I thank the commentators for their thoughtful and articulate responses, in which they have quite rightly exposed several inconsistencies and queried or expanded on a number of points that I did not have the time or space to develop in the original piece. In doing so, they raise the important issue of regional variations in the ways in which archaeology is conceived, practised and perceived by its practitioners and publics, which also significantly extends and complicates the original discussion. Rather than comment on specific points, almost all of which are relevant and well made, I want to focus on four linked themes which I think are reflected in different ways across all five comments. These are the relationship of archaeology to modernism and modernity, the value of the archaeological production of a sense of the ‘uncanny’ as an active intervention in the quotidian present, the surface/depth dichotomy, and the question of archaeological methodology in relation to an archaeology in and of the present. In doing so, I hope to provide some important clarification regarding what I mean when I use the terms ‘archaeology in and of the present’, ‘surfaces’ and ‘assemblages’, as well as to take up Ian Russell's challenge to approach more critically the use of artistic metaphors to emphasize the affective qualities and creative possibilities of archaeological practice. Before I move on to do this, I think it is helpful to discuss briefly the circumstances under which this paper was written and its place within a broader emergent programme of research and writing to give some context to what follows.

Designs for an archaeology in and of the present for the future

This paper began to take form in the immediate aftermath of the completion of After modernity (Harrison and Schofield Reference Harrison and Schofield2010). At that time I began to look back at the work which John Schofield and I had undertaken in the book in summarizing the publications dealing with the archaeology of the present and recent past over the decade since the publication of Buchli and Lucas's Archaeologies of the contemporary past (Reference Buchli and Lucas2001b) and exploring the ways in which conventional archaeological methods (broadly speaking) might be applied to the study of late modern societies. It seemed to me in retrospect that in trying to outline the ways in which traditional archaeological methodologies might be used to study the present and very recent past we had implicitly exposed the ways in which those same techniques might be considered to be deficient for this purpose. This is a point which is echoed by Paul Graves-Brown, who notes that in ‘applying an archaeological sensibility to the contemporary world, it becomes increasingly clear that the habitual tropes of archaeological practice either do not work, or need to be rethought and reconfigured’ (p. 168). This paper was partially written as a way of thinking through some of the implications of this situation, as a starting point for developing what I have come to think of as a new set of techniques and ways of thinking, a new ‘toolkit of concepts’, as Paul Rabinow (Reference Rabinow2003, 2, drawing on Foucault) might express it, with which archaeology might begin to reorient its interests towards the emergent present and its possible futures. I mention Rabinow's work here as he has, for many years, been involved in a parallel project with respect to the anthropology of the present (e.g. Reference Rabinow1996; Reference Rabinow1999; Reference Rabinow2003; Reference Rabinow2008; Rabinow et al. Reference Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion and Rees2008), and a number of his more thoroughly developed concepts parallel some of those I have discussed, and those which the commentators have noted in responding to the discussion article (see further discussion below). Audrey Horning rightly points out that despite my bold assertion that we need to focus on ‘how’ to do the archaeology of the present, the bulk of my article and its conclusion were still oriented towards the question of ‘why’. I think this is partially because archaeology has so consistently defined itself as ‘that which archaeologists do which others do not’, or excavation. Alfredo González-Ruibal and Ian Russell quite rightly draw attention not only to the importance of excavation as a creative practice, but also to its epistemological and political value to archaeology. This is a point which is made clear by various papers in the previous issue of this journal on the role of excavation in the 21st century, which were unfortunately not yet available when I was writing my own discussion article, but which form an important counterpoint to this discussion. But as Graves-Brown and González-Ruibal note, excavation is not necessarily the most useful methodology for querying the present archaeologically (although clearly in some cases it is – and William Rathje's account of 32 years of the Garbage Project elegantly demonstrates this point). This forced me to begin to think about the usefulness of excavation as a trope for archaeology more generally, while implicitly beginning to think through some of the ways in which we might need to revise its ‘toolkit’ to deal with an unfinished, emergent present (a point to which I will return at the end of my reply).

