn (theologian-musician), and
myself (design-archaeologist), all of us based in Stanford University Humanities Center, California.

Mike Pearson and I had appropriated the notion of deep mapping from William Least Heat-Moon in
his 1991 book PrairyErth (A Deep Map) when we started our own work on the Welsh uplands
around Esgair Fraith. Reflecting eighteenth-century antiquarian approaches to place, which
included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and
represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the
historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the
conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you
might ever want to say about a place….

The project Three Landscapes adapted the katachrestic tactic of triangulation to landscape. We
conceived ‘landscape’ not neutrally as another word for land and the countryside, but as a way of
connecting with and representing inhabited places, typically involving those aesthetic conventions
developed from the seventeenth century with which I began this talk: the picturesque and the
sublime, designed and staged landed properties, agricultural improvement, associations with
classical antiquity, relationships with a past opened to reasoned study. The project focus was on
different modes of engagement with land: walking, looking, working, experiencing the land,
excavating, encountering others, driving across it, mapping, and documentation. The result of the
year-long effort was a manifold of manifestation, comprising original research into the three
regions; a systematic itinerary of the geological fault; fieldwork and excavation in Sicily; visits to the
Hafod estate, under restoration; three performed lectures; a large graphic work—a map on a wall; a
large-format journal—a self-published book-in-a-room; three video diaries concerning Sicily, the
map and the diary; three essays on Hafod, dealing with place and identity, spirituality, the Celtic
revival, notions of the picturesque, Duns Scotus on specificity and haecceity, and a whole lot more;
twenty-four taped discussions with guests; a report on the project in the form of a visual primer; a
software project in collaborative deep mapping using early forms of social software (and later
developed into a wiki in my lab, Metamedia at Stanford, under the title Traumwerk).

Here is what Cliff said about these deep maps, and reflecting this rhizomatic assemblage. They are
big—the issue of resolution and detail is addressed by size. They necessarily embrace a range of
different media or registers in a sophisticated and multilayered orchestration. The complementary
use of rich analogue and the fungible, interchangeable forms of digital media is demanded in this
regard. Bridging different registers of the local, national and global, insiders and outsiders,
amateurs and professionals, deep maps do not seek the authority and objectivity of conventional
cartography. They are politicized, passionate, and partisan. They involve negotiation and
contestation over who and what is represented and how. They give rise to debate about the
documentation and portrayal of people and place. And in this respect, deep maps are unstable,
fragile and temporary—conversations and not statements.

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The early death of Cliff McLucas in 2002 left much of the project in an unfinished and ruined state,
sadly not inappropriate to this vision. Dorian joined the Jesuits. The project broke up and became
indeed an archival question, as well as one of memory. How might all this be recollected? Currently
some archival items are deposited in the National Library of Wales, others are stored digitally at
Stanford, and there are still boxes of items in my lab through which I am slowly working— a
poignant archive.

Image 13. A map on a wall. An experiment in deep mapping California. Cliff McLucas for Three
Landscapes, Stanford 2000.


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Image 14. A book in a room. A diary experiment in the documentation of visit and encounter. Cliff
McLucas for Three Landscapes, Stanford 2000.

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Image 15. Diary page. An experiment in the documentation of visit and encounter. Cliff McLucas for
Three Landscapes, Stanford 2000.

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Image 16. Video diary: the excavations of Monte Polizzo, Salemi, Sicily. Video still. Michael Shanks
for Three Landscapes, Stanford 2000.

The references again to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the definition of deep
mapping, in the choice of Hafod as one of the three landscapes, are not gratuitous, but a vital
component of theatre/archaeology (Pearson and Shanks 2001). For deep mapping, offering
orientation, guide, and modeling, is part of chorography, an old antiquarian genre of
comprehensive regional account, dating back to the northern European renaissance of the late
sixteenth century (see Shanks and Witmore 2010a on this connection between chorography and
performance). I repeat that I am keen to promote critical awareness of the genealogy of our
engagement with region in the context of a distinctly Eurocentric sensibility.

