I recently attended Julian Thomas’ talk, “Archaeology and modernity: Depth and surface,” at the Archaeology Research Center at Berkeley. Julian’s talk highlighted the core argument of his recent book Archaeology and Modernity. In short, archaeology could not have existed prior to the modern era because modern thought created the very conditions for the existence of archaeology. Archaeology is distinctively modern. Yes. It is. Well, at least this is how it has always characterized itself. How else could it be?
Modernity, for Thomas, came about through a revolution in how humans thought of themselves in relation to the world. Modernity is characterized by epistemic breaks, philosophical ruptures, against the Aristotelian teleology and dynastic rulership of Medieval Europe and toward Renaissance humanism, Cartesian dualisms, rationalism, atomism and so on. With the social contract in place, the crossed-out God was replaced by Man. Constructed, planned, ordered, modern life, Thomas emphasizes, is put into theory before it is put into practice. Without modernity there would be no archaeology. Yes. There would also be no sciences, no nation-states. Without modernity the world would be a very different place.
Building up to the penultimate question, Thomas asks whether archaeology can exist outside modernity? Indeed, when it comes to this question of whether archaeology can exist outside of the conditions of modernism, Thomas is deeply pessimistic.
In addressing this very question, Thomas presents us with a tautology. Because modernity created the conditions for archaeology, archaeology is nothing but thoroughly modern, and therefore cannot exist apart from it. It is what it is.
Furthermore, the very modernist divides that Thomas contextualizes are, as he would maintain, arbitrary, oversimplified and outmoded. But if this is so why does Thomas reproduce them? Thomas argues for a counter-modern archaeology where ethics, politics, rhetoric, difference and dialogue take center stage. Such, he contends, is still a modern archaeology. Thomas reminds us that so long as we are modern (which if you are an archaeologist then you are) there will continue to be a counter point of view. The pendulum swings back and forth across the divides, first siding with one side, then the other, continually turning modernity’s revolving door of polarity and contradiction. A counter-modern archaeology continues to provide the energy and momentum for this.
After all we have no choice.
But what if the moderns got it wrong? What if we could bypass such a predicament altogether by retracing our steps?
Indeed, Thomas argues against “going back to first principles.” Fine. But Thomas readily embraces a modernist epistemology and this is the problem. He believes the thinkers of modernity. He takes their myths at face value. He boils the world down to subjectivity and meaning. He gives us a world-for-human-consciousness where the initiative always comes from the “thinking man.” This take on modernity validates what we have been spoon-fed for so long. In contrast, but not in contradistinction, I firmly believe that a recharacterization of modernity and archaeology is in order; a recharacterization of how we understand and interact with the material world.
This is not to suggest that we need to throw out the tub containing both the baby and the bathwater. Rather, this endeavor requires a symmetrical archaeology.
In a symmetrical archaeology modernist thought is treated as the outcome, rather than the prime mover. On the ground humans are always entangled within a heterogeneous collective. While Thomas has in his new book performed a great service for the history of the discipline, we need, more than ever, to understand how archaeologists operated on the ground under the banner of modernity. We need to understand how earlier antiquarians and archaeologists interacted with a diversity of entities in real-time practice, not just what they regarded as the outcome. We need to recognize how we have, in this sense, “never been modern.”
Digging under Thomas’ claims, there was no new man, no more rational mind, born out of a revolution of thought, rather the transformation came in combination with the proliferation of mundane and humble modes of engagement and articulation. Modernity presents itself as a revolution in thought when it was actually a revolution in how humans circulate something more of themselves and the world at a spatiotemporal distance. Modernity simultaneously denies the action of things. But this rebuttal is not a call back to materialism. Instead, along with archaeologists such as Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor, I wish to plead for symmetry.
What are held as revolutions of thought occurred in step with the mobilization and proliferation of the printing press and graven images. They occurred alongside the slow accretion of optically consistent and standardized modes of showing and the ability to transfer something more of the world at a spacio-temporal distance. There are no mystical and over-dramatized ruptures, fissures or divides. We do not witness the birth of a new rational mind, but we encounter a collective on the ground, a mixture of a person, a compass, a chronometer, a telescope, a microscope or an accurate, optically consistent and standardized flat projection of the earth. We encounter the further distribution of humans and things in the world. We witness the birth of new collectivities, new mixtures of humans and things. What people thought in this context is a different question from who they are. Humans and things (modernism’s burdened ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’) are constructed simultaneously.
This is why we at MetaMedia are so thoroughly interested in archaeological relationships with the digital world, which cannot be wished away by a superficial critique of the digital as a “pattern of pixels” (let’s not forget the pixilated history of photography in its early years). More importantly, archaeologists are becoming ever more complex collectives. And in this digital world we have to understand ourselves (with the proviso that there is more to understanding than meaning) as post-human. The crossed-out God (who has never really gone away) needs to be joined by the crossed-out Man (who will also never really go away). We need to witness the birth of nature, we need to write a new contract. Following Serres, we need to articulate a natural contract, in order to understand how it is that we human beings are entangled with the world.
Archaeology, “the discipline of things” is ripe to take center stage in the articulation of this new contract, but this cannot occur if we limit ourselves to modernism’s myth.
In beginning to address Thomas’ extremely important question: can archaeology exist outside of modernism? Yes. Modernism, the myth of a new, more rational, free-standing, thinking individual, never existed as such. But there was also a great deal of value, which came out of the social contract, as Thomas has endeavored to point out so clearly. Both have to be thoroughly mixed with an understanding that the past, which is populated by things, has action, it continues to percolate and is itself entangled with the contemporary and the future. To be sure, this is a much more complicated and tricky task. But it is necessary. Let us put aside the oversimplified and contradictory framework that continues to burden modernity and begin to understand the world symmetrically.
[Please note: this entry was scripted in the Spring of 2005.]