Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
This article was downloaded by: [141.214.17.222]On: 31 October 2014, At: 11:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Angelaki: Journal of the TheoreticalHumanitiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20
30,000 BC: painting animalityDarren Ambrose aa Department of Philosophy , University of Warwick , CoventryCV4 7AL, UK E-mail:Published online: 02 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: Darren Ambrose (2006) 30,000 BC: painting animality, Angelaki: Journal of theTheoretical Humanities, 11:2, 137-152
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250601029309
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 11 number 2 august 2006
I prehistoric art ^ chaos, magma,and life
The paintings and engravings of Upper
Palaeolithic (40,000–10,000 BC) parietal
rock art depict vibrant scenes of animality –
bison, horses, lions, mammoths, bears, and deer.
The cave art at Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet
continues to directly convey a profound intensity
and extraordinary beauty with a vitality and
invention often associated with modernist
abstract painters like Picasso, Klee, or Miro; as
the prehistorian Emmanuel Anati claims, it is an
art that remains contemporary.1 In these ancient
caves, animal forms are tilted, displaced,
inverted, superimposed, and even placed upon a
vertical plane, making them appear as if they
were floating within space. Alongside these
clearly structured and organised representations
of animals, there exist certain abstract elements
whose ‘‘figurative’’ or ‘‘symbolic’’ nature seems
hopelessly obscure. As the prehistorian Denis
Vialou has written: ‘‘There is a spatial and
graphical reality which is juxtaposed and often
superimposed on recognisable representations –
as such they should be considered as separate
graphic units.’’2
There have been a great many theoretical
approaches developed with regard to both of
these distinct elements within Palaeolithic par-
ietal art – e.g., art for art’s sake, totemism, Abbe
Breuil’s hunting magic theory,3 Bataille’s theory
of prohibition and Transgression,4 Leroi-
Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaire’s structuralist
theories.5 Recent influential approaches include
the shamanic interpretative frameworks posited
by Clottes and Lewis-Williams,6 the construction
of a taxonomy of symbols by Anati,7 and the
holistic approach favoured by Lorblanchet.8
Typical to the approach adopted by many of
the early theoretical approaches was the extra-
polation from the painted or engraved surface of
more or less complete and recognisable motifs,
leaving behind the remainder of seemingly
irreducible entanglements of lines, marks, dots,
daubs, scratches, etc. Early prehistorians such as
the Abbe Breuil expressed contempt for what he
called lines of interference, claiming that they
were devoid of value and that they obscured the
‘‘beautiful’’ animal figures. For many theorists,
these residual elements serve a merely provisional
function with regard to animal figuration, as, in
Sandars’ memorable phrase, ‘‘the splendour of
forms yet to come.’’9 Later theorists such as
Leroi-Gourhan and Vialou, despite focusing
serious attention upon the abstract, geometrical
marks in the caves, continued to maintain a
darren ambrose
30,000 BC: PAINTINGANIMALITYdeleuze and prehistoricpainting
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/020137^16� 2006 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI:10.1080/09697250601029309
137
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
graphic dualism between representational figura-
tion and abstraction.10 Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan
associated indeterminate lines and marks with
what he called provisional unfinished outlines.
Since the great majority of Palaeolithic parietal
art precisely consists of such ‘‘graphic units,’’ i.e.,
abstract and complex interweaving lines and
marks, abstracted and isolated parts of animals,
and unrecognisable biomorphic forms, I wish to
argue in this paper that it seems unjustifiable to
continue with this form of graphic dualism that
insists upon separating the integral animal forms
from the seemingly disorganised, chaotic, and
non-figurative elements. It seems illegitimate to
separate and privilege one type of visual space,
apparently organised around ‘‘good’’ naturalistic
representational form, from another type of
graphic space considered to be ‘‘incohesive’’
and ‘‘disorganised,’’ and which is taken merely
to function as a subsidiary and subordinate zone
to the first. The possibility that a radical graphic
fluidity might exist within prehistoric painting
and engraving has often been overlooked, side-
lined, or diminished by prehistoric art specialists.
However, two recent influential prehistorians,
Michel Lorblanchet and Emmanuel Anati, have
made considerable efforts to instantiate just such
an approach. These prehistorians assign indeter-
minate lines and marks a much more important
place within the overall prehistoric aesthetic.
Anati’s approach posits that prehistoric art is a
form of writing in a primary language that, when
deciphered, will prepare the ground for a
universal history. He argues for the presence of
three distinct but interrelated types of sign in all
forms of prehistoric art – pictograms, ideograms,
and psychograms. Pictograms are images (human
figures, animal figures, structures, and objects);
ideograms are symbols that are repeated and
have, Anati claims, a standard significance;
psychograms are exclamations and as such are
not repeated or standard. For Anati, psychograms
were created under the influence of intense
impulses and violent discharges of energy, and
as such were capable of expressing sensation.
Each psychogram is unique. For Anati, all three
distinct elements constitute the fundamental
structure of all prehistoric art found throughout
the entire world – ‘‘the same modes of
expression, the same associations, and the same
themes are found throughout the world.’’11
Anati’s approach has the virtue of not imposing
an artificial graphic hierarchy but of conceiving
prehistoric art as a coherent and unified graphic
assemblage where figuration and abstraction are
seen to be fundamentally related and as operating
together. It is a virtue shared by the interpreta-
tive approach developed by Michel Lorblanchet,
who argues for an integrated understanding of the
relationship between the animal figures and the
unorganised tangles of lines and marks. For
Lorblanchet, these lines and marks indicate a
clear metaphysical intention – ‘‘a primeval
magma where all living and imaginary beings
merge in formal games.’’12 Thus, these indeter-
minate lines and marks contain potentialities for
the becoming of latent figural images and as such
are, for Lorblanchet, a crucial element within the
prehistoric figuration of a mythology of creation.
Here, the figurative components are born from a
formless tangle or magma, e.g., from the formless
web of subsidiary lines, perhaps a hoof or an
antler emerges, perhaps a muzzle or a creature’s
spine, perhaps an eye stares out from the depths
of the graphic chaos. The seemingly incohesive
graphic chaos is seemingly vibrant with emergent
forms of Life.
Beginning, then, with the insights provided by
Anati and Lorblanchet, I will attempt to show
that it was through the evolution of a unified
plane of composition that prehistoric creators or
artists were subsequently able to traverse, freely
and smoothly in all directions, between the two
extremes; that it was the existence of a radical
form of stylistic free-play within prehistoric
parietal art which allowed for the boundaries
between different living species to be so funda-
mentally and repeatedly Transgressed. Over
thousands of years, a number of ‘‘styles’’ evolved
that permitted prehistoric artists, in graphic
terms, to migrate or Transgress from one
organism or creature to another. The explicit
presence of hybridised figures within a great deal
of prehistoric art13 clearly indicates that the
boundaries between animal species were far from
inseparable and were often Transgressed. Indeed,
if we look at a panel from Trois Freres, we are
seemingly presented with one of the most
138
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
Fig1.
