Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock

Abstract

Kilmartin Glen’s rock art and built structures suggest activities dedicated to decentring human individuality and agency, paradoxically through heightened sensory experience. This process of “losing oneself” in time and place may be understood in terms of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), rejecting subject–object relationships in favour of a “flat ontology” of object–object relations in which life or sentience receives no privileged status. OOO’s explication of metaphor, rooted in a schema of essence and appearance, and further supported by cognitive linguistics, serves as a basis for erasing not only the distinction between the literal and metaphorical but also, with additional consideration of the implicate order as described by physicist David Bohm, the organic and inorganic. Taken together, these approaches allow us to understand ritual activity involving music and contact with “dead” stone at astronomically significant moments as a method of “attunement” to the continuity between terrestrial/celestial and animate/inanimate, consistent with contemporary efforts to reconcile classical and quantum physics as it confronts the subjunctive nature of reality itself.