Against Knowing: On opacity, archaeology, art, and the power of refusal
I was remembering, the other day, trips deep into the bowels of Harvard’s Widener Library where rarely-referenced early medieval law codes sat under a layer of dust, and the whole placed smelled of a fantasia of what young academics of a certain sort thought a library ought to be. And it occurred to me there has been and continues to be an olfactory aspect to knowledge. It has a smell. Think dry soil. Paper. Dust. Perhaps more recently, the petrichoric ionization of hard drives.
And just as suddenly, all Proustian, this recognition fired-off another. The smell of knowledge announces itself (as that library did long ago for me) in a complex heuristic of senses and sensibilities as something stable, definitive, finished—something certainly Real. It’s not the smell, it’s what that smell triggers. Those law codes, as structurally useless for me as they ended up being, are almost the entirety of the current real of the 7th-century. Them, and some buildings, jewellery, and pots, make up what we Know.
Speaking of pots, and I do frequently, archaeology, perhaps more than any other discipline, has perfected that complex—the aura of certainty produced by catalog numbers, stratigraphic diagrams, controlled vocabularies. It promises that the past can be reconstructed, that the broken can be made whole again. But the dig never fully cooperates. It crumbles, merges, lies. What we call knowledge often rests on the shakiest of sediments: a story built on a fragment, a theory propped up by a single line cut into stone.
We like to imagine (and certainly for many, many decades encouraged the idea) that archaeology is about revelation, literally bringing the past to light. But it is really about translation—about forcing mute things into a grammar utterly alien to them. And that translation is never neutral. Every sketch and label is an act of interpretation disguised as fact. The object, once lifted from the earth, loses its silence; it becomes evidence, illustration, content. The museum (and its servitors) finishes what time began: it stabilizes and domesticates.
And yet, what first draws us to these objects is precisely what exceeds knowledge. The chipped stone, the carving, the shard—each insists on presence, not explanation. It radiates a kind of resistance. The closer one looks, and if one is honest, the less one knows.
The Archaeological Temper
I’m not attempting to create an archaeological strawman, but rather I am trying to capture a mindset—a still dominant mindset—about how worlds might be unearthed and explained. Key to understanding this is to acknowledge a temperament that runs through archaeology and modernity alike: the conviction that everything can, in principle, be understood. That patience and technique will deliver meaning. It’s a beautiful dream, and a violent one. Tim Ingold once wrote that to study material traces is to enter into their lines of becoming, not to fix them. But the discipline rarely listens. It classifies instead. It turns the world’s entanglement into tables and typologies.
Every museum case is a little moral story about progress. The shards are arrayed in order; the captions calm and confident. The visitor is invited (and in fact, counts on it) to move from not knowing to knowing. Mystery becomes information; silence, an error to be corrected.
But the deeper you go into the actual earth, the more disorder you find. Layers fold into one another; time loops, bleeds, our markers fail us. We begin to see how provisional the whole enterprise is—how each conclusion depends on what it has chosen not to notice.
The Art World’s Mirror
Contemporary art, supposedly, resists this compulsion. It gestures wildly (and too frequently too wildly) toward ambiguity, celebrates the fragment, plays with interpretation. But it, too, often succumbs to explanation—if not in the work itself, then in the apparatus that surrounds it. Wall text. Press release. Artist statement. Grant proposal. A whole industry and economy built around translating experience back into discourse.
We pretend the text is supplemental, but in practice it’s the main event—the most direct and unambiguous mainline into our well-ordered modern brains. The art world has become archaeological in its own way: every gesture catalogued, every impulse rationalized, every ambiguity promptly explained in the next paragraph. Even the avant-garde now comes with footnotes.
I’m not against understanding (this too, is some hundreds of words of explanation, of attempting to elicit understanding). But I mistrust its speed, its eagerness. Most “understanding” is a defense mechanism—an attempt to close the circuit of discomfort. We do not—as a species, or as a modern—tolerate silence well. When faced with a thing that does not yield meaning, we talk it to death (or try to).
Working in the Interval
This Chronoliths project of mine that I’ve written about, hinted at, gestured towards, emerged from that tension. Eight black stoneware forms, each carved with a Paleolithic blade and marked with humanity’s oldest known symbols. Circles, chevrons, lines, grids: a proto-language without translation. They appear across caves from France to Sulawesi, spanning forty thousand years. Nobody knows what they meant. What they mean.
I began there—with the not-knowing. I wanted to make objects that operate inside that same interval: too precise to be natural, too silent to be legible. Each Chronolithcould plausibly be an artifact. It could also be a contemporary sculpture. The project refuses to decide, offers no knowing.
The creative process itself is a kind of dialogue across millennia. To carve with a stone blade is to feel the stubborn continuity of hand and material, to sense that technique is older than history. The resulting forms are disciplined, almost severe (something their base colouring also supports). They invite reading but deny it. They present themselves as evidence but yield only presence.
