Abstract
The article focuses on the phenomenon of “Wild Archaeologies” – that is, on “archaeologies” that have appeared in the history of knowledge outside of Classical Archaeology: The first of these projects one thinks of, is of course Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir, but there has also been Freud’s archaeology of the soul, Benjamin’s archaeology of modernity as well as Kittler’s archaeology of media – and even Kant’s archaeology of metaphysics. All of these various projects experimented with a material reflection of temporality and presented alternatives to the conventional historical thinking of the past. What do these various projects have in common? What is their historical, philosophical and epistemological relation to contemporary archive theory as well as to Classical Archaeology? And which consequences has this “archaeological method” or thinking for art history? And finally, what does Giorgio Agamben’s recent claim mean: that “the archaeologist’s gesture is the paradigm of every human activity”?
Highlights
Thinking temporality in the digital age requires a different line of thinking than historical discourse: not narrating, but counting; seeing rather than reading; not historia, but archaiologia – and perhaps not even the disciplined approach of archaeology proper, but such a thing as “wild archaeology,”[1] which means, at first, that one is dealing with archaeological projects outside of archaeology proper
The 20th century has seen a number of such “wild” archaeological projects: Sigmund Freud’s “Archaeology of the Soul,” Walter Benjamin’s “Archaeology of Modernity” and, Foucault’s “Archaeology of Knowledge,” which is probably the first of these mysterious projects that comes to mind
How can we reach this long past but yet very close age? How can we find the originating and constitutional time, as we always already operate in constituted time? How can we remember a time when we did not know what time was? How can we regress to the other time and to the other of time? To answer these complicated questions, one might look at the methodology of every “wild archaeology” – which can itself, as we know from Benjamin, be rather wild
Summary
Thinking temporality in the digital age requires a different line of thinking than historical discourse: not narrating, but counting; seeing rather than reading; not historia, but archaiologia – and perhaps not even the disciplined approach of archaeology proper, but such a thing as “wild archaeology,”[1] which means, at first, that one is dealing with archaeological projects outside of archaeology proper.
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