‘Now-time’: archaeology, modernity and modernism

I think one of the issues which we failed to adequately come to grips with in After modernity was our treatment of modernity (and indeed ‘late modernity’), albeit with some reservation, as a historical time period which might be studied in a broadly similar way to other archaeological periods (but see Harrison and Schofield Reference Harrison and Schofield2010, 5). In doing so, we were (at least implicitly) drawing on the treatment of modernity popularized by Marshall Berman (Reference Berman1982) and channelled through the writing on late modernity and postmodernity by Jameson (Reference Jameson2005), Auge (Reference Augé2004), Virilio (Reference Virilio1986) and others. All of this work is more or less haunted by the spectre of Walter Benjamin, for whom modernity comes to stand in for a particular form of lived experience; modernity becomes a distinct and totalizing temporal periodization from which flows a particular treatment of time and the concepts ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. Graves-Brown makes an important point about distinguishing between ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ in their divergent treatment of the concept of tradition. Modernity appears in the present discussion article in three linked guises – as historical time period, as condition or quality of experience and as (an incomplete) project (see also Osborne Reference Osborne1995). Putting aside the problems of treating modernity as a single unified project (instead of the form taken by a heterogeneous set of interests which draw on a similar underlying philosophical justification for the exercising of certain modes of power/knowledge), as Osborne (Reference Osborne1995, 13–14) notes, the ‘time’ of modernity is not straightforward, as it involves a complex doubling in which it defines itself simultaneously as both ‘contemporary’ and ‘new’. In doing so, it constantly creates the present as ‘contemporary past’ whilst it anticipates the future as embodied within its present. This simultaneous intimacy and distance of the past in the (modern) present is what makes working on the archaeology (as τα αρχαια or ta archaia, ‘the ancient’; see Witmore, in press; Harrison and Schofield Reference Harrison and Schofield2010, 6) of the present so conceptually difficult, even oxymoronic. I am certainly not the first archaeologist to discuss the ways in which the past is actively created in the present (e.g. Shanks and Tilley Reference Shanks1992) or the ways in which simultaneous, overlapping pasts are contained within it (e.g. González-Ruibal Reference González-Ruibal2006b; Lucas Reference Lucas2005; Reference Lucas2010; Olivier Reference Olivier2003; Schlanger Reference Schlanger2004; Witmore Reference Witmore2006b; Witmore, in press). But the commentators were right to push the concept of modernism and its conceptual differences from that of modernity, as well as some of the ways in which modernist tropes such as an emphasis on empiricism and experience might be potentially useful to archaeology.

I think one way of avoiding this bind is to work with Benjamin's distinction between the present as a historical period and the experience of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’ (Olivier Reference Olivier2008; Funari and Vieira de Carvalho Reference Funari and Vieira de Carvalho2009) which is generated as a result of a revelatory intervention in the present (see also Dawdy Reference Dawdy2010 on the use of Benjaminian perspectives on ruin and the relationship between modernity and antiquity in relation to archaeology). I use this term ‘intervention’ explicitly to connect with Rathje's point about the role of archaeology as an intervention in contemporary society, and my own discussion of archaeology's role in translating (or, perhaps more accurately, creatively assembling) the intervening traces of the past in the present. For Benjamin, ‘now’ represents the point at which a constellation of images, objects, agencies, ideas and trajectories coalesce to form a unique image or assemblage (Rosen Reference Rosen, McLaughlin and Rosen2003, 2) which in turn generates a dialectical realization of the past being gathered up in the present (Osborne Reference Osborne1995, 143). The assignation of a particular event to a specific moment in time becomes irrelevant as past, present and future are experienced as a single moment in an alternative historico-metaphysical experience which generates an explosive revelation and sense of redemption. Leaving aside the metaphysical elements of this notion, the idea of a ‘now-time’ as a creative coalescence of multiple overlapping pasts experienced simultaneously at a particular, unique time and place is helpful in overcoming the simultaneous intimacy and distance which is implicit in a modern notion of the ‘present’, and provides us with the grounds on which to begin to build an archaeology in and of the present for the future. Adopting the sense of the present as Jetztzeit means that we are no longer dealing with a historical present, but a series of localized and hence spatialized presents and the pasts that are generated by the relationships between the particular people and things contained within them. These collectives of human and non-human actors which coalesce as assemblages experience a sense of synchronicity of pasts in the present generated by their creative coming (or gathering) together at a particular moment in which the ordinary chronological boundaries which divide them one from another are severed. I say ‘gathering’ here as I see within this a creative role for archaeology in actively bringing things and people together (‘assembling’ and ‘reassembling’) and helping to generate this experience of Jetztzeit. Hence what was perhaps my most radical suggestion (which strangely generated no discussion from the commentators): abandoning the focus on particular temporal periods for an emphasis on the present and the pasts that intervene within it at a particular moment of archaeological involvement; that is, archaeology, ‘now’. This seems consistent with various discussions of alternative historical ontologies in which the past is perceived as palimpsest and the ‘trace’ (another thoroughly Benjaminian concept; see e.g. Lucas Reference Lucas2010) plays a fundamentally creative, even revelatory, role. I think this also sits comfortably with the notion of a four-dimensional percolation of time and material in relation to contemporary critical art practice to which Russell refers, citing Witmore (Reference Witmore2006b). This brings me to my next point about the everyday and the role of producing a sense of revelation, of bringing to consciousness that which is normally unacknowledged, through making the familiar uncanny or unfamiliar.

