30, 000 BC: Painting Animality – Deleuze and Prehistoric Painting

Prehistoric Art – Chaos, Magma and Life The paintings and engravings of Upper Palaeolithic (40, 000 – 10,000BC) 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 seem 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 parietal art – e.g. Art for art’s sake, totemism, Abbe Breuil’s hunting magic theory3, Bataille’s theory of prohibition and transgression4, Leroi-Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaire’s structuralist theories5. Recent influential approaches include the shamanic interpretative frameworks posited by Clottes & Lewis-Williams6, the construction of a taxonomy of symbols by Anati7 and the holistic approach favoured by Lorblanchet8. Typical to the approach adopted by many of the early theoretical approaches was the extrapolation 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 graphic dualism between representational figuration and abstraction.10 Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan associated indeterminate lines and marks with what he called provisional unifinished outlines. Since the great majority of Palaeolithic parietal art precisely consists of such

1 E. Anati, [2003] 2 D. Vialou, [1991], p. 200 3 H. Breuil, [1952] 4 G. Bataille, [1955] 5 A. Leroi-Gourhan, [1968] ; A. Laming-Emperaire, [1962] 6 J. Clottes & D. Lewis-Williams, [1998] 7 E. Anati, Ibid. 8 M. Lorblanchet, [1984] 9 N.K. Sandars, [1985], p. 128 10 Indeed Leroi-Gourhan imposes a further binary opposition within his actual analysis of abstract signs – the opposition and complementarity between male and female principles (e.g. all long signs and dots were male while solid signs such as ovals, circles and squares were female).

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“graphic units”, i.e. abstract and complex interweaving lines and marks, abstracted and isolated parts of animals, 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”, “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, sidelined 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 indeterminate 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, 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 interpretative 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 indeterminate 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 11 E. Anati, Ibid., pp. 3-4 (Anati is one of the key figures in the project to establish a “World Archive of Rock Art” (WARA) – See H. Caygill, [2002], pp. 19-25) 12 M. Lorblanchet, Ibid, p. 142

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of stylistic free-play within prehistoric parietal art which allowed for the boundaries between different living species to be so fundamentally 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 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 provide 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 then 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 paradigms within Western thought. Through Deleuze &

