ABSTRACT
The archaeology of the contemporary past requires a particular way of telling and manifesting things—a different aesthetics. In this chapter, the potential of Jacques Rancière’s idea of the aesthetic regime of art is explored to understand contemporary archaeology’s aesthetics. It is defended that both regimes (of art and archaeology) work aesthetically through parataxis—the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated phenomena, objects, or ideas—only that art creates parataxes, and contemporary archaeology documents them as it finds them in the world. Rancière’s poetics of knowledge also provide an excellent point of departure for a new rhetoric of archaeology, one based on materiality, ellipsis and silence, which is particularly well suited to manifest the traumas and violence of the contemporary era.
