Brief reply to Leo S. Klejn.
Renfrew, Colin
It was with great pleasure that I learnt that Leo S. Klejn was to
review Figuring It Out, since he achieved a well-deserved reputation
already in the 1970s as a keen and highly independent critic of
theoretical archaeology in the West. So I am naturally delighted that he
has read the book with such close attention, and with many relevant
comments. For instance his emphasis on the role of photography in
changing ideas about representation in the visual arts is well taken.
Only in the last section, where he identifies the book as
'postmodernist' would I wish to disagree. And presumably it is
his remarkable peroration with its military metaphor - where I am
identified as, 'a great leader, commander in chief; although
unfortunately of the wrong army--which has motivated the Editor of
Antiquity to invite me to write a word of comment.
My own view of postmodernism is probably as critical as that of
Professor Klejn, and certainly I have no desire to lead its
'armies'--and distinctly ragged battalions I would imagine
them to be. But why the military metaphor? It seems to me that Klein is
re-living some of the battles of the 1980s and 1990s, when the
self-styled 'post-processual' archaeologists (including Shanks
and Tilley) delivered their robust critique of processual archaeology.
My own position has always been to question what I see as the defective
epistemology--the relativism, the vulnerability to
pseudo-archaeology--of the more doctrinaire interpretive archaeologists,
while welcoming their initiative in entering the symbolic field. For
that reason I have advocated a cognitive archaeology which would seek to
be 'processual' in the broadly scientific tradition of the New
Archaeology, yet would deal with the symbolic and projective aspects of
human experience. I respect the initiatives in the field of gender
archaeology, and the archaeology of identity, and indeed of landscape
archaeology which have come largely from researchers who would place
themselves in the 'post-processual' tradition of interpretive
archaeology. Indeed I feel that their best work (just as I felt with the
Marxist prehistorians of yesteryear) could without difficulty be
translated into a processual or cognitive-processual mode of thought and
expression.
Ultimately I think Klejn misunderstands the nature of science. My
book deliberately sets out to use inspiration from the work of artists,
inspiration which involves feelings and reactions which are indeed in
large measure subjective, to promote new understandings and new ways of
thinking. If the matter were to end there, then his strictures might
have some validity and the enterprise might be dismissed as merely
'postmodern'. But in the field of science (meaning here
systematic knowledge, and not necessarily number-crunching by men in
white lab coats) it is not the source of the inspiration but the use to
which it is put that is crucial. This point was made effectively by
Jacques Hadamard (1945) many years ago. Indeed Einstein, in a famous
letter to Hadamard wrote: 'The words or the language, as they are
written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of
thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in
thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be
voluntarily reproduced or combined: One famous example in the history of
science is the dream of whirling snakes experienced by the chemist
Friedrich August yon Kekule which led him to formulate the cyclical
structure of benzene, so basic to organic chemistry. Many scientists
including Clerk Maxwell and Poincare as well as Einstein have made this
point, that in the sciences insight often arises from imagination rather
than logic or reason, and I don't imagine that Klejn visualises
them as marching in his (or my) postmodernist army.
For the archaeologist, I would argue, it is not simply the visual
element but the quality of materiality which is so relevant both in
contemporary art and archaeology. This is a point which I have sought to
make more systematically, in terms of what one might call material
engagement theory (Renfrew 2004; see Malafouris 2004), and the same line
of thinking underlies Figuring It Out. So my advice to Klein is to chill
out a little, go and see some more visual art, feel it, and experience
it (as well as thinking about it), and return refreshed to the
scientific workdesk of the contemporary archaeologist, Perhaps he will
then escape those militarist nightmares, which were surely more suited
to the Cold War of archaeological theory, a conflict from which we have
perhaps now mercifully escaped.
References
HADAMARD, J. 1945. The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field. New York: Dover.
MALAFOURIS, L. 2004. The cognitive basis of material engagement:
where brain, body and culture conflate, in E. DeMarrais, C. Godsen &
C. Renfrew (ed.) Rethinking Materiality, the Engagement of Mind with the
Material World: 53-62. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.
RENFREW, C. 2004. Towards a theory of material engagement, in E.
DeMarrais, C. Godsen & C. Renfrew (ed.) Rethinking Materiality, the
Engagement of Mind with the Material World: 23-32. Cambridge: McDonald
Institute.
Colin Renfrew *
* The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of
Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER, UK (Email:
des25@cam.ac.uk)