13 For example, the hybrid animal at the entrance of Lascaux and the Bull headed man in the Chauvet cave.

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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 & 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 & 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 20th century art theorists, Riegl14 and Worringer15, who had explicitly set out to provide an historical 14 A. Riegl, [1985] Alois Riegl’s fundamental concern was with delineating various historical manifestations of what he called the human “will to art”. He concluded that there were three distinct types of aesthetic principles governing three distinct historical manifestations of this will to art - the Egyptian, Greek and Roman. Common to all three was the goal of representing external objects as clear material entities. For Riegl the ancients all attempted to delimit space to varying degrees in order to vitiate certain problems inherent within visual perception that emerge from the eye’s way of perceiving the natural world in two-dimensional coloured-planes – the objects of the external world tend to appear to us in a chaotic mixture. The ancients, Riegl claims, found the optically perceived external objects gained to be confusing and thus were driven to attempt in their art a representation of the individual object that was as clear as possible. They were forced to have to delineate it and emphasise its material impenetrability. Space was simply regarded as absence or as a void; it represented the negation of the kind of material stability required. In their efforts to comprehend and express the individuality of the object ancients were driven to refuse any reference to the actual ordinary experience of a subject or individual in their effort to embody the absolutely “objective”. The simplest and most straightforward means of perceiving an isolated, separate and “objective” object from out of the chaos of visual perception was through touch which revealed the enclosed unity of the surface or exterior of the object as well as reinforcing its material impenetrability. Yet touch alone cannot yield a comprehensive grasping of the complete surface of the object, just discrete elements of it. In order to grasp the entire object one must combine or link the series of multiple touches through an act of subjective consciousness and thought. The eye initially takes in a confused image of coloured planes and only assembles the outlines of defined individual objects through the synthesis of multiple planar perceptions. Riegl claims that touch is superior to vision in providing information regarding the material impenetrability of objects, yet vision surpasses touch by informing us of height and width, since it is able to synthesise multiple perceptions more quickly than touch. A comprehensive knowledge and understanding of stable objects as three-dimensional requires the subjective synthesis of multiple tactile and visual encounters with the object. Riegl thus generated an opposition between the objective/subjective and tactile/optical in his account of the ancient will to art. This latter opposition between the tactile and the optical is, Riegl claims, subsequently subsumed within vision. Thus, hand and eye come to reinforce one another, since our visual perceptions of objects as impenetrable, three dimensional and stable entities, necessarily comes to incorporate and synthesise knowledge gained from tactile experience. Hence Riegl introduces the notion of “tactile” or “haptic” vision or seeing, in which the contributing role of the hand and touch has become synthesised and emphasised. He thus opposes the development of this haptic vision in ancient art to the pure optic vision prevalent within the modern era, where the synthesised role of manual touch has become minimised and largely obscured. 15 W. Worringer, [1953] & [1994] Wilhelm Worringer attempted to ground Riegl’s opposition of the haptic and the optic in a fundamental distinction between abstraction and empathy. Like Riegl, Worringer also understood the primitive to be beset by a threatening, confusing universe that installed an immense spiritual dread of space. Unable to trust visual perceptions they remained dependent upon the assurances of touch. Primitives sought, according to Worringer, the tranquillity that comes from being separated or abstracted from the flux of the phenomenal world. They thus avoided wherever possible any representation of open space, and create in art an abstract domain of stable forms. This primitive artistic impulse, according to Worringer, has nothing to do with the mere rendering of nature that one finds in “prehistoric art”. Rather this primal will comes after this period of mere rendering and manifests itself as the search for pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the perceived world

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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 & Guattari attempt to reconfigure the notion of this “singular task”16 by re-engaging with prehistoric art and the entire subsequent Western art tradition. 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.”17 Deleuze & 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 representationalist paradigm within aesthetic theory. For Deleuze & 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 representation; if this object is the organism and organisation, 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.18

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

of nature. The primal artistic will generates out of itself a realm of geometrical abstraction. For Worringer so called “prehistoric art” cannot be considered art since it seemingly lacks this necessary will to abstraction and is merely the naïve and immediate rendering of nature and natural forms. Contrasted to this “non-artistic” form of prehistoric naturalism Worringer opposes the necessity of what he terms “style” in order for a work to be considered a work of art. All “style” for Worringer is predicated then on the necessary idea of abstraction. Worringer claims that the “abstract” domain of stable forms is most clearly evident in ancient Egyptian art. The classical Greeks, by contrast, gained a certain mastery over the natural world through their use of reason, and as a result of this mastery were able to delight in the variability of existence, to project themselves into that world and so discover the beauty of the organic, growing and changing forms. The Greeks thus “empathized”, Worringer claims, with nature and enjoy themselves and their own vital movements in and through an art that reflects the dynamic rhythms of life. However, Worringer diverges from the Rieglian account of the development of art through the positing of an aesthetic category that cannot be reduced to either the primitive or classical models. This is what he called the Gothic or Northern Line. This was, according to Worringer the product of a fundamentally “nomadic” existence among Northern or Barbarian people. This “nomadic” tendency robbed them of any stable referents within the external world, so in a sense the world was doubly chaotic. There was within them, Worringer claims, a fundamental discord. Within the Northern form we encounter abstract, geometric forms but without any of the corresponding equilibrium and tranquillity associated with the Egyptian form. This abstract geometrical form is an aberrant, questioning and vital movement, but which is also a movement utterly divorced from organic life. It is, Worringer claims, best understood as a “super-organic mode of expression”. We are confronted here by a vitality which appears to be independent of us, which challenges us – it appears to have an expression of its own, which is stronger than our own life. It seems to give us the impression that we are being assailed by some type of alien will. Worringer claims that we ascribe to this line the sensation of the process of its chaotic execution and as such it appears to impose its own expression upon us. We perceive this line as something absolute, independent of us, and we therefore speak of a specific type of expression of the Gothic Line. 16 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994], p. 176 17 M. Merleau-Ponty, [1993], p. 97 18 G. Deleuze, [2003], p. 126