Infra-ordinaire: the uncanny as the product of an archaeological intervention in the present

‘Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. Question your tea-spoons’ (Perec Reference Perec1999, 210–11). Thus wrote Georges Perec in Paris in the essay ‘Approaches to what?’ in 1973, the same year in which William Rathje founded the Garbage Project in Tucson. Although neither, as far as I am aware, made reference to the other, both (as Rathje writes of his own work) shared a concern with exposing the nature of contemporary everyday life by drawing attention to the gap between what people think they do and what people actually do. Rathje's project has acted as an important touchstone in demonstrating not only the potential value of archaeology to the development of policies which can have a very real impact on issues of contemporary social, political and environmental concern, but also the value of a focus on the present to the development of innovative archaeological theory and methodology. In saying his intellectual project shares concerns with Perec, I do not want to detract from how unique and important Rathje's contribution to archaeology has been, but to suggest that the idea of drawing attention to the most overlooked aspects of everyday life – the banal, the obvious, the quotidian – is linked to concerns which are wider than those which arise directly from archaeology (a linking of archaeology with broader social issues of which I am sure he would strongly approve). Perec noted (Reference Perec1999, 210),

Indeed, it has been a broadly Perecquian orientation towards the infra-ordinary which has sat, at least implicitly (but see Olivier Reference Olivier2000), behind the work of many archaeologists of the contemporary and recent past. In a series of novels and shorter non-fictional essays (many of which were translated and published in English in the collection Species of spaces and other pieces) written during the 1960s and 1970s, Perec began to develop new experimental forms of writing which were intended to uncover the overlooked aspects of everyday life. From his An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris (in which he sat in the same spot in Place Saint-Sulpice for three days, making a record of everything that he observed) and Attempt at an inventory of the liquid and solid foodstuffs ingurgitated by me in the course of the year nineteen hundred and seventy four, to Life. A user's manual (a 600-page novel which describes the events within a single Parisian apartment block at a single ‘moment’, precisely 8 a.m. on 23 June 1975), he consistently sought to defamiliarize the familiar to draw attention to the overlooked, quotidian aspects of human existence.

This concern with the creative potential of the uncanny in turning the (archaeological) lens on contemporary everyday life links all five comments in different ways. Graves-Brown is perhaps clearest when he speaks of his desire to ‘make the “familiar unfamiliar”’ so as to reveal ‘the invisible’ (p. 171), but this is also obviously an interest of Rathje's in using archaeology to confront people with the gap between what it is they think they consume and throw away and what the empirical record of their food waste demonstrates they actually expend and discard. Similarly, González-Ruibal discusses the ways in which excavations of both former Nazi spaces and sites associated with the Spanish Civil War force an engagement with the uncanny liminal space between the familiar and the alien which obliges a confrontation with the ‘open wounds’ of the past in the present. A similar point is made by Horning in relation to the ways in which colonial pasts and presents are intimately intertwined in the context both of the work she does and of the ‘histories’ she produces from it, in Northern Ireland. This also emerges as an interest in Russell's comments about affect and the ways in which contemporary artists can help generate ‘framing devices’ for ‘the negotiation of the objective/affective schism within modern archaeology practice’ (p. 175).