ApanelfromTroisFre'res.
ambrose
139
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
extraordinary attempts at picturing the dynamic
‘‘magma’’ of primordial animality.
The polyvalence within this panel is so
hyperbolic that it is as if we are being presented
with a gestating world order, from chaos to order
– the birth of animality itself within a graphic
schema. In this paper, I will argue that Deleuze
and Guattari’s philosophical aesthetics can pro-
vide us with the necessary conceptual resources in
order to begin to restore this necessary radical
graphic ‘‘holism’’ to prehistoric art. Many
contemporary prehistorians remain suspicious of
any attempts to begin to interpret the ‘‘meaning’’
of Palaeolithic art. Many believe that to even
begin to interpret Palaeolithic art without the
extensive support of archaeological research to
provide a reliable cultural context is a dangerous
and foolhardy venture. They would argue that
since we do not know the myths, beliefs, and
social and religious frameworks within which
these works emerged, it is virtually impossible to
talk of their ‘‘meaning.’’ Whilst this paper does
not seek to posit a naively speculative account of
the ‘‘meaning’’ of these ancient artworks, what I
do hope to be able to demonstrate is that
prehistoric art itself, when radically conceived,
is capable of disrupting certain aesthetic para-
digms within Western thought. Through Deleuze
and Guattari, I will seek to demonstrate that
prehistoric art invites us to imagine alternative
ways of seeing, ways that render sensible within
the visual fabric what representationalist modes
of seeing regard as ‘‘invisible.’’ The relevance of
Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis to this debate
resides in the claim that from its inception within
prehistoric engravings and paintings, art has
sought to invent means for rendering visible
certain intensities of Life – affects, energies,
rhythms, and forces. Deleuze and Guattari
provide a radically alternative genealogy of the
unfolding of Western art which is elaborated
within a variety of their works, a number of
which I will seek to elucidate within the second
part of this paper. This alternative genealogy of
art is explicitly constructed from a deliberate
engagement with two early twentieth-century art
theorists, Riegl14 and Worringer,15 who had
explicitly set out to provide an historical account
of Western art based upon the notion of
Kuntswollen (‘‘will to art’’) that manifests itself
in a unified manner throughout all of the arts of a
given age. Despite not being prehistorians as
such, both articulated a very specific conception
of the artistic ‘‘will’’ governing the production of
prehistoric art. Deleuze and Guattari attempt to
reconfigure the notion of this ‘‘singular task’’ by
re-engaging with prehistoric art and the entire
subsequent Western art tradition (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 176). This reconfiguration can be
read as an articulation of what Merleau-Ponty, in
an essay on the art of painting, had called the
‘‘single task’’ stretching from Lascaux to
Modernity. For Merleau-Ponty, this ‘‘single
task’’ ‘‘secretly inaugurates another history
which is still ours’’ and which operates like
‘‘fires answering one another in the night.’’16
Deleuze and Guattari, through the elaboration of
an alternative genealogy of Western art, seek to
commune with this secret history in an effort to
disrupt what they see as the dominant represen-
tationalist paradigm within aesthetic theory. For
Deleuze and Guattari, while art can be figurative,
it was not so at first; they argue that figuration is
always a result. As we shall see in the next part of
this paper, they posit an organic theory of
expression as a means to challenge the primacy
and dominance of representationalism.
If representation is related to an object, this
relation is derived from the form of representa-
tion; if this object is the organism and organisa-
tion, it is because representation is first of all
organic in itself; it is because the form of
representation first of all expresses the organic
life of man as subject.17
A crucial element of this challenge is a radical
re-description of the nature of prehistoric art in
order to identify what Merleau-Ponty had called
the ‘‘fraternity of painters’’ living the ‘‘same
problem’’ across the vast aeons of time (Merleau-
Ponty 1993, 97). For Deleuze, there is a singular
task that concerns all art across time, a ‘‘common
problem’’:
There is a community of the arts, a
common problem. In art, and in painting as
in music, it is not a matter of reproducing
or inventing forms, but of capturing
forces . . .. The task of painting is defined as
deleuze and prehistoric painting
140
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
the attempt to render visible forces that are
not themselves visible.18
In the second part of this paper, I will attempt to
demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari’s alter-
native genealogy of art and painting is capable of
fundamentally restoring a sense of the continuity
whereby animals, humans, and abstract marks,
lines, and ‘‘signs’’ can become acknowledged as a
dynamic multiplicity of visible stitches within a
continuous graphic fabric of co-creation and
becoming.
II art, sensation, and becoming
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari
attempt to reconfigure the object of all the arts as
the ‘‘capture’’ of forces, the extraction of the
‘‘percept from perceptions of objects and from
states of a perceiving subject, and to wrest the
affect from affections as a passage from one state
to another. To extract a bloc of sensations, a pure
being of sensation.’’19 When percepts and affects
are successfully separated from the specificity of
human perception and affections a sensory
aggregate is formed. Deleuze and Guattari argue
that with this sensory aggregate – ‘‘one is not in
the world, one becomes with the world, one
becomes in contemplating it. All is vision,
becoming. One becomes universe. Becomings
animal, vegetable, molecular, becoming zero.’’20
This radical ‘‘becoming-with’’ the world is
achieved through a specific type of sensory
aggregate – the artwork. The artwork, as a
sensory aggregate, does not operate through
resemblance, but through what Deleuze and
Guattari call an ‘‘affect’’ – a ‘‘non-human
becoming,’’ or ‘‘becoming’’ with the world
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 169). The affect is
defined as a becoming-other, not merely as a
passage from one lived state to another but man’s
non-human becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari,
Life alone creates such indeterminate zones where
all beings whirl and rotate in a primeval magma.
Art is capable of reaching, traversing, and
penetrating this chaotic zone through its efforts
at what they call ‘‘co-creation’’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 173). Art gains its own vitality and
life from plunging into this virtual field in Life, a
field capable of dissolving all organic forms and
imposing the existence of a zone where we no
longer know or can determine what is animal or
human. The artist is obliged to create radically
plastic methods and techniques for handling
material in order to recreate the vital and
primitive magma of life, or what they call ‘‘a
single abstract animal’’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1988, 255). Artists are the presenters of affects,
i.e., modes of becoming with the world, they are
literally the inventors and creators of affects, of
folds where one goes from ‘‘one form on the
organic stratum to another’’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988, 255). Artists not only create
them in their work, but they give them over to
us in such a way that we become with them, they
draw us into the compound of sensation.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the artwork does not
simply actualise what is essentially a virtual
event; rather the artwork in some sense comes to
embody the virtual event itself. The artwork gives
this ‘‘virtual event’’ a body, life, or universe.