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painters” living the “same problem” across the vast aeons of time.19 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 the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible.20

In the second part of this paper I will attempt to demonstrate that Deleuze & Guattari’s alternative 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. Art, Sensation and Becoming In What is Philosophy Deleuze & 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.”21 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.”22 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 & Guattari call an affect – a non-human becoming, or becoming with the world. The affect is defined as the becoming-other, not merely as a passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman becoming. For Deleuze & 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”.23 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”.24 Artists are the presenters of affects, i.e. becomings 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”.25 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.

19 M. Merleau-Ponty, Ibid. 20 Ibid. p. 56 21 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994], p. 167 22 Ibid. p. 169 23 Ibid. p. 173 24 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 255 25 Ibid.

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For Deleuze & 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 a universe. These bodies, lives, 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 & Guattari call a “plane of composition”, which they subdivide into the “technical plane of composition” (which concerns the materials of the artwork) and the “aesthetic plane of composition” (which concerns “sensations”).26 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 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 molds, 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.27 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 as the pure product of the mind of the artist. Forms are created out of these suggested virtual potentials of the matter rather than being something 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 individuated possibilities. These two planes, the technical and the aesthetic, Deleuze & Guattari 26 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994], pp. 191-199 27 There is an analogous effort to elucidate the specific and peculiar logic of paint developed by painters undertaken by James Elkins in What Painting Is [1998]. Elkins pursues this logic through mobilising a fascinatingly fluid resonance between alchemy and painting. For Elkins painting has a deep affinity with alchemy insofar as both concern an ongoing logical development emerging from a negotiation with different fluid materials which are worked on without knowledge of their properties, by blind experiment. For Elkins the ongoing dialogue with the material of paint by the painter, and the development of a thinking in paint or a specifically painterly logic of sensation, is a largely unspoken and uncognised dialogue where the material of paint speaks silently.

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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 production 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 development 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 intelligibility 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.28

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 understood 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 anorganic 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 & 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 & Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: There is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, 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 assemblages depending on their connections, heir relations of movement. A fixed

28 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 342

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plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it.29

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 & 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”.30 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 fundamental 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. So there is a virtual dimension of force that is always immanent within the virtual’s actualisation or individuation. Whilst the virtual’s actualisation occurs in actual bodies as a dynamic process of organic individuation, there is, immanent to that process, a passive force of the virtual. 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 actualised, but also always remains something immanent 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.31 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. These intensive accumulated forces synthesised within the sensation cannot be grasped by the empirical senses. It is only upon the aesthetic plane of composition and within the artwork that these invisible forces, which are now captured, configured or rendered sensible as blocs of sensation, confront us. For Deleuze the being of sensation entails an act of creation, which he calls the mystery of passive creation. He regards the fundamental process of creative evolution in nature as a continuous actualisation of the virtual, and that the passage of the virtual itself entails a passive force of composition whereby the virtual becomes actual. He thus distinguishes between the form and the force of the virtual. The linkages, bonds and connections whereby the virtual self-forming forms grow and take shape presuppose the force of passive synthesis, which involves the contraction of a past into a present within a conserving and contemplating soul. For Deleuze every self-forming form is 29 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 255 30 G. Deleuze, [1994], pp. 139-40 31 Ibid. p. 81