The performance of document, or The paradox of pictures

It was in the wake of Three Landscapes and the publication with Mike Pearson of our book Theatre/
Archaeology (2001) that I returned in 2003 to the English borders with Scotland, where I had grown
up and started as an archaeologist, but now with my own chorographic intention. How to represent
this region I know so well? One answer has been: through the performance of document.

The year before I had already began hosting a series of conversations with colleague and friend Bill
Rathje, and later involving Chris Witmore (Rathje et al 2012). We asked archaeologists who were
visiting our lab about their experiences, and we taped and transcribed them. We heard frank stories
about building careers, struggles to be heard and to persuade, quests for funding to investigate,
efforts to build institutions, as well as insights into the shape of the human past. The conversations

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were an extension, for me, of that simple insight that I have just shared, that archaeology, albeit
ostensibly about the past, is actually no more or less than what archaeologists do. Our
conversations were a project in science studies, in understanding the practice, the performance of
archaeology.

Why call it performance and not practice, or, more precisely, disciplinary practice? I have just
mentioned how performance has long been a root metaphor for understanding social practice. I
think that this use of performance applies well to formalized, rule-bound, discursive practices like
archaeology. As a classicist I am also very conscious of the genealogy of (theatrical) performance,
its roots in ritual, ceremony, body politic, public sphere. Western drama is intimately associated
with the assembly of the citizen body in the ancient Greek city state, gathered to witness the
enactment of dramatic performance in the city or sanctuary theatre, scripted by a dramaturge, an
Aeschylus or Aristophanes, reworking themes from religion, myth and tradition, history and
contemporary events (Martin 2007). I repeat that cognate with performance is rhetoric, the
technical forensic apparatus mobilized in the articulation of a case or argument, in an act of
representation before the same assembly, gathered to hear a case, to deliberate, to take decision.
Archaeology shares this forensic disposition, one where the remains of the past are mobilized in
practices (performances), often conceived as mimetic, aiming at representing or restoring behavior.

Documentation as performance entails that shift of attention, already mentioned, to encounter, to

how we engage with a site or region, to how we work upon our experiences, making documents.
This is not the place to share the archive generated by my visits. I just mention that it is arranged in
three itineraries through the borders, connecting episodes, people, places in the richest of
archaeological landscapes (itinerary was a regular feature of chorography). Here let me unpack the
ways that I use photography in this chorographic effort (see also Shanks and Svabo 2013).

Early in my archaeological career I was responsible for site and finds photography. My chorography
of the borders has involved experiment around photography, treated as photowork. Photography
is, to stretch the term somewhat, chronotopic—a spatio-temporal engagement by means of an
instrument. This instrument, the camera, is, in essence, a darkened room, camera obscura, with an
aperture or window on the world through which the outside is projected, via a focusing lens, as an
inverted image onto the opposite interior wall. Photography is an architectural arrangement of
gatherings and relationships between viewer, room, window, viewed subject. The photographic
image is a secondary product of such architecture, albeit the aspect that normally grabs attention.


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Image 17. Lindisfarne, Northumberland UK, the original Bishop's Palace (site of). On this spot: it
happened here. Part of the chorographic series exploring "code" in photowork: genre, convention,
schema, formal structures. Tactics: irony, exaggeration, pastiche, transgression.


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Image 18. Lindisfarne, Northumberland UK, door to a fisherman's hut on the Ouse, site of the great
Viking raid of June 793. On this spot: it happened here. Part of the chorographic series exploring
"mediawork" in the documentation of site: framing, surface and materiality, resolution, and the
performance of document. Outdated Polaroid film.

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Image 19. Dryburgh Abbey, Scottish Borders, near the grave of Sir Walter Scott. Quiddity:
"whatness", the qualities of things. Part of the chorographic series Lapidarium Septentrionale
(Northern Stones).

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Image 20. Lindisfarne, Northumberland UK, remains of a medieval farmstead in the sand dunes
colonized by invasive pirri-pirri from New Zealand. Part of the chorographic series "the quotidian",
exploring how "haecceity", hereness, a sense of place, is constituted through everyday ambient
textures.