Heidegger notes (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962, 69) that ‘that which is ontically closest and most well known is ontologically farthest and not known at all; and its ontological signification is constantly overlooked’. Indeed, for Heidegger, everyday life provided the key to the universal phenomenological ontology necessary to realize the experience of Jetztzeit described by Benjamin (see Osborne Reference Osborne1995, 160 ff., 186–87). I want to suggest that the creative potential of the uncanny which the commentators mention is a direct manifestation of the revelatory experience of ‘now-time’ in which the individual becomes suddenly (perhaps shockingly) aware of the simultaneous existence of previously unknown or overlooked pasts, their traces in the present and their implications for the future. González-Ruibal describes succinctly the potential for revelation which exists in this uncanny liminal space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Clearly there is an important role for archaeology in drawing attention to that which exists outside the realm of current popular knowledge, either through active erasure, neglect or its submergence into everyday practice, and I agree strongly with my commentators on this point. My intention was not to undermine that project in discussing the semantic slipperiness of this phrase ‘making the familiar unfamiliar’ and its relationship with a broader archaeological sensibility of creating distance, both between past and present and between ourselves and our ‘others’ (as part of a broader anthropological project, cf. Fabian Reference Fabian1983). The critical thing to explore is how we might utilize this creative, revelatory potential of the uncanny, drawing on an experience of ‘now-time’ generated by our archaeological intervention in the present. I believe the notion of the present as a surface is very helpful in this regard. This connects with my next point about surfaces and depths.

Excavating surfaces: depth, proximity and creative action

All of the commentators raise the issue of the surface/depth dichotomy in different ways. In suggesting the surface as an alternative trope for archaeology arising from its reorientation to engage with an emergent present and its possible futures, I did not mean to suggest that the surface should be directly opposed to the notion of depth. Indeed, as González-Ruibal notes, surfaces can be deep and multilayered. I also did not intend to develop a notion of the surface as ‘superficial’ or opposed to that which is ‘inside’ something. Indeed, thinking of the present as a surface, as an interface with the ‘now-time’, is intended to significantly deepen the definition of the surface. In the same way that it is not useful to speak of the ‘surface’ in opposition to ‘depth’, I do not think it necessary to speak of the ‘inside’ in opposition to the ‘surface’. In the discussion of the importance of the quotidian above I hope I have broadened out and clarified the concept of the surface and its assemblages in just this way. In speaking of the surface I wanted to draw attention to that which is actively assembled and exposed. To return to Graves-Brown's metaphor, when a rock is broken into two, new surfaces are exposed to inspection. It seems to me that it is the creative action of producing the surfaces which is important here, rather than the fact that what was previously ‘inside’ is now ‘outside’. I agree with González-Ruibal that it is helpful to think of the past as simultaneously imminent (in the sense in which all pasts exist as a product of the present) and hidden (in the sense in which we have to do work to generate these pasts) in the present; indeed, that surface and depth as well as present and past are on the same ontological level. But I think there is an important semantic difference between this simultaneous presence and distance of the past and its traces in the present, and the idea of ‘hidden’ depths. There is a sense in which that which is deep and hidden comes to stand in for the unattainable. In contrast, the idea of ‘surfaces with depth’ which Russell discusses and which I had perhaps less eloquently tried to develop in my original discussion article is important in emphasizing the accessibility of the past, present and future. One can only ‘see’ what is on the surface, or, perhaps, in this case, what is on the surface one creates. I simply meant to speak of the surface as something which was attainable, in contrast to the idea of hidden depths which always remain just beyond our grasp (as in the example Graves-Brown discusses of ‘going deeper’ to find out more about Shakespeare, which assumes there will always be depths which remain at least partially mysterious to us).

