The underlying notion for this article is that archaeology requires an amalgamation of humanities and science, and of narrative and scientific knowledge. The need for this fusion has arisen in a context in which contemporary society is experiencing major changes in epistemics, aesthetics and fashion; an increase in virtual experiences; and an economic crisis. I refer to this situation as the neo-baroque, a condition that is elusive and partially ambiguous. This social context (perhaps the final crisis of modernity), and the breakdown of this integration in pragmatic terms, call for a repoliticization of science.
The challenge of knowledge in late modernity is how we might mobilize in a positive, transformative way what is the highest level of information, self-reflexivity and self-awareness that humanity has reached in its entire history. We have never known so much, so well, about so many things. Never before has it been possible to create significant interrelationships between everything we know. However, none of this is much use in terms of consolidating social welfare, and the archaeology that I want is one that contributes towards achieving this goal.
A way forward might be exemplified by Castle, a television series for which I have a particular weakness. Its co-stars are charming, but I like the series above all because, in a way that I am sure has little to do with the intentions of its scriptwriters, it becomes a statement in defence of the humanities. The series is about a novelist who helps out a policewoman from New York. While she gathers evidences, he puts together the background story. In a very simple way, this shows us how, without evidence, we only have a novel, but without a narrative, all we have is evidence that proves nothing. I think this is the best way of summing up the situation between science-oriented and narrative-oriented research.
This kind of synthesis is increasingly common, as exemplified in anthropology by Fuentes and Wiessner (Fuentes and Wiessner Reference Fuentes and Wiessner2016; Wiessner Reference Wiessner2016). The development of archaeological theory over the last ten or fifteen years, as happened in the fields of history and philosophy of science, has bridged the divide between the old dualities of positivism/hermeneutics, explanation/interpretation and objectivism/subjectivism. Differences still exist, but if the objectivist ideal of processualism was exhausted some time ago, it is also obvious that a subjectivist version of postprocessualism or a postmodernist hermeneutic liberalism is not the solution. The rise of critical reflexivity as a central component of all theories and practices, and the consolidation of a weak model of science (rigorous data, robust methodologies and reflexive theories), open the way to a new integrative proposal that Kristiansen (Reference Kristiansen2014) has recently identified as the ‘new paradigm’ for archaeology.
Kristiansen's proposal combines the science-based potentials of archaeological research (big data, deep archaeometries, information sciences, visualization technologies) with robust theories to produce meaningful narratives. This problem-oriented type of archaeological research brings together anthropological approaches and social sciences with ‘hard’ sciences. The frequent appearance of terms associated with ‘sewing’ and ‘stitching’ in material studies and in current theoretical archaeology converges with this trend.
However, any integrative strategy involves difficulties. Some are marginal: how to avoid the practical contradictions of diverging theoretical schemes (eclecticism has never been a solution), or how to overcome the dispersive effect of narcissistic disciplinary criticism (which is more interested in defending one's own identity and competing for academic power than in creating syntheses). But the most substantial difficulty is that we will not be able to progress towards a new state of awareness without first embedding these integrative trends within a reconsideration of modernity. This is urgently required and something that I would call a ‘symmetrical re-modernity’, which is to be understood as a process of overcoming the tropes that have shaped European thought up to now. To do this it will be necessary to question the philosophical foundations of modernity, identify the transformations of modern epistemologies, and correlate these with the transformations of knowledge and power strategies operating in our contemporary knowledge society.
For me ‘symmetry’ faces up to the challenge of overcoming the dichotomies that date back to the very origins of Western philosophy. Since the rise of Greek philosophy, the language of ‘dualization’ has constituted the metaphysics of being and in particular the way of resolving the copular verbs (i.e. the relationship between the subject and that subject's actions in relation to objects) in Indo-European languages, which drives our European understanding of reality at ontological and epistemological levels. For a very different approach, one of the most original projects in the field of philosophy in the last 30 years is the rethinking of European philosophy from a Chinese perspective (Jullien Reference Jullien2010, 208). Jullien's simple but effective approach shows that the problem that Western metaphysics has with the duality distinguishing the object and the subject cannot be translated into the Chinese perspective: it depends on our European languages, which the Eastern tradition overcomes.