Spaces and arrangements, geometries and connections between people, events and things: the
term that captures much of this is mise-en-scène. I offer a definition somewhat broader than usual,
and, according to the proposition that camera work is architectonic, emphasize structure and
arrangement. Mise-en-scène is thus the choice of location and viewpoint, the arrangement of items
and actors in front of a camera or before a recording author, setting a scene to be documented,
photographed or filmed, such that the resulting account, still or movie has a certain designed
outcome, makes a point, communicates a message, fits into a story, conveys the intention of
photographer or filmmaker. Mise-en-scène is about staging: the disposition, arrangement and
relationships between people, artifacts, places and happenings.

Mise-en-scène points to the performative character of photowork, in that the staging is managed.
We are prompted to inspect its temporality. The articulation of components before the

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photographer happens in a decisive, opportune moment (to satirize Cartier-Bresson): it all comes
together when the photograph is captured. The Greek concept for a conjunctive moment, an
opportune moment, a decisive moment, is kairos. A closely related concept is actuality, which
refers to the presence of the past, the nowness of the past (in memories and remains, for example),
that might offer kairotic opportunity. The photograph, transparency, negative and print, supplies a
material form to mise-en-scène that persists, may be transported, displaced from site of capture to
be viewed at a later time. This temporality is duration: the photograph, in its materiality, can endure
and offer articulation with times long gone in another conjunctive moment. The photograph offers
connection between the decisive kairotic moment of capture and its new moment of viewing (cf
Olivier 2011).

While duration is an aspect of materiality and curation (the photograph needs a certain amount of
care for it to survive), kairos or actuality is specific and located, the temporal aspect of a site-
specific, architectonic arrangement or assemblage, as I have just described. Kairos is the event of
performance. A persistent moment, the subject of photowork, the material photograph re-presents
a return of the moment of capture, in a kind of haunting recapture. A photograph says: This was all
here then, and is with us still now. Performance shares this restored, or twice-behaved character,
consisting of physical, verbal, or virtual actions that are not-for-the-first-time—a performer might
say “here is the way it was”. In archaeology we recognize the primacy of two temporal modes.
Actuality as kairos: the present engaging the past, finding, excavating, inspecting, documenting,
bringing it back. Duration: the persistence of the material past in remains, ruins and traces, ghosts.

The duration, persistence of the photograph, the ruin and the trace, is dependent upon materiality,
just as performance is located, site specific, embodied and conjunctural, So the performance of
document needs to be sensitive to the materiality of engagement, to embodied experience, the
material and physical processes and properties of assemblage, of gathering people and props on
location, as well as those of mediation, the instruments and processes of transforming encounter
into document, inscription, depiction.

What then of the relation between my visit, encounter and the document I make of it?

This short inspection of photowork simply indicates the important differences between several
kinds of documentation, according to their materiality, instrumentality, architectonics, agency, and
temporality. Johannes Vermeer may well have traced the image thrown onto ground glass by his
camera obscura, or perhaps transposed the projection onto canvas. That inscription or
transcription was later, in the 1830s, delegated by photography to ‘the pencil of nature’—the action
of light on light-sensitive chemicals. Agency, of artist or natural chemistry, is involved, and much
more. Though there are no accepted conventions or definitions, we might, for example, distinguish
illustration from representation. If the term illustration is used to refer to depiction that intends to
elucidate a statement, representation invokes additional temporal and political modalities. Re-

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presentation may involve the presentation of self, of a case, of a relationship, of a depiction, before
an audience or assembly of people. The political or legal representative may stand-in as delegate
for those he represents, constituency or client, in order to present a case.

Compare the mimetic and what we may term the eidetic, in relation to this performance of
document. The mimetic, imitation, the work of mimos (the word for actor in ancient Greek), refers
to a set of relationships between the real and the represented. Often mimesis is connected with
metaphor and simile: the relationship between real and represented is one of analogy,
comparison, likeness - ‘it was like this’, ‘as if it happened like this’. Performance is often seen as
synecdochic (substituting a part for the whole), and metonymic (standing in place of).