Viewers lean in, searching for meaning—the anthropologist’s instinct, the critic’s reflex. And the objects hold their ground. Nothing comes. What’s left—what I’m seeking—is that ache of want, of interpretation itself, the mind turning in circles around an absence.
The Seductions of the Archive
To deepen the trap, I am building an archive around these objects: field reports, site maps, recovery notes, photographs, all impeccably formatted and slightly wrong. The coordinates don’t quite match. The paper looks official but not entirely. The tone wavers between scholarship and hallucination.
It’s a game of authority, but also an exposure of it. The archive’s structure mimics the language of science to reveal how easily belief adheres to form. The moment you see a report with a typewriter font and a stamped date, you relax. You accept. The artifact becomes fact.
This is how knowledge works: not as discovery, but as performance. Jacques Rancière called it the “distribution of the sensible”—the system that determines who gets to speak and what counts as truth. The Chronoliths offer that distribution and lets it unravel. They show the machinery by pretending to operate it.
Opacity as Method
I’ve come to think of this not as mystification but as a form of ethics. Édouard Glissant spoke of the “right to opacity,” the right of people—and by extension, things—to remain incomprehensible on their own terms. Archaeology, in its classical mode, denies that right. It wants to expose, to explain, to render transparent. But opacity can be an act of respect, of acknowledgement. It allows the object to exist without being consumed by meaning.
In the atelier, this means refusing to resolve. Allowing contradictions to stand. Letting the surface carry its own logic, its own temporality. Ambiguity isn’t a pose; it is a recognition of reality.
This runs against the grain of both archaeology and contemporary art, which are, in different ways, industries of legibility. Both rely on narrative coherence to justify their existence—to secure funding, to fill the catalog, to reassure the visitor that something has been learned. But learning isn’t the same as understanding, and understanding isn’t the same as truth.
The Limit of the Explainable
There’s a line from someone, somewhere deep in my brain, I keep returning to: The absence of meaning is not the absence of value. It reminds me over and over again that silence is not ignorance. It’s another form of knowledge—one that doesn’t flatten difference into comprehension.
We tend to think of the unknowable as failure, but perhaps it’s the most honest relationship we can have with the world. Every object, every person, carries an excess that eludes capture. To name it too quickly is to erase it.
Chronoliths sit precisely there: at the border of sense, where interpretation breaks down. They are not puzzles to be solved but conditions to be endured. Their refusal is their meaning.
Making these pieces reinforced in me a different kind of epistemological bent, one divorced from that of ideas and constructs. Not theory then, but contact. Merleau-Ponty called it the “flesh of the world”, the shared materiality that links perception and thing. When I carve into clay with the stone, time folds. I’m not illustrating prehistory; I’m participating in its ongoing texture.
This is knowledge that can’t be written down. It’s tactile, gestural, iterative. It happens in the hand, in the eye, in the space between the two. The archaeologist seeks to extract meaning from matter; the artist, to let matter speak. But maybe both are just two inflections of the same longing: to touch the real without destroying it.
The Politics of Ambiguity
In an era obsessed with data (particularly of the binary sort), ambiguity feels subversive, perhaps even revolutionary. We are told that everything can be quantified, modeled, archived. The museum has become an algorithmic interface, the artist a content provider. Against this background, opacity becomes political. To withhold information is to resist commodification.
Ambiguity is not a retreat into mystery but an assertion of agency. It demands that the viewer slow down, be uncertain, relinquish control. The Chronoliths enact that demand. They do not reward the interpretive impulse; they suspend it.
Georges Didi-Huberman once wrote something along the lines that to see is always to be seen—an exchange, not a possession. The same applies to knowledge. The moment we think we’ve mastered the object, it turns a knowing eye. The Chronoliths are built for that reversal. Their surfaces catch light like skin; they seem to listen. What they know, they won’t tell.
Beyond Meaning
I’m arguing above that archaeology and art share the same underlying fantasy: that matter can be made to testify. Both are, at heart, theological enterprises. They seek revelation. But perhaps the sacred lies elsewhere—not in what can be revealed, but in what resists revelation.
The Chronoliths aren’t about the past. They’re about the condition of looking, of thinking, of wanting to know. They offer no story, no key, no origin. Only the quiet insistence of form.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe, at this point in history, the most radical gesture is to stop explaining—to let the object remain other, to allow silence to stand unbroken.
Knowledge, after all, is not infinite. It has an edge. And beyond that edge lies not ignorance, but the field where art begins: the space of not-knowing. Shimmering, alive.
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Once an archaeologist of the dead and their vessels, Peter BG Shoemaker now writes and makes objects that question what endures. From his rural French atelier, he shapes forms and the quiet worlds around them—where matter, story, and time continually remake one another. peter@ateliertushu.fr | www.ateliertushu.fr