These bodies, lives, or universes are neither
virtual nor actual but are, they argue, possibles.
The possible becomes a privileged type of
aesthetic category – art is to be understood as
the realm of the possible virtual event. The
formation or creation of the artwork takes place
upon what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘‘plane of
composition,’’21 which they subdivide into the
‘‘technical plane of composition’’ (which con-
cerns the materials of the artwork) and the
‘‘aesthetic plane of composition’’ (which concerns
‘‘sensations’’; Deleuze and Guattari 1994,
191–99). Within the first plane, the sensation
realises itself in the material, i.e., the sensation
adapts itself to a well-formed, organised, and
regulated matter. In painting, this is the mode of
representational, naturalistic, and perspectival
art, in which sensations are projected upon a
material plane or surface that is always already
inhabited by spatial schemata and coordinates
that structure the morphology of the figure. It is a
kind of graphic hylomorphism – hylomorphism
being the doctrine that the order displayed by
material systems is due to the form projected in
advance by an external producer, a form which
organises what would otherwise be chaotic or
passive matter. On the second plane, it is the
material that passes into the sensation, and here
ambrose
141
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
we are able to think the self-ordering potentials of
matter itself. So, rather than sensation being
projected upon the readily striated material
surface, the material rises up into a metamorphic
plane of forces and discloses what they call
‘‘smooth space.’’ For them, matter is never
simply an homogenous substance that passively
receives forms but is itself composed of intensive
and energetic traits.
These implicit traits make the formation of
matter into individuated forms possible, but they
also provide the means by which such forms can
be continuously altered. The forms of matter are
never fixed moulds; rather, they are something
determined by the singularities of the material
itself. It is then a principle of energetic matter in
continuous immanent development and variation.
In painting, the materiality of the paint itself
comes to articulate and express ‘‘forces’’ – the
matter of paint itself becomes the crucial
expressive component in the artwork.22 Matter-
movement carries with it ‘‘singularities’’ as
implicit or virtual forms. It is then the potential
for material self-ordering with which the artist
negotiates. The ‘‘form’’ as such is something
suggested by the material itself rather than being
the pure product of the mind of the artist. Forms
are ‘‘created’’ out of these suggested virtual
potentials of the matter rather than being some-
thing which is preconceived by the artist and then
imposed on a passive matter. The artist on the
‘‘aesthetic plane of composition’’ in some sense
surrenders to matter so the artist must follow
matter’s singularities by attending to its traits,
and then devise strategies to bring out these
virtualities, to actualise them as sensible individ-
uated ‘‘possibilities.’’ These two planes, the
technical and the aesthetic, Deleuze and
Guattari argue, finally express only a single
plane, what they call the ‘‘plane of aesthetic
composition.’’ And it is upon this plane that a
radically non-hylomorphic mode of artistic pro-
duction becomes possible, a production that
consists of extracting and rendering sensible
virtualities:
The essential relation is no longer matters-
forms . . . neither is it the continuous develop-
ment of form and the continuous variation of
matter. It is now a direct relation material-
forces. A material is a molecularized matter,
which must accordingly ‘‘harness’’ forces;
these forces are necessarily forces of the
Cosmos. There is no longer a matter that
finds its corresponding principle of intellig-
ibility in form. It is a question of elaborating a
material charged with harnessing forces of a
different order: the visual material must
capture nonvisible forces.23
The percepts and affects, the beings of sensation
that are extracted from the perceptions and
affections of everyday corporeal experience,
become the compositional elements that the
artist shapes and forms on the aesthetic plane of
composition and renders perceptible through
materials that have themselves been rendered
expressive. This aesthetic plane of composition is
configured as an infinite field of forces and
intensities, an infinite play and Transmutation of
forces. The artwork engages with these forces as
they operate within a process of ‘‘becoming.’’ The
‘‘aesthetic plane of composition’’ can be thought
of as a type of embodied becoming. In this way,
we can begin to think of prehistoric art as being
engaged in a ceaseless search to create a finite
‘‘monument’’ that in some way restores a sense of
the infinite. The prehistoric artist can be under-
stood as attempting to commune with infinite
chaos and bringing back varieties that no longer
constitute the mere reproduction of the sensory
in the organs (i.e., perceptions) but rather
establish the ‘‘being’’ of the sensory, a ‘‘being’’
of sensation (i.e., the percept) upon a radically
inorganic aesthetic plane of composition. It is this
aesthetic plane that is capable of restoring to this
extract the infinite. According to Deleuze, all art
fundamentally struggles with primal chaos in
order to bring forth a vision that ‘‘illuminates’’
that chaos for an ‘‘instant,’’ that instantiates it as
a sensation. Prehistoric art should, I suggest, be
reconceived as a cohesive composition of chaos
that attempts to yield the vision or sensation of
chaos. It constitutes a type of sophisticated
composed chaos that is neither foreseen nor
preconceived.
By denoting the type of universe that becomes
possible on the ‘‘aesthetic plane of composition,’’
and by assigning art with a role of co-creation,
deleuze and prehistoric painting
142
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
Deleuze and Guattari seek to align the ‘‘aesthetic
plane of composition’’ with the natural plane of
composition, i.e., the plane of immanence
whereby an actualisation of the virtual self-
forming forms as organic life occurs. This natural
plane of composition is simply that of every
living form in its ongoing process of ‘‘concrete’’
embodiment and individuation. As Deleuze and
Guattari write, in A Thousand Plateaus:
there is a pure plane of immanence, univo-
cality, composition, upon which everything is
given, upon which unformed elements and
materials dance that are distinguished from
one another only by their speed and that enter
into this or that individuated assemblage
depending on their connections, their relations
of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which
everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. A
single abstract Animal for all the assemblages
that effectuate it.24
The aesthetic plane of composition is to be
understood as being involved in engaging this
immanent Life (the ‘‘plane of immanence’’ or
‘‘single abstract Animal’’) in an enterprise of co-
creation – a co-creation or ‘‘becoming’’ through
sensation.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues
that all thought begins in sense-experience – or
what he terms the becoming-other of the senses,
and that this becoming-other of the senses is a
‘‘sign’’ of the passage of the ‘‘virtual’’ into the
‘‘actual.’’25 The production of the ‘‘actual’’ in
Life is everywhere to be understood as a
becoming ‘‘actual’’ of the ‘‘virtual,’’ i.e., as a
process of organic individuation. The fundamen-
tal process of creation in nature is as a continuous
actualisation of a ‘‘virtual’’ force. However, this
‘‘virtual’’ is always in some sense held back in
reserve in absolute immanence. As such, the
‘‘virtual’’ entails an ongoing creative force of
natural composition through which the virtual
‘‘becomes’’ actual. As Bogue writes:
The virtual’s actualization takes place in actual
bodies as a dynamic process of individuation, a
process that may be described in terms of
active, physical forces, but immanent within
that process is a virtual connecting, or
bonding, through a process of retentive,
contracting, self-conserving sensation.