The notion of the eidetic takes the matter further and poses questions of the relationship between
real and represented and of how we treat the materiality (the actuality) of performance and the
performed. The eidetic refers, in some psychological use, to mental imagery that is vivid and
persistent. Eidetic memory means memory of a sensory event that is as accurate as if the person
were still viewing, or hearing, in the presence of the original object, present at the event. Eidetic
memory confounds past and present. The etymology of the word eidetic is most instructive and
suggestive. Roots are in the Greek eidō and its cognates (to know, see, experience; that which is
seen, form, model, type, image, phantom). So performance is eidetic because it raises questions of
what is real and what is simulated, what persists, what is at the heart of experience (knowledge,
impressions, physical materials?). Performance, as eidetic, is ironic: in its act of re-presentation,
performance is this and that, simulated and real. The political representative is a person speaking
in democratic assembly for others, conveying their voice. Performance is ironic in drawing upon
theatrical metaphors. For while we might suppose a script, performance has no such sole origin
and there is always that gap between script and act, as well as between performer and audience,
representative and constituency. What is being acted out in performance? Who is speaking in
democratic assembly—representative or constituency? We should answer that there is only ever
the irony of reiteration without an ultimate origin, simulation without an original. Representative or
constituency?—at best it is both. And in these iterative chains the question of performance is
immediately the question of how we may speak and write of performance, given the irony.
Performance is about re-iterating, re-mediating, re-working, re-storing, re-presenting, re-enacting.

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Image 21. Eidetic presence: daguerreotype, circa 1850. From the series Ghosts in the Mirror.

For me, this also is archaeology, heritage practice, working on what remains. We seek in vain a
representation that will explain the ruin of history. In dealing with remains, the archaeologist in all
of us is working upon relationships between past and present that circle around the impossible
irony of trying to turn action and experience, material form and body, remediated, into
representation. There can thus be no finality to mimesis, only constant reworking and restoring. So
my performance of document in the Borders is about incessant return and reworking around these
material architectonics (see Shanks and Pearson 2013).

In a mimetic relationship the photograph with which I began this essay pictures, references
Hadrian’s Wall. Mimesis as imitation directs attention to features of appearance, similarity and
signification, how a sign relates to what it signifies, for example, and with primacy accorded to a
reality that is represented in an image such as a photograph, and so raising questions of how
faithful to an original an image might be. The concept of eidesis, referring to creative image
making, directs us to consider also the qualities of engagement, experiences of presence and
actuality, of how we connect with others and with things through our senses, through making,

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through communicating, constructing knowledges, imagining the world. An attention to eidetics
prompts us to ask how an image participates in an experience, the way an image, for example,
helps conceptualize and may be instrumental in facilitating thought or action (Corner 2014). Maps
can help us navigate unknown territory. Blueprints can help us build machines. Information
graphics and diagrams can convince people to change their minds. Making a model can help us
grasp essentials and help us move from the prototype to full production. Visualization can aid
action in all sorts of ways. The concept of eidesis is about performative communication, directing
us to consider how visualization as mediation is involved in agency, in pulling together and
managing projects, achieving goals; eidesis is a key concept in connecting visualization and
design.

Performance and pragmatology

The heritage manager caring for a landscape; the community member researching local history; the
property owner negotiating regulations concerning conservation of the historical character of his or
her home; the archaeologist excavating a Roman fort; the collector planning the purchase of a new
collectable: all are working on what remains of the past. For us theatre/archaeology has been a
cultural probe into these. We shared experiments in performance in order to monitor and evaluate
responses, and so to establish the characteristics of this field of practice, following the proposition
that archaeology and heritage are performative. All instances of such work upon what remains
allow creative appropriation of the past, though subject to all sorts of constraints and
determinations. The resources available to heritage managers are, of course, quite different to a
community pressure group lobbying for the conservation of a building, or someone researching
their family history. Likewise, the epistemological aims of an archaeologist may conflict with the
desires of a museum visitor to witness and experience the authentic presence of the past.
Nevertheless I hope to have shown that there are fundamental homologies and convergences that
elsewhere I have described as the archaeological imagination (Shanks 1995a, 2012, 2019).