I think there is a crucial connection here between Graves-Brown's discussion of the importance of an understanding of the experiential qualities of things to archaeologists, Russell's emphasis on ‘gesture’ and the affective qualities of ‘archaeology as art’ as a practical/experiential engagement with the present, and Rathje's discussion of archaeology as an intervention in contemporary society. Indeed, it was this very practical involvement with the surface and creative engagement with the processes of assembling and reassembling which I hoped to highlight in the discussion article through my emphasis on archaeology as ‘the making and remaking of material palimpsests which mediate the production of the past, present and future’. I certainly did not envisage a detached contemplation but a direct involvement in and with the surface. This concern with practical engagement also resonates clearly with Horning's and González-Ruibal's interests in the relationship between archaeology and knowledge/power effects in the past and present.

I disagree that the surface should be seen as that which is closest to us and hence most familiar. As in the discussion of Heidegger's work above, that which is most ‘obvious’ is also often that which is furthest from consciousness. Here I see a direct connection between the notion of a ‘surface with depth’ and the sort of revelatory processes which are emphasized in different ways by Graves-Brown and González-Ruibal in relation to an archaeology of the present and recent past. Engagement with the surface and the ‘now-time’ provides a way of bringing into consciousness both that which has been actively ‘forgotten’ or ‘covered up’, as in the cases discussed by González-Ruibal, and those actors and things which are the most quotidian and hence the most easily overlooked, as discussed by Graves-Brown. Indeed, although these appear to be opposites, they are at once both distant and proximal. The uncanny and the everyday, the proximal and the distant, the past and the present (and the future) all occupy the same ontological fields and all occur simultaneously in the now. It is in the creative engagement with the surface and its assemblages, with the active process of assembling and reassembling, that archaeologists are able to intervene in the present to produce a confrontation with the past (however ‘deep’) in the present for the future in the experience of the ‘now’.

A ‘toolkit of concepts’: rethinking archaeology's methods and tropes

This brings me to my final comment about the ways in which reorienting archaeology to engage with and intervene in the emergent present and its possible futures requires a radical rethinking of both its methods and its tropes. I should say from the outset that I see this as an open and ongoing project, one best pursued through the kind of conversation entered into here in conjunction with the creative insights generated by work in the ‘field’ (indeed, if I had more space I would want to trouble this term too, to suggest, as others have done, that it is unhelpful to dichotomize the field and the laboratory, because ‘doing’ is also a process of ‘thinking’). I also see the process of rethinking archaeological concepts and tropes as integrally bound up with the recasting of its methods. I have already discussed Rabinow's work in developing a ‘toolkit of concepts’ for an anthropology of the contemporary (especially Reference Rabinow2003; Reference Buchli, Lucas, Buchli and Lucas2008; Rabinow et al. Reference Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion and Rees2008). There is a clear parallel between various concepts he develops and those discussed here. For example, he develops the term ‘actuality’ in an analogous way to Benjaminian ‘now-time’, distinguishing between it and the concept of the contemporary ‘present’ in a similar way to my discussion above. Similarly, his discussion of various processes which occupy different spatio-temporal modes as problematizations, apparatuses and assemblages would appear to map onto my concern with assemblages and the processes involved in assembling and reassembling. However, I think it is worth noting that Rabinow's particular research interests as an anthropologist are in some ways quite distinct from those of an archaeology of now, and for this reason it is important that we collaboratively develop our own ‘toolkit’ of concepts and methods which are specific to our interests as archaeologists. Similar experiments with the concepts of archaeology can be found in Michael Shanks's work on the ‘archaeological imagination’, including his online glossary (Shanks Reference Shanks2011). Another set of experiments is present in the critical trajectories stimulated by a consideration of ‘archaeology as art’ as discussed by Russell both here and elsewhere (e.g. Reference Russell2008; Cochrane and Russell Reference Cochrane and Russell2007).

My commentators have all demonstrated ways in which archaeologies in and of the present for the future are currently being pursued, and I am excited by the possibilities of this and future work. We must feel able to explore and experiment with minds open to the possibilities of the future in order to engage with the emergent present and its pasts. I hope this discussion of the surface and its assemblages makes a contribution towards this ongoing project.