Immanent within the active forces of bodies
in formation, then, is a passive force of the
virtual.26
The virtual in itself is always something distinct
as the self-forming form, which is grasped
independently of any actualisation – and it is
this virtual as a principle of self-forming form
that is engaged in an ongoing process of
individuation. The ‘‘virtual’’ thus becomes actua-
lised, but also always remains something imma-
nent within the actual, a virtual multiplicity
always in reserve, still to come. The actualisation
of the virtual is twofold – actual individuated
bodies and material forces and the invisible
‘‘passive syntheses of retentive connections’’ that
make up the conditions of possibility for there to
be any manifest and material conditions (Deleuze
1994, 81).
For Deleuze, it is this passage of the virtual to
the actual, understood in terms of passive
synthesis, which is experienced as sensation, but
it is a sensation beyond the norms of common
sense and recognition. He argues that this notion
of sensation is to be understood through a notion
of the synthesis of different forces; a ‘‘being of
sensation’’ is to be understood as a contraction or
retention of vibrations that occurs through a kind
of passive synthesis. Each being of sensation is
already accumulated or coagulated sensation –
each and every sensation is a concentrated and
synthesised assemblage of forces. As Deleuze
writes:
Perceptual syntheses refer back to organic
syntheses which are like the sensibility of the
senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility
that we are. We are made of contracted water,
earth, light and air – not merely prior to the
recognition or representation of these, but
prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in
its receptive and perceptual elements . . . is a
sum of contractions, of retentions and
expectations.27
These intensive ‘‘accumulated’’ forces synthe-
sised within the sensation cannot be grasped by
the empirical senses. According to Deleuze, they
are not the ‘‘given.’’ Rather, they are that by
which the given is given, and are as such
ambrose
143
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
imperceptible. It is only upon the aesthetic plane
of composition and within the artwork that these
invisible forces, which are now captured, config-
ured, or rendered sensible as blocs of sensation,
confront us. As I indicated earlier, for Deleuze
and Guattari, the most general aim of all art is to
produce a sensation, to create a pure being of
sensation. Thus, the work of art utilises the
passive synthesis of the ‘‘being of sensation’’ to
produce affects of its own. The synthetic and
accumulative principles of sensation themselves
become the principles of composition upon the
aesthetic plane of composition. Art attempts to
‘‘capture’’ or seize this virtual force immanent to
the actual by attempting to seize the becoming-
other of the virtual’s passage into the actual, the
event, as sensation. Art, in its attempt to render a
sense of non-human becoming something percep-
tible within a work, must wrest this becoming-
other away from any organised bodily or human
structure of perception and affection. Deleuze
and Guattari adopt the modernist dictum of Paul
Klee – ‘‘not to render the visible, but to render
visible’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 342) – the
fundamental ‘‘task’’ of all art is not the mere
reproduction of visible forms but rather the
capture and presentation of the non-visible
forces that act behind or beneath these forms.
All art attempts to extract from the realm of
intensive forces a ‘‘bloc of sensations’’ in an
effort to produce a material artwork that is
capable of ‘‘capturing’’ and ‘‘sustaining’’ such
invisible forces. This is ultimately to be under-
stood as the sensuous presentation or
configuration of the virtual as ‘‘pure possibility’’
itself, i.e., not merely the passage of becoming
from the virtual to the actual conceived as a
‘‘possibility’’ but as the virtual perpetually
immanent within the actual as a force of pure
possibility:
It is now a question of elaborating a material
charged with harnessing forces of a different
order: the visual material must capture
nonvisible forces. Render visible, Klee said,
not render or reproduce the visible . . ..
Matters of expression are superseded by a
material of capture. The forces to be captured
are . . . the forces of an immaterial, nonformal,
and energetic cosmos.28
According to Deleuze and Guattari, both the
natural plane of composition and the aesthetic
plane of composition are finally to be recognised
as planes of nature – planes of the actualisation of
virtual self-forming forms. The aesthetic plane is
a ‘‘plane of composition of Being,’’ and its object
is to engage life in an enterprise of co-creation.
Art’s ‘‘possible’’ is the embodied virtual, ‘‘the
event as alterity engaged in an expressive
matter.’’29 Art’s universe is that of an expressive
matter attempting to render the sensations of the
virtual’s passage into the actual something
palpable or sensible. In other words, the
‘‘aesthetic plane of composition’’ is a world of
immanent, virtual forces within bodies. Through
extracting percepts and affects, combining them
and subsequently forming assemblages of sensa-
tion, art is able to render palpable a sense of this
passive force of the virtual immanent to the
actual through the aesthetic category of the
‘‘possible.’’ It is this infinity of possibility with
regard to ‘‘becoming’’ that art seeks to catch sight
of, an infinity of possibility to which it attempts
to construct a stable ‘‘monument’’ upon its
aesthetic plane of composition. Art’s concern is
not with merely imitating, representing, reprodu-
cing or resembling stable and ‘‘good’’ organic
form as it emerges within the organism, but
rather with exploring and figuring the force of the
immanent virtual and its ceaseless passage into
Life. As Deleuze and Guattari write in A
Thousand Plateaus, it is a matter of
‘‘becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-
imperceptible’’:
No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or
figurative. Suppose a painter ‘‘represents’’ a
bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can
occur only to the extent that the bird itself is
in the process of becoming something else, a
pure line and pure colour. Thus imitation self-
destructs since the imitator unknowingly
enters into a becoming that conjugates with
the unknowing becoming of that which he or
she imitates. One imitates only if one fails,
when one fails. The painter and musician do
not imitate the animal, they become-animal at
the same time as the animal becomes what
they willed, at the deepest level of their
concord with Nature. Becoming is always
deleuze and prehistoric painting
144
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
double, that which one becomes becomes no
less than the one that becomes – block is
formed, essentially mobile, never in
equilibrium.30
In becoming-animal, the vestiges of the human
are traversed and swept away. For Deleuze and
Guattari, art provides a means of accessing the
animal, of traversing asignification and getting
beyond mere representational meaning by
means of intense ‘‘sweeping,’’ ‘‘blazing,’’ and
‘‘becoming’’:
Becomings-animal . . . their reality resides not
in an animal one imitates or to which one
corresponds but in themselves, in that which
suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become –
a proximity, an indiscernability that extracts a
shared element from the animal.31
Art thus seeks to Transfigure the virtual’s force
and energy upon its own plane of aesthetic
composition. In this sense, the artist must allow,
through an act of co-creation (becoming-animal),
for a passage of the virtual into their work, for it
to become ‘‘captured’’ as ‘‘sensation.’’ The
virtual must become something to be struggled
with aesthetically and its productive vitality put
to work, and it must be allowed to breed its forms
in the visual space of the work, without its chaotic
energy destroying the overall cohesion of that
work. Art unleashes ‘‘becoming.’’
