archaeography

The Burren
Co. Clare, Ireland
July 2004

The role of the senses in producing space is very important to Lefebvre. Like many people, he bemoans Cartesian philosophy, his reason being the unfortunate privileging of the visual in trying to understand space. For Lefebvre, space is as much about understanding place through sounds, smells, tastes, and touch as it is about mapping it onto a grid or comprehending distances. Animals and people produced and lived space long before they conceived of space and created thought space and representations of space. The advent of the Logos and its emphasis on the visual (this advent being an important part of both ancient Greek society and Cartesian thought) brought about this visual perception of space and estranged it from space as a lived experience.

Because of these beliefs, Lefebvre recognizes the impossibility of truly understanding the spatial realities (relative to an individual) of another person’s experience. One would have to be his body in order to share his perception of space (Sein und Zeit, etc., etc.). This is why ‘phenomenological’ approaches are unacceptable for many people. Yet Lefebvre himself makes assertions about the space and spatial realities of other peoples. He makes several observations about space by contrasting the spatial practices and perceptions of the Greeks and Romans. I think that Lefebvre would claim that while an archaeologist cannot achieve a fully correct interpretation of space relative to an individual or society, he can make progress toward a more correct understanding of that other spatial world. This progress comes from parallel analysis of spatial perceptions and bodily perceptions. If you want to understand ancient Greek space, you must understand both how the ancient Greeks viewed space and how they viewed their bodies. Obviously this approach is better suited for societies that have left more ‘clues’ as to their perceptions of the body. This is not to say that only historical or proto-historical societies provide such ‘clues.’ Furthermore, it is just as likely that all the Greek philosophical works on the body might actually lead an archaeologist astray in trying to make a particular viewpoint speak for an entire society. In addition, attempting this approach privileges one goal – recovering ‘the’ (and this is a very presumptuous ‘the’) ancient experience – and ignores another, just as worthwhile – exploring past-present relationships through an understanding of our own personal roles in creating the space of ruins.

Throughout all of Lefebvre’s musings is the noticeable absence of a working definition of the body. For Lefebvre, the body seems to the same thing as the self – mind, body, consciousness, and action all contained in a neat package. Lefebvre’s body informs its mind, and vice versa; he wants to avoid the Cartesian mind-body split that has arisen as capitalism and the Church have fragmented the body. It is interesting that while he criticizes the mind-body split, he continues to use its language because the Ego has become a reality for the Western world, in his opinion. Just because things are part of discourse does not make them unreal for Lefebvre. Conceiving of something makes it real, although he believes also in realities that exist before and beyond discourse, such as the existence of Topos before and outside of Logos.