Process, practice, performance: these are the active articulations of past-present-future that take
precedence over the familiar oppositions with which I began my talk. Such separations of past and
present, amateur and professional, history and heritage, for example, are real indeed, but are the
result of particular interruptions of the processes of working on what remains of the past. My
photograph of Hadrian’s Wall is a temporary freezing of an encounter, a dynamic experiential flux.
This occurs when the (archaeological) temporalities of performed engagement (actuality/kairos
and duration, associated with place/event and the multi-temporal topological folding of
landscape) are eclipsed by a framed moment, as in a photograph. And such arrest or freezing may
be ideological.

Critique, as investigation into the conditions of possible knowledge, can unmask and make
manifest what some may prefer to remain hidden. We can raise consciousness, explicitly drawing

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attention to the process of knowledge making rather than to its objects, with the purpose of
revealing context, sites and location, interest. This may be to a hermeneutic end, that is, aiming to
reveal how statements are made and acts occur under specific conditions.

I have outlined some tactics that can help reveal and maintain dynamic creative flux. Performance,
as a field of rhetoric and theatre, of forensics and storytelling, can use satire, caricature and the
grotesque, as exaggeration of salient features. Powerful techniques of compression can be brought
in, such as allegory, metonymy, synecdoche; or irony and inversion, so as to point the finger and
efficiently convey a message; also carnival, mockery, humor, as well as staged, scripted and
improvised argument are used in addressing different audiences.

All these rhetorical tropes can take powerful form through scenography and dramaturgy,
assembling agents and artifacts, sites and events, the architectonics, the poetics of delivering
pasts-in-presents. I have illustrated katachresis, (unjustified) comparison, displacement, challenges
to scene-setting through shifting the proscenium arch, or doing away with this framing device, the
separation of real from represented.

Above all, however, a performative perspective invites not just commentary but action, offering
radical critique, making new pasts-in-presents (Taylor 2016), just as the performed past of a re-
enacting society may make no explicit reference to academic knowledge contained in textual
discourse (though while in character they may engage in gossip and know much of past ways of
life!). Re-enactment, restaging, restoration, remodeling: all these practices direct attention at the
relations and connections between past and present, in offering mimetic and what I have called
eidetic works. A classic tactic here is to interrupt and intervene in performance, Brecht-like, in
processes of knowledge construction, with disrupting or incongruous events, breaking the illusion
of the theatre, so as to reveal precisely the process—working on what remains. This can happen
within the staging. As Mike tells the story of Esgair Fraith, he offers an aside on his own village
upbringing in Lincolnshire. As I question the re-enacting Celt about his composite bow, he tells me
where he bought it in Slovakia.


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Image 22. The Persians (Aeschylus). Site Specific Performance of the ancient Greek play by National
Theatre of Wales, directed by Mike Pearson, August 2010. Set in the model village used for
simulating urban fighting in the Sennybridge military training ranges, Wales. (Paul Farrow
Creative/National Theatre of Wales).

However, these tactics of site-specific performance and theatre/archaeology, which may be

summarized as assemblage and interruption, do not constitute a method of heritage practice.
Indeed they beg the question: What form should heritage management practices take? These
tactics are a way of approaching matters of pasts-in-presents, conscious of ethics, responsibilities,
ideals of democratic inclusion. In this they are a pragmatics: modi operandi—ways of working.

What might we call this diverse field of working upon what remains? I suggest pragmatology.
Pragmatology: the theory and practice of ‘pragmata’ (Shanks and Svabo 2013). Encompassing the
richness of the old Greek meaning of the term, pragmata are ‘things’, but also, ‘deeds’,
‘acts’ (things done), ‘doings’, ‘circumstances’ (encounters), ‘contested matters’, ‘duties’, or
‘obligations’. The verb at the root of pragmata is prattein, to act in the material world, engaged with
things. This is cognate with making as poetics (the Greek root is poiein) — a creative component to