It is precisely this notion of co-creation
(becoming-animal) that is particularly relevant
with regard to understanding the unity of
prehistoric parietal art. For Deleuze and
Guattari, the processes undertaken by art to
embody the virtual immanent to the natural plane
(within actual Life) are in some way absolutely
fundamental to all forms of art. Thus, if
prehistoric art is even to be considered art, it
too must always already have been actively
engaged in this process of co-creation (becoming-
animal), and it is precisely such a point we find
outlined within a brief section of A Thousand
Plateaus entitled ‘‘Nomad Art.’’ Here, Deleuze
and Guattari explain the nature of what they term
the ‘‘haptic space’’ and ‘‘abstract line’’ in pre-
historic art through the notion of co-creation and
becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 492–99).
They begin by discussing the notion of ‘‘tactile,’’
or what they call ‘‘haptic’’ space, which they
distinguish from ‘‘optical’’ space. The notion of
the ‘‘haptic’’ is a borrowed concept from the early
twentieth-century art historian Alois Riegl, who
created the concept as a way of explaining the
type of aesthetic associated with primitive art.32
Deleuze and Guattari mobilise the opposition
introduced by Riegl between the ‘‘haptic’’ and
the ‘‘optical’’ in an effort to begin to think the
aesthetic configuration of two distinct types of
space which they term the ‘‘smooth’’ and the
‘‘striated.’’ The ‘‘smooth’’ is the space of the
virtual and is defined as a relatively undiffer-
entiated and continuous topological space (hence
‘‘smooth’’) which is incessantly undergoing
discontinuous Transitions and is progressively
acquiring determination until it condenses into a
measurable and divisible metric space (hence
‘‘striated’’). The relation between the ‘‘smooth’’
and the ‘‘striated’’ is that between what Deleuze
and Guattari call ‘‘intensive’’ and ‘‘extensive’’
properties – the extensive properties of striated
space are easily divisible, easily isolated and
abstracted, whereas the intensive properties of
‘‘smooth’’ space are radically continuous and are
relatively indivisible. Smooth space is a fluid
space of continuous variation characterised by a
plurality of local directions. If one were to speak
of it in purely geometrical terms, the difference
between smooth and striated space may be
expressed in terms of an inversion in the
relationship between points and lines – so striated
space treats the line as something that traverses
between two points, as in Euclidean geometry.
However, in smooth space, the priority is given to
the line itself (the line is given independence),
and as such it treats points simply as relays
between successive lines. The two types of lines
are thus very different. They argue that striated
space ‘‘closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it
according to determinate intervals, assigned
breaks, in the smooth one ‘distributes’ oneself
in an open space according to frequencies and in
the course of one’s crossing.’’33 The aesthetic
plane of composition itself becomes explicitly
figured as a way in which this distinction between
virtual and actual or smooth and striated can be
thought. Central to this account of the aesthetic
ambrose
145
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
plane of composition will be the specificity of
prehistoric art or what they term ‘‘nomad art.’’
For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space is to be
understood as the ‘‘object’’ of a close-vision par
excellence and is the tactile element they call
‘‘haptic space.’’ Space becomes tactile as if the
eye were now a hand caressing one surface after
another without any sense of the overall config-
uration or mutual relation of those surfaces. It is
a virtual space whose fragmented components can
be assembled in multiple combinations. In this
pure haptic smooth space of close-vision, all
orientation, landmarks, and the linkages between
things are in continuous variation, i.e., a
continuous Transmutation which operates step
by step to no pre-arranged or pre-governed
schema. There is no stable unified set of
referents, since orientations are never constant
but constantly change. The interlinkages them-
selves are constituted according to an emergent
realm of dynamic tactile relationships that have
more to do with how a nomad conceives of their
territory. Smooth space is understood as the
principle of nomadic existence, i.e., it is the
‘‘territorial principle’’ of the nomad. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that the nomad ‘‘is distributed in a
smooth space which he occupies, inhabits,
holds.’’34 So, for the nomad, it is always the
journey itself that is important, the points along
the way being ‘‘strictly subordinated to the paths
they determine’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988,
493). Thus, the paths traversed within nomadic
existence serve to distribute individuals and
groups across an open and intermediate space:
The nomad has a territory; he follows
customary paths; he goes from one point to
another . . .. A path is always between two
points, but the in-between has taken on all the
consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and
a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is
the intermezzo . . .. The nomad goes from
point to point only as a consequence and a
factual necessity; in principle, points for him
are relays along a trajectory . . .. This nomadic
trajectory distributes people (or animals) in an
open space, one that is indefinite and
noncommunicating . . .. The nomad distributes
himself in a smooth space; he occupies,
inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial
principle . . .. They are vectors of deterritor-
ialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to
steppe, by a series of local operations whose
orientation and direction endlessly vary . . ..