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conceived as a fundamentally sensing form that is able to become through a creative retentive contraction of the past into the present – this creative retentive contraction is experienced as sensation. As I indicated earlier, for Deleuze & 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 perceptible within a work, must wrest this becoming-other away from any organised bodily or human structure of perception and affection. Deleuze & Guattari adopt the modernist dictum of Paul Klee – “not to render the visible, but to render visible”32 – 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 understood 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.33

According to Deleuze & 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”34. 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 sensation, 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, reproducing 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 & 32 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 342 33 Ibid. p. 343 34 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994] p. 196

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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, the 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 double, that which one becomes no less than the one that becomes – block is formed, essentially mobile, never in equilibrium.35

In Becoming-animal the vestiges of the human are traversed and swept away. For Deleuze & 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.36

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 & Guattari the processes undertaken by art to embody the virtual immanent to the natural plane (within actual Life) is 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”37. Here Deleuze & Guattari explain the nature of what they term the “haptic space” and “abstract line” in prehistoric art through the notion of co-creation and becoming. 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 20th century art historian Alois Riegl who created the concept as a way of explaining the type of aesthetic associated with

35 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], pp. 304-5 36 Ibid. p. 279 It is worth noting that Deleuze & Guattari insist that “becoming-animal” is only one form of becoming. See p. 272 37 Ibid. pp. 492-499

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primitive art.38 Deleuze & 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 undifferentiated 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 & 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”.39 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 plane of composition will be the specificity of prehistoric art or what they term “Nomad Art”. For Deleuze & 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 configuration 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 themselves 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 & Guattari argue that the nomad “is distributed in a smooth space which he occupies, inhabits, holds.”40 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”.41 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 38 See note 14 39 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], Ibid. p. 481 40 Ibid. p. 381 41 Ibid. p. 493

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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 deterritorialization. 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 space.42

And: 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 interinked 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.43

For this pure haptic eye there is no invariant horizon, stable background, central perspective, limit, outline or form. Its function consists in what Deleuze & Guattari term the “Nomadic Absolute”44, whereby it seeks to integrate each heterogeneous element within a unified smooth space of tactile intensities. 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.”45

Having established this idea of pure haptic space and the idea of a nomadic absolute of topological and tactile points of connection and interlinkages, Deleuze & 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 20th century had posited an aesthetic phenomenon termed the Gothic or Northern Line.46 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 42 Ibid. pp. 380-382 43 Ibid. pp. 493-4 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. p. 494 46 See Note 15

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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, 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 coordinates, 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 & 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, and that 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 indiscernability of the line are disclosed, in that “the line is common to different animal, to man and animal, and to pure abstraction.”47 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.”48

Thus the abstract Line is accompanied by what they call “material traits of expression”49 (virtualities) and that 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 natural plane of composition or plane of immanence). The abstract Nomad Line “is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic.”50 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: 47 G. Deleuze, [2003] p. 130 48 Ibid. p. 46 49 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 498 50 Ibid. p. 498

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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 without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms.51

Deleuze & 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 fundamentally experienced and expressed within the art as inorganic or supra-organic. The expression of this supra-organic becoming-animality 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 that 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, 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 & Guattari call zones of indiscernibility; the animal becomes other, 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 are a consistent phenomenon throughout all prehistoric art, and is a process illuminated by the aesthetic categories introduced by Deleuze & 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 sensation) the virtual force of becoming-animality 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 representational hierarchy. Indeed, Deleuze & Guattari’s aesthetics enable 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

51 Ibid p. 499

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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-mammoth, becoming-bear and becoming-human. In conclusion Deleuze & Guattari’s aesthetics allow 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 seriously and attempting to understand the elements that make up the radical graphic continuity found there– i.e. the ceaseless repetition, folding, dissolving, superimposition and becoming of animality, Deleuze & Guattari ultimately initiate through this alternative genealogy of art an entirely new trajectory within Western aesthetics.52

Darren Ambrose Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry, CV4 7AL UK Email: d.ambrose@warwick.ac.uk

52 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.

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