Traces And Meaning

Course Code: ANTHGC12
Candidate Number: MONTE33
Word count:2.998
Tutor’s name: Victor Buchli




















TRACES AND MEANING.
























TRACES AND MEANING.


To what extent can traces have meaning? If they are thought of as ubiquitous testimonies of an absent object, it could be said that they constitute the materialrepresentation of the former existence of an entity, therefore referring to an absent past whilst living in the present. This essay will explore the notion of traces through the relations between mediated experience, public space and creative narratives.  The intention is to follow a path that leads to understanding the properties and contradictions that could arise from the very notion of trace, as abearer of meaning and to its potential to make objects something other than a static and insignificant volume.  Two distinct theoretical backgrounds will be confronted. On the first part, the arguments by Alfred Gell and Dusan Boric will open questions in relation to trace and human agency, and how these ideas help us bridge the ontological tension between the material form of a trace and theabsence of its indexical object. Furthermore, when confronted with the division between humans and things, we will find in Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory a series of assumptions that will open new analytical possibilities. This approach will offer tools to understanding traces as relationships between actors, whether in human, semiotic or social form, and it will be possible to locate some of themain constraints when applying his ideas to a final case study by the artist Sophie Calle.  This final case describes how photography, interviews and personal memory were used to document the traces of monuments removed from public spaces in Berlin. These arguments will ultimately lead to discovering how narratives play a central role in granting meaning to traces.

It will be necessary to firstfocus our attention in Boric writing ‘Deep time’ metaphor (2003), where he defined traces as 'an imprint or mark left in the passage of agency as a materialization of its absence’ (2003:57).  His statement will help us thread an argument that not only relates traces to the notion of agency, therefore turning a trace into an active entity able to act and have meaning, but also build up the notionof trace as the materialization of an absence in time, a passage of agency. Thus, to begin this analysis the ontological tension between presence (the material form) and absence (of the object) and its multiple and simultaneous present/past existence, must be confronted.

Through the notion of agency, a trace can be analysed as an object, consequently traces can be understood as agents with thecapacity to index humans intentions and act as ‘exclusively relational’ entities (Gell 1998:19). In this capacity to index agency, objects refer to one another expressing meaning through those connections. This process of referencing occurs in a relational environment where a primary agent, one that is an ‘intentional being’, and a secondary agent that is an object as the reflection of him/her canbe distinguished (Gell 1998:20). Yet, not all traces are meaningful, as objects with agency need to be visible and this only happens at the moment the relationship is established. It is only possible to recognise this relationship ‘ex post facto’. In this sense, traces speak through their agency once our ability as recipients to recognise them is activated (Gell 1998:22).

When following Gell’snotion of object, traces acquire meaning through a process of inferences, which has the object in connection with its agents as a starting point. This complex process of knowledge production has been developed by Gell as method that reveals the agencies involved in the network of relations of which an object (traces) forms part. It is a simultaneous process of revealing and assigning, in which...