There is an extraordinarily fine topology that
relies not on points or objects but rather on
haecceities, on sets of relations (winds,
undulations of snow or sand, the song of the
sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile
qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather
‘‘haptic,’’ a sonorous much more than a visual
space. The variability, the polyvocality of
directions, is an essential feature of smooth
spaces . . .. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 380–
82)
Deleuze and Guattari also write:
These questions of orientation, location, and
linkage enter into play in the most famous
works of nomad art: the twisted animals have
no land beneath them; the ground constantly
changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the
paws point in the opposite direction from the
head, the hind part of the body is turned
upside down; the ‘‘monadological’’ points of
view can be interlinked only on a nomad
space; the whole and the parts give the eye that
beholds them a function that is haptic rather
than optical. This is an animality that can be
seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but
without the mind becoming a finger, not even
by way of the eye.35
For this pure haptic eye, there is no invariant
horizon, stable background, central perspective,
limit, outline, or form. Its function consists in
what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘‘Nomadic
Absolute,’’ whereby it seeks to integrate each
heterogeneous element within a unified smooth
space of tactile intensities (Deleuze and Guattari
1988, 494). The haptic eye is able to provide an
infinite succession of heterogeneous linkages and
changes in direction. They claim that this purely
haptic function of the eye is in some sense
isomorphic with the process of ‘‘becoming’’ – ‘‘It
is an absolute that is one with becoming itself,
with process. It is the absolute of passage, which
in nomad art merges with its manifestation.’’36
Having established this idea of pure haptic
space and the idea of a nomadic absolute of
topological and tactile points of connection and
deleuze and prehistoric painting
146
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
interlinkages, Deleuze and Guattari proceed to
explain the idea of what they term the abstract
line and how it is linked with the idea of a process
of becoming. This ‘‘abstract line’’ traverses these
points of connection in ‘‘haptic space,’’ and in
effect it traces smooth space itself. The notion of
a prehistoric ‘‘abstract line’’ or ‘‘Nomad line’’ is
derived from the art theorist Wilhelm Worringer,
who, in the early twentieth century, had posited
an aesthetic phenomenon termed the Gothic or
Northern Line.37 For Worringer, this type of line
was the product of a fundamentally ‘‘nomadic’’
existence among what he called Northern or
Barbarian people. This is a line that passes
between things and, in the process, imbues
the figures of people, animals, plants, etc. with
a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its
movement gives birth to a dynamic and chaotic
geometry of diagonals, jagged edges, and swirling
lines that actively construct space rather than
merely describing it. This nomadic line connects
and assembles heterogeneous elements while
maintaining them as heterogeneous. Thus, space
is assembled piece by piece, with each piece of
space having its own internal geometrical coordi-
nates, its own temporal rhythms, and its own
dramatic intensities.
There is contained here, according to Deleuze
and Guattari, the idea of non-organic life; such a
line does not delimit a stable organism but rather
what they term a ‘‘body-without-organs.’’ As
Worringer claims, such an ornamental Gothic
line delimits and expresses a paradoxical non-
organic life, and it is this specific characteristic
which resonates so clearly for Deleuze and
Guattari with their own themes of the virtual
and the actual, becoming-animal, non-organic
Life, body-without-organs, the labyrinthine fold,
etc. They thus attempt to reconceive the notion of
the Gothic line as the prehistoric abstract line.
This more radical form of abstract line was, they
claim, capable of sustaining infinite figural
possibilities and of breeding an infinite realm of
possible organic becomings upon a field of
radically non-organic forms; ultimately, such a
line is a genuine feature of the ‘‘pre-historic’’
nomadic aesthetic. Here, the abstract line
embraces a wildly dynamic non-organic geometry
of jagged lines, twisting loops, superimpositions,
and accelerating spirals, ultimately blurring the
distinction between figure and ground, and
tracing out the smooth space of the aesthetic
plane of composition. The plant and animal forms
that this abstract line appears to trace within
prehistoric art are thus deformed representational
images – zones of indiscernibility of the line are
disclosed, in that ‘‘the line is common to different
animals, to man and animal, and to pure
abstraction.’’38 They claim that if prehistoric
art is to become conceived as art, it is precisely
because of the exemplary way in which it
manipulates a purely abstract and non-
rectilinear line to give expression to radically
non-organic forces of Life: ‘‘If it [the Nomad
Line] encounters the animal, if it becomes
animalised, it is not by outlining a form,
but . . . by imposing, through its clarity and
nonorganic precision, a zone where form becomes
indiscernible.’’39
Thus, the abstract line is accompanied by
what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘‘material traits
of expression’’ (virtualities; Deleuze and
Guattari 1988, 498), and these implicit traits
correlate with the flow of matter’s ‘‘becoming’’
as a continuous actualisation of a ‘‘virtual’’
force (i.e., there is then a fundamental
correspondence, as I indicated earlier in this
paper, between the aesthetic becoming and the
becoming on the natural plane of composition
or ‘‘plane of immanence’’). The abstract Nomad
Line ‘‘is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more
alive for being inorganic.’’40 The feverish
dynamism associated with this line liberates a
power of life which all matter expresses as the
trait, flow, or impulse traversing it – this is the
power and force of the virtual immanent to
the actual. If everything upon the prehistoric
plane of composition is then essentially ‘‘alive,’’
it is precisely because of the way in which it is
the aesthetic expression of this virtual power in
the actual of matter:
If everything is alive, it is not because
everything is organic or organised but . . .
because the organism is a diversion of life. In
short, the life in question is inorganic,
germinal, and intensive, a powerful life with-
out organs, a Body that is all the more alive for
ambrose
147
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
having no organs, everything that passes
between organisms.41
Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is always a
question of this single becoming-animal in
prehistoric art, a single becoming that restores
the idea of an aesthetic unity to the art. This rests
upon the idea that animality itself was fundamen-
tally experienced and expressed within the art as
‘‘inorganic’’ or ‘‘supra-organic.’’ The expression
of this supra-organic becoming-animal necessarily
entails a form of pure abstraction rather than the
stable representationalism associated with the
mere isolation and reproduction of stable organic
form, i.e., organisms, the ‘‘animal.’’ There thus
exists a radical graphic continuity in prehistoric
art made up of dots, superimposed and broken
lines, outlines, and profiles, and all of these
components can be understood through the
operation of the pure Nomad Line. This Nomad
line repetitively folds back upon itself to form
partial organic outlines, fragments of animals,
and hybridised animals, which are gradually
accumulated and assembled until a more or less
complete and stable animal form emerges. This is
then ceaselessly dissolved and fragmented back
into what Deleuze and Guattari call zones of
indiscernibility; the animal becomes other and is
Transfigured or hybridised into other animal
species or back into the pure field of intensities
via the catastrophe of the pure abstract line, or
what Anati has called psychograms. Fragmentary
animals fuse into fantastic intermediate and
hybridised animals which incorporate elements
from a multitude of different species. The
complete isolated animal is only ever caught for
an instant within a concrete graphic form before
it dissolves. It is clear that this ‘‘process’’ of
segmentation, assemblage, and dissolution is a
consistent phenomenon throughout all prehisto-
ric art and is a ‘‘process’’ illuminated by the
aesthetic categories introduced by Deleuze and
Guattari. As Lorblanchet has posited, the graphic
continuity in Palaeolithic prehistoric art can be
seen as a kind of supra-organic animality, a
cosmic placenta, a primordial magma, or a field
of virtual intensities where all animal forms are
Transfigured, where there is an attempt to forge
linkages between animal forms. This
Transfiguring and linking of organic forms
should in the end be understood as the radically
initial aesthetic attempt to figure (through sensa-
tion) the virtual force of becoming-animal itself,
and it is the radical visual fluidity that this entails
which has not been properly comprehended by
those who have approached it via a strict
classificatory system governed by a representa-
tional hierarchy.
Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics
enables us to begin to elaborate upon the insights
provided by the prehistorians Anati and
Lorblanchet, to recognise that what was being
ceaselessly explored within prehistoric parietal art
was the infinite variability and Transmutability of
the animal – the pure possibilities of all animal
life, of animal-becomings, of pure animality (the
singular abstract animal). What was being
attempted was precisely the abstraction and
Transfiguration of the radically inorganic virtual
force immanent to Life within a coherent and
unified graphic schema. Prehistoric parietal art
simply presents us with one of the very greatest
attempts within human art to catch sight of the
vitality, energy, and becoming of Life itself,
rather than a limited concern with the mere
representation of actual individuated forms.
There is within prehistoric art an attempt to
capture the sheer exuberant flow of Life, Life as
incessant becoming-other, Life as the vital
inorganic force of the cosmos. A path is traced
and figured on the cave walls of Lascaux and
Chauvet between complexity and simplicity,
between chaos and order. Upon these surfaces,
there is a continual movement from the single
abstract animal to becoming – becoming-bison,
becoming-horse, becoming-lion, becoming-mam-
moth, becoming-bear, and becoming-human. In
conclusion, Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics
allows us to begin to reconceive the prehistoric
plane of composition as a zone of radical graphic
experimentation where aesthetic possibilities
associated with virtual animality – the ‘‘singular
animal’’ – are allowed to ‘‘manifest.’’ By taking
the aesthetic coherence of prehistoric art ser-
iously and attempting to understand the elements
deleuze and prehistoric painting
148
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
that make up the radical graphic continuity found
there (i.e., the ceaseless repetition, folding,
dissolving, superimposition, and becoming of
animality), Deleuze and Guattari
ultimately initiate through this
alternative genealogy of art an
entirely new trajectory within
Western aesthetics.
acknowledgements
Thanks to Keith Ansell-Pearson and Emily
Harding, for their generous and helpful advice
during the preparation of this article, and
Constantin Boundas, for his insightful and
encouraging remarks.
notes1 Anati (2003).
2 Vialou (1991, 200).
3 Breuil (1952).
4 Bataille (1955).
5 Laming-Emperaire (1962); Leroi-Gourhan(1968).
6 Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998).
7 Anati (2003).
8 Lorblanchet (1984).
9 Sandars (1985,128).
10 Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan imposes a furtherbinary opposition within his actual analysis ofabstract signs ^ the opposition and complemen-tarity between male and female principles (e.g.,all long signs and dots weremale, while solid signssuch as ovals, circles and squares were female).
11 Anati (2003, 3^4). (Anati is one of thekey figures in the project to establish a ‘‘WorldArchive of Rock Art’’ (WARA); see Caygill 2002,19^25.)
12 Lorblanchet (1984,142).
13 For example, the hybrid animal at the entranceof Lascaux and the bull-headed man in theChauvet cave.
14 Riegl (1985). Alois Riegl’s fundamental concernwas with delineating various historical manifesta-tions of what he called the human‘‘will to art.’’ Heconcluded that there were three distinct types ofaesthetic principles governing three distinct his-torical manifestations of this will to art ^ theEgyptian, Greek, and Roman. Common to allthree was the goal of representing externalobjects as clear material entities. For Riegl, theancients all attempted to delimit space to varyingdegrees in order to vitiate certain problems inher-ent within visual perception that emerge from theeye’s way of perceiving the natural world in two-dimensional coloured planes ^ the objects of theexternal world tend to appear to us in a chaoticmixture. The ancients, Riegl claims, found theoptically perceived external objects gained to beconfusing and thus were driven to attempt intheir art a representation of the individual objectthat was as clear as possible.They were forced tohave to delineate it and emphasise its materialimpenetrability. Space was simply regarded asabsence or as a void; it represented the negationof the kind of material stability required. In theirefforts to comprehend and express the individual-ity of the object, the ancients were driven torefuse anyreference to the actual ordinaryexperi-ence of a subject or individual in their effort toembody the absolutely ‘‘objective.’’ The simplestand most straightforward means of perceiving anisolated, separate, and ‘‘objective’’object from outof the chaos of visual perception was throughtouch, which revealed the enclosed unity of thesurface or exterior of the object aswell as reinfor-cing its material impenetrability. Yet, touch alonecannot yield a comprehensivegraspingof the com-plete surface of the object, just discrete elementsof it. In order to grasp the entire object, onemustcombine or link the series of multiple touchesthrough an act of subjective consciousness andthought. The eye initially takes in a confusedimage of coloured planes and only assembles theoutlines of defined individual objects through thesynthesis of multiple planar perceptions. Rieglclaims that touch is superior to vision in providinginformation regarding the material impenetrabil-ity of objects, yet vision surpasses touch byinforming us of height and width, since it is able tosynthesisemultiple perceptionsmore quickly thantouch. A comprehensive knowledge and under-standing of stable objects as three-dimensionalrequires the subjective synthesis of multiple
ambrose
149
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
tactile and visual encounters with the object.Riegl thus generated an opposition between theobjective/subjective and tactile/optical in hisaccountof the ancientwill to art.This latter oppo-sition between the tactile and the optical is,Riegl claims, subsequently subsumed withinvision. Thus, hand and eye come to reinforce oneanother, since our visual perceptions of objects asimpenetrable, three-dimensional, and stable enti-ties necessarily come to incorporate and synthe-sise knowledge gained from tactile experience.Hence, Riegl introduces the notion of ‘‘tactile’’ or‘‘haptic’’ vision or seeing, inwhich the contributingrole of the hand and touch has become synthe-sised and emphasised. He thus opposes thedevelopment of this haptic vision in ancient artto the pure optic vision prevalent within themodern era, where the synthesised role ofmanual touch has become minimised and largelyobscured.
