Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology-and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin's insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism's creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a direct engagement with recent ruins. What! Ruins so soon! (Alexis de Tocqueville (2003 [1835])Alexis de Tocqueville was speaking of a ruined log cabin he stumbled on in his exploration of the woods of New York. He marveled at the restless American frontier and was enchanted by the oddness of new ruins. Until recently, such enchantment has been rare. More often, Western observers of recent ruins have found them banal, tragic, or noisome. Romantic views are usually reserved for the ruins of a more distant past. One of the unique attributes of Walter Benjamin was his ability to turn romanticism on its head. His aesthetic contemplation of the recent ruins of the shopping arcades of Paris and the artifacts they housed in dusty whatnot shops inspired him to rethink the temporality of capitalism and the dialectic of history, among other things (Benjamin 1999;Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999). The resurrection of Benjamin as a philosophical provocateur in the present intellectual moment is not unrelated to a growing aesthetic sensibility that shares Benjamin's and de Tocqueville's fascination with recent ruins. Nor does it seem unrelated to a growing cross-disciplinary interest in archaeology, a practice grounded in the study of ruins. Intensely personal encounters, both mediated and immediate, with large-scale recent ruins such as those of 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the blooming global rust belt of postindustrial cities may also feed this preoccupation. In Benjamin's terms, ruins ar...

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