The ability to integrate narrativity and scientificity (the integration of sciences with humanities, theory with data) makes archaeology an essentially symmetrical discipline. I am not referring by this to the creation of a post-humanist metaphysics of objects and things (see criticism by Barrett Reference Barrett2014), but to the fact that archaeology is in a good position to overcome the traditional dichotomies of modernity, as has been demanded by several authors (Bryant Reference Bryant2011; González-Ruibal Reference González-Ruibal and González-Ruibal2013; Latour Reference Latour2007). Interpretive practice is the kernel of any integrative strategy that must avoid both explanatory objectivism and a hermeneutic subjectivity, but seeks instead to change the world through its interpretation without reifying the individual subjective condition. The main problem that still remains with regard to interpretation is that world views cannot be one-views. Therefore the key task is to find a contextual way of representing the world that integrates two different steps: the first step achieves a ‘weak’ interpretation through a formal comparison of regularities occurring between different ranges of phenomena or different codes (either material, literal, performative or ideal), the second step constructs a ‘strong’ interpretation by reading these regularities from the rationale of the cultural context to which they belong, something that constitutes what I refer to as a ‘reason lost’ (Criado-Boado Reference Criado-Boado2012; Reference Criado-Boado, Kristiansen, Šmejda and Turek2015). Although the second step is the definitive one, the density of the matter is provided for by its own interpretation, which Ingold (Reference Ingold2011, 342) illustrates with reference to basketry. Recent interest in material studies (Lemmonnier Reference Lemmonnier2012) and thing-oriented approaches (Olsen Reference Olsen2012b) supports the empirical basis of interpretations in the material dimensions of real things. To some extent meaning could arise from the materialities themselves, because materials incorporate the means and senses of the actions on them. Their material dimensions speak about these means and provide the preconditions for them. Materialities are products that reflect the entanglement of the mind and the world; they negotiate, or even cause, this relationship (Malafouris Reference Malafouris2013). Thus not only does the materialization process express this relationship (mind–world), but also its consequences (the material characteristics of matter) reproduce it. In the near future we would need to go far beyond speculative cognitive archaeology by including advances in the neurosciences and even archaeometric data. Some evidence suggests that in material culture there is a relationship between ways of doing, ways of perceiving and ways of thinking. The notion of ‘statistics of the world’ (Torralba and Oliva Reference Torralba and Oliva2003) unveils the reason behind this entanglement and why human products (either materials or ideals) do not depend solely on the brain, the body, society or the environment, but instead upon connections with states of mind related to the world which include past human experiences, perceptions, projections and reactions. Good archaeology will always embrace a productive fusion of speculative and scientific knowledge.
The current transformations of interpretation have to do with the ongoing transformations involved in the emergence of the ‘knowledge society’, but also relate to other realms: the scientific (the ‘third scientific revolution’), the cultural (neo-baroque aesthetics), the social (the crisis of the European welfare state), and the political (hegemonic hyper-liberal power strategies). We need to disentangle the relationships within this network, such as science, knowledge, neo-baroque, the crisis and neoliberal policies and economics.
In epistemological terms, the third scientific revolution (cf. Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen2014) means the final decline of a system of knowledge based on metaphorical or metonymic representations, and the definite overcoming of analogical reasoning and knowledge. New genomics and digital technologies herald the emergence of a knowledge articulated by ersatz models (e.g. the DNA sequencing of an individual) and the experience of virtual realities. At the same time, the end of the old representationalism is related to major transformations currently taking place in the fields of knowledge, economics and politics (the ‘knowledge society’ or ‘information age’ – Castells Reference Castells1989) that fracture the traditional equation of wealth with value. This makes possible counterintuitive situations in which, for example, Google's stock value exceeds that of General Electric by 50 per cent, with an annual turnover that is 4.7 times lower, and it fosters new forms of economic practice (commons, prosumers, Uber, the zero-marginal-cost society – Rifkin Reference Rifkin2014) that take advantage of digital technologies. Meanwhile, what I identify as neo-baroque is one of the material ways of being that echoes the new cultural ways of living. Moreover, it goes together with current transformations of epistemology (i.e. anti-representationalism – Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro2012) and ontologies (i.e. the agency of things – Brown Reference Brown2001; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell Reference Henare, Holbraad, Wastell, Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007).
