The Burren
Co. Clare, Ireland
July 2004
Still this vagueness about the body troubles me. The body is, for Lefebvre, a means to an end. That is, he uses a concept of the body to get to an understanding of space. Is this the fate of the body, the reality of its existence as a concept in our field? To be whatever an archaeologist needs it to be for a particular argument? I think it safe to posit that the body is a different thing for each archaeologist. The variation is, however, even more deep-rooted. Each of us does not have just one concept of body but a multiplicity of conceptual bodies. We select which body to use on different occasions and for different arguments.
This is not a novel conclusion – that the body is created by discourse, and that a new body is created each time it is put to use in discourse. Lefebvre recognizes this to some degree: ‘Indeed, there are as many different relationships between the Ego and its own body – as many forms of appropriation of that body, or of failure to appropriate it – as there are societies, ‘cultures’, or even perhaps individuals.’ He believes, however, that we are lost within discourse and our relationships with and understandings of the body are lost within discourse but that the body itself is a reality that is not merely the product of discourse:
‘The analysis – and self-analysis – of the total body, the way in which that body locates itself and the way in which it becomes fragmented, all are determined by a practice which includes discourse but which cannot be reduced to it …. Under the conditions of modern industry and city life, abstraction holds sway over the relationship to the body. As nature fades into the background, there is nothing to restore the total body – nothing in the world of objects, nothing in the world of action. The Western tradition, with its misapprehension of the body, re-manifests itself in increasingly strange ways; laying the blame for all the damage at the door of discourse alone is to exculpate not only that tradition but also ‘real’ abstract space.’
 by Meg Butler
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