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practice generally. Here I emphasize the care archaeologists, heritage managers, and many others
have for pasts-in-the-present, a loyalty to ta archaia (a root of ‘archaeology’), literally translated as
‘old things’. Remnants, vestiges, monuments, ruins, artifacts hold memories which we attentively
piece together with, typically, an aspiration to fidelity and authenticity. Of course, archaia demand a
particular orientation, both practical and imaginative. To regard old things of archaeological and
heritage interest as pragmata reminds us of the primacy of engaging with things, that many others
are drawn to these matters in different ways, in different (performed) engagements or encounters,
and so may even constitute them as different things, because pragmata do not stand on their own
—they become what they are through our relationships with them. This constitutive importance of
particular experiences or engagements with the past, as the past comes to be what it is through
our actions upon it, means that there is no definitive end to the past. The past lives on in our
relationships with what remains, and so there is always more to be said and done. The challenge is
to meet things, the past, halfway, in our future-oriented archaeological projects to make something
of what remains.

Pragmatology and heritage as design

I have commented that performance is a mode of design—scenographically and dramaturgically
assembling and arranging agents, props, architectures, and events, in relation to scripts,
precedents, styles, ideologies, sets of skills and techniques, and with regard to intention, affect and
effect. Pragmatology includes such design processes. Working on what remains: this is a field of
design. I return to the question I just raised: What form should heritage management practices
take? An answer is: Design practice.

A detailed exposition of design practice is not really necessary here, because the way I have
described archaeology and performance, with an emphasis upon process, is in fact as design
pragmatics. I am just calling them what they are. Nevertheless I offer a few comments as summary
and to point to connections so fertile they offer considerable potential for addressing the concerns
of heritage management.

Design Thinking (Brown 2009, Lewrick et al 2018) is shorthand for a distillation of human-centered
design, those approaches to industrial and product design that began in the 1960s to give less
priority to styling (the look of a product) and more to the way artifacts relate to people’s
physiological needs, experiences, emotions, dreams and desires—interaction and experience
design. It is well described as a pragmatics, and in architecture and product design this is highly
professional and refined, having close connections, as I have tried to show, with contemporary arts
practice.

Begin in medias res with a design challenge or brief. Here, imagine it is a local archaeological
museum. Research the context—ethnographically, or by whatever appropriate means, with an
eclectic research methodology that aims to establish deep, empathic insight into needs and

49 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

desires of clients, constituencies, and communities. Define the problem/need/desire, or else
redefine—building a museum may not be the solution to local circumstances and points of view.
Make this definition design actionable, something that can be addressed by a service, a product,
an experience, something made or assembled. Ideate: generate ideas and possible solutions to the
challenge/brief—perhaps enhanced support for a local history society may be just what is needed.
Choose some of these ideas for prototyping: material models/mock-ups that can be shared,
showing possible solutions, not specifying a definitive answer. Show, rather than tell. Share these
models, test them out with people to see how they work, or not—evaluate. Perhaps it emerges that
what really is at stake is demographic in character—a disjunction between the attitudes to the local
past of younger and older generations. Repeat/iterate with another prototype. Build when force of
circumstance dictates (depending on feasibility of technology and resources, practical and
economic viability). Be aware that any ‘solution’ is provisional.

In all of this process there is rich and flexible interplay between action, inscription and description,
research and theory, fabrication and display, with agents, witnesses and audiences, experts and
users constantly exchanging roles in collaborative co-creating teams or communities that recognize
little hierarchical structure. Such design thinking connects with what I have outlined as agile
management (Shanks 2007). This pragmatics is about informed intervention under a tactical
attitude, performative remix and assemblage, post-disciplinary, because it freely can combine
scientific research and expressive arts, and located in specific encounters between past and
present. There is both ambition to make a difference and contribute to well-being, as well as a
humility that stands by work done while recognizing how provisional that work always is.

I suggest that here we have a way of practically carrying the insights afforded by performance art,
ideology critique, archaeological theory, and critical heritage studies into heritage management
strategies and structures, making these points about the ontology of the past actionable.

I end with that anxiety of allure with which I began. There is no need to be puritanically correct. Just
be mindful. We are thrown into a wonderful mix of past and present. Look, appreciate, address your
own reaction—and listen to my words: “Let me tell you something about Hadrian’s Wall …”


50 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

Image 23. Interruption.

51 Shanks - Heritage, performance, design 2019

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