The recent actualization of the baroque (c.f. Klein Reference Klein2004) in the world of fashion and aesthetics is significant (Prominski and Koutroufinis Reference Prominski and Koutroufinis2009) and equates with a number of major changes in all of the different realms of reality today: in epistemics, perception, virtual experiences, the economic crisis. I refer to this as the neo-baroque era not in a celebratory way, but instead as a critical diagnosis – a period that is not representational, but when old and new potentials (the synthetic, the corporeal, experiences, feelings, emotions and senses beyond sight) are available to understand reality. At a time marked by the hegemony of interpretive practices, when everything is nothing but interpretation, the baroque loop (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1988) shows the way followed by the hermeneutic spiral of understanding. At a time when there is a fusion of different subjective horizons and everything becomes confused and confusing, the baroque brings back the adventure of combining, of diversity and cultural interbreeding. At a time when new ontologies emphasize things, the life of matter and the agency of actants, the baroque is recovered as the art that was able to breathe life into the inanimate. Something curious is happening: the same rationales that, from the perspective of northern European bourgeois and Protestant citizens, discredited the baroque in early modern Europe today warrant its reappraisal.
What sense is there in the congruence between this neo-baroque in fashions and styles and the moment when science is breaking away completely from analogy and representation? The third scientific revolution has occurred at the same time as the neo-baroque, in the same way as the first baroque period anticipated the scientific revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we return to the genealogy of the original baroque we can see that although the baroque was reviled by the Enlightenment it marked a milestone in modern science and contributed to making that Enlightenment possible. The maximum perfection of realism and the expression of emotion elevated to theatrical levels seen in baroque art and literature were capable of causing, better than any other means, the dual separation between object and subject (Panofsky Reference Panofsky2013, 63). The development of science required this duality as a condition to enable the discovery of a modern epistemology and ontology. It is no coincidence that great scientists have always paid special attention to representation, with a constant entanglement between art and science (Galileo dedicated his life to science because he could not be an artist – Shea Reference Shea2013, 59). This can be seen in the fields of perspective, cartography, optics, geodesics and, later on, photography: Nikola Tesla and Ramón y Cajal were great photographers. Now this emphasis has shifted to renewed interest in the visualization of data, derived from a genuine interest in how best to show ‘big data’ so that they are comprehensible. The eruption of 3D imaging is one extreme effect, similar to what happened a few years ago with GIS technologies. In both cases their boundless possibilities and low cost turned desktop PCs into incredible tools that often led us to forget what the scientific problem was that needed to be solved (something that Llobera (Reference Llobera2010) has rightly criticized). Everyone now makes 3D reconstructions, but nobody says what the research question is. It is not because they do not know how to ask research questions but because the question is unnecessary. The aim is boiled down to re-engaging with reality itself, to making a model of it in high resolution, and ideally emancipating it from subjective distortion. The simultaneity of visualizations and 3D imaging with the ongoing scientific revolution and the neo-baroque is not a mere coincidence: on the one hand both overcome the hurdles of analogical representation (3D modelling is not an analogue drawing, but a mechanical and a synthetic image), and on the other hand their aim is to return to things themselves.
However, this emergence of the neo-baroque is ambiguous. It occurs in a non-representational period, in which pure experience enveloping bodies and things replaces representation and scientific models that wrap up the rationale of the world (for a critique see Millán-Pascual Reference Millán-Pascual2015). At the same time a new regime of understanding emerges that is characterized by synthetic, ersatz and corporeal performances, including a strong appeal for the emotional. Emphasis on precise depictions of reality arises from a pre-theoretical new empiricism (exemplified by the 3D and virtual reality boom) and matches with the complete dissolution of bodies and objects into experiences arising in the ontological turn. There is a trail to patch together these different experiences. For this reason it is not surprising that ‘sewing’ terminology is today a frequent metaphor in the archaeological narrative of other disciplines, whose genealogy is embedded, in my view, in the experience of coping with the multiplication and increasing complexity of modern life. It seems that the intricacy of the current multivocal action, multi-agent reality and multicultural context demands sewing, mending and patching up our fragmented life. Entanglement has become a core concept to encompass the fluidity of networks and to mean something that does not belong to single human actors but that is intrinsic to reality itself: it epitomizes the interwoven nature of the real, and calls for transdisciplinary research.