15 Worringer (1953, 1994) Wilhelm Worringerattempted to ground Riegl’s opposition of thehaptic and the optic in a fundamental distinctionbetween abstraction and empathy. Like Riegl,Worringer also understood the primitive to bebeset by a threatening, confusing universe thatinstalled an immense spiritual dread of space.Unable to trust visual perceptions, they remaineddependent upon the assurances of touch.Primitives sought, according to Worringer, thetranquillity that comes from being separated orabstracted from the flux of the phenomenalworld. They thus avoided, wherever possible,any representation of open space, and created inart an abstract domain of stable forms. This pri-mitive artistic impulse, according to Worringer,has nothing to do with the mere rendering ofnature that one finds in prehistoric art. Rather,this primal will comes after this period of mererendering and manifests itself as the search forpure abstraction as the only possibility of reposewithin the confusion and obscurity of the per-ceived world of nature. The primal artistic willgenerates out of itself a realm of geometricalabstraction. For Worringer, so-called ‘‘prehistoricart’’ cannot be considered art, since it seeminglylacks this necessary will to abstraction and ismerely the naI«ve and immediate rendering ofnature and natural forms. Contrasted to this‘‘non-artistic’’ form of prehistoric naturalism,Worringer opposes the necessity of what heterms ‘‘style’’ in order for a work to be
considered a work of art. All ‘‘style’’ forWorringer is predicated then on the necessaryidea of abstraction. Worringer claims that the‘‘abstract’’ domain of stable forms is most clearlyevident in ancient Egyptian art. The classicalGreeks, by contrast, gained a certain masteryover the natural world through their use ofreason and, as a result of this mastery, wereable to delight in the variability of existence, toproject themselves into that world and so dis-cover the beauty of the organic, growing, andchanging forms. The Greeks thus empathized,Worringer claims, with nature and enjoyed them-selves and their own vital movements in andthrough an art that reflects the dynamic rhythmsof life. However, Worringer diverges from theRieglian account of the development of artthrough the positing of an aesthetic categorythat cannot be reduced to either the primitiveor classical models. This is what he called theGothic or Northern Line. This was, according toWorringer, the product of a fundamentally‘‘nomadic’’ existence among Northern orBarbarian people. This ‘‘nomadic’’ tendencyrobbed them of any stable referents within theexternal world, so in a sense the world wasdoubly chaotic. There was within them,Worringer claims, a fundamental discord. Withinthe Northern form, we encounter abstract,geometric forms but without any of the corre-sponding equilibrium and tranquillity associatedwith the Egyptian form.This abstract geometricalform is an aberrant, questioning, and vital move-ment, but also a movement utterly divorced fromorganic life. It is, Worringer claims, best under-stood as a ‘‘super-organic mode of expression’’(Worringer 1953, 33).We are confronted here bya vitality which appears to be independent of us,which challenges us ^ it appears to have anexpression of its own, which is stronger thanour own life. It seems to give us the impressionthat we are being assailed by some type of alienwill.Worringer claims that we ascribe to this linethe sensation of the process of its chaotic execu-tion, and as such it appears to impose its ownexpression upon us. We perceive this line assomething absolute, independent of us, and wetherefore speak of a specific type of expressionof the Gothic Line.
16 Merleau-Ponty (1993,97).
17 Deleuze (2003,126).
deleuze and prehistoric painting
150
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
18 Ibid. 56.
19 Deleuze and Guattari (1994,167).
20 Ibid.169.
21 For a more detailed discussion of this, seeBogue (2003), esp. chapter seven, ‘‘Sensation andthe Plane of Composition’’ 163^85.
22 There is an analogous effort to elucidate thespecific and peculiar logic of paint developed bypainters undertaken by James Elkins (1998) inWhat Painting Is. Elkins pursues this logic throughmobilising a fascinatingly fluid resonance betweenalchemy and painting. For Elkins, painting has adeep affinity with alchemy in so far as both con-cern an ongoing logical development emergingfrom a negotiation with different fluid materialswhich are worked on without knowledge oftheir properties, by blind experiment. For Elkins,the ongoing dialogue with the material of paintby the painter, and the development of a thinkingin paint or a specifically painterly logic ofsensation, is a largely unspoken and unrecogniseddialogue where the material of paint speakssilently.
23 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 342).
24 Ibid. 255.
25 Deleuze (1994,139^40).
26 Bogue (2003,183).
27 Deleuze (1994, 73).
28 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 343).
29 Deleuze and Guattari (1994,196).
30 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 304^05).
31 Ibid. 279. It is worth noting that Deleuze andGuattari insist that ‘‘becoming-animal’’ is only oneform of becoming. See 272.
32 See note14.
33 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 481).
34 Ibid. 381.
35 Ibid. 493^94.
36 Ibid. 494.
37 See note15.
38 Deleuze (2003,130).
39 Ibid. 46.
40 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 498).
41 Ibid. 499.
bibliographyAnati, E.‘‘Art and Symbolism: AGlobal Approachto Obtaining Meaning from Early Art.’’ Paper pre-sented at the FifthWorld Archaelogical Congress,Washington,DC, 2003.
Bataille,G.Prehistoric Painting: Lascauxor the Birth ofArt.Trans. A.Wainhouse. London: Macmillan,1955.
Bogue, R. Deleuze on Music. Painting and the Arts.London: Routledge, 2003.
Breuil, H. Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art.Trans.M.E. Boyle.Montignac: Centre d’e¤ tudes et de doc-umentation prehistoriques,1952.
Caygill, H. ‘‘Digital Lascaux: The Beginning in theEnd of the Aesthetic.’’Angelaki 7.1 (2002): 213^21.
Clottes, J. and D. Lewis-Williams. The Shamans ofPrehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves.NewYork: Harry Abrams,1998.
Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. Trans. P.Patton. London:The Athlone Press,1994.
Deleuze, G. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.Trans.D. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus.Trans. B. Massumi. London: The Athlone Press,1988.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari.What is Philosophy?Trans.G. Birchill and H.Tomlinson. London: Verso,1994.
Elkins, J.What Painting Is. London: Routledge,1998.
Laming-Emperaire, A. La signification de l’art rupes-tre Paleolithique. Paris: Picard,1962.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. The Art of Prehistoric Man inWestern Europe. Trans. N. Guterman. London:Thames & Hudson,1968.
Lorblanchet, M. L’art des cavernes: Atlas des grottesorne¤ es Paleolithiques Franc� aises. Paris: Ministe' re dela Culture,1984.
Merleau-Ponty, M. ‘‘Indirect Language and theVoices of Silence.’’ Trans. R.C. McCleary. TheMerleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy andPainting. Evanston: Northwestern UP,1993. 76^120.
151
ambrose
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
Riegl, A. Late Roman Art Industry.Trans. R.Winkes.Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider,1985.
Sandars, N.K. Prehistoric Art in Europe. New Havenand London:Yale UP,1985.
Vialou, D. Our Prehistoric Past: Art and Civilization.London:Thames & Hudson,1991.
Worringer, W. Abstraction and Empathy: AContribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. M.Bullock. New York: International UniversitiesPress,1953.
Worringer, W. Form in Gothic. Trans. H. Read.London: AlecTiranti,1994.
Darren Ambrose
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
UK
E-mail: [email protected]
deleuze and prehistoric painting
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
141.
214.
17.2
22]
at 1
1:19
31
Oct
ober
201
4