In this sense, Hodder's entanglement (Reference Hodder2012) is as significant as Disney's Tangled, and, yes, I am referring to the Walt Disney film from 2010, two years before the appearance of Hodder's book, which in no way demerits it, but in itself has the merit of illustrating the fact that both works belong to stronger dynamics of rationality than the intention of their authors. The intellectual neo-baroque is an acknowledgement of plurality and multi-otherness, of diversity and fragmentation. The reality of these networks, interwoven with transitive and copulative engagements, is now so strong that in all of the different fields of knowledge and practices of late modernity we need the skill of seamstresses in order to construct intelligible, effective and efficient diagnoses of reality. And so theoretical literature has become full of terms we normally associate with this field: sew, mend, patch, entangle, ensemble, unravel, neatness, messiness, threads, networks, and so on.
This weaving process knits together such events as the neo-baroque, Castle, socio-economics, digital power (the fifth estate), anti-representationalism, new ontologies . . . and crisis. This type of synthesis that brings together big science, knowledge, new paradigms, entanglement theories, community research and public science leads us towards theoretical and practical consensuses that can be either as productive in scientific terms as they are empty in their transformative horizons, or as active in political terms as they are scientifically weak. In either case, there is the suspicion that this consensus which is interwoven into today's theoretical and practical integration of the sciences echoes neoliberal ideologies.
Kristiansen's (Reference Kristiansen2014, 27) statement about living in ‘the most exciting of times’ focuses critics on the dilemma between optimism and pessimism (Larsson Reference Larsson2014, 53). Optimism lies in our chances of going deeper into the modernization project and producing a re-modernity, both reflexive and revised. Meanwhile, pessimism overwhelms us when we make a radical critique of modernity (following authors who approach modernity from a reverse perspective: Debord (Reference Debord1967); Jullien (Reference Jullien1998); Kurz (Reference Kurz2002); Piketty (Reference Piketty2013); Rodrik's trilemma (Reference Rodrik2011)). Despite the fact that according to the latter idea there is no chance of salvation within modernity because modernity is the problem itself, from a pragmatic perspective the time has come to bring into play positive syntheses that recover the legacy of knowledge and modern experience, integrating it with the critical and reflexive perspectives of radical critique to draw up new paradigmatic frameworks that reconcile the main theoretical trends and proposals of the twentieth century in archaeology, science or culture.
The new paradigmatic frameworks require a symmetrical perspective, understood in the weak sense of thinking beyond dualities, that combines narrativity and scientificity. Applying this reflexive integration to research requires a re-politicization of our practices because, at the same time as creating scientific reason (i.e. certainty, by bringing together meaning and rationality), they displace practical reason from the domain of science and place it within a political arena. Knowledge is a social construct, and as such a political dimension must always form a substantial part of research practice. The political dimension is the means of building intersubjective networks of trust through the creation (as accounted for science by Latour (Reference Latour2013, 46)) of a transparent institution of archaeology (Alonso-González, forthcoming), something that has recently been addressed by Mizoguchi (Reference Mizoguchi2015). We must not be afraid of politics engulfing our practice in relativism and scepticism. The hard component of archaeological science that I advocate, and the epistemological and ontological precautions I have outlined here, together with ethics, prevent us from falling into the trompe l'oeils of extreme subjectivity. I do want an archaeology that is pragmatically pervaded by combining scientificity, interpretation and politics. Without considering the political dimension of knowledge (Beck Reference Beck1997; Zaera-Polo Reference Zaera-Polo2008), radical optimism in science sounds like a version of the neoliberal consensus, another trompe l'oeil that is denied by the current situation of Europe and the world. Let me be provocative, to end: perhaps this sort of agreement in theoretical positions in archaeology and science could epitomize the trail to create the agreements that are so difficult in everyday life.
