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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.
Notes
notes
1 Anati (Citation2003).
2 Vialou (Citation1991, 200).
3 Breuil (Citation1952).
4 Bataille (Citation1955).
5 Laming-Emperaire (Citation1962); Leroi-Gourhan (Citation1968).
6 Clottes and Lewis-Williams (Citation1998).
7 Anati (Citation2003).
8 Lorblanchet (Citation1984).
9 Sandars (Citation1985, 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).
11 Anati (Citation2003, 3–4). (Anati is one of the key figures in the project to establish a “World Archive of Rock Art” (WARA); see Caygill Citation2002, 19–25.)
12 Lorblanchet (Citation1984, 142).
13 For example, the hybrid animal at the entrance of Lascaux and the bull-headed man in the Chauvet cave.
14 Riegl (Citation1985). 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, the 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 come 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 Worringer (Citation1953, Citation1994) 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 created 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 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 enjoyed 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 also a movement utterly divorced from organic life. It is, Worringer claims, best understood as a “super-organic mode of expression” (Worringer Citation1953, 33). 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 Merleau-Ponty (Citation1993, 97).
17 Deleuze (Citation2003, 126).
18 Ibid. 56.
19 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1994, 167).
20 Ibid. 169.
21 For a more detailed discussion of this, see Bogue (Citation2003), esp. chapter seven, “Sensation and the Plane of Composition” 163–85.
22 There is an analogous effort to elucidate the specific and peculiar logic of paint developed by painters undertaken by James Elkins (1998) in What Painting Is. Elkins pursues this logic through mobilising a fascinatingly fluid resonance between alchemy and painting. For Elkins, painting has a deep affinity with alchemy in so far 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 unrecognised dialogue where the material of paint speaks silently.
23 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1988, 342).
24 Ibid. 255.
25 Deleuze (Citation1994, 139–40).
26 Bogue (Citation2003, 183).
27 Deleuze (Citation1994, 73).
28 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1988, 343).
29 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1994, 196).
30 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1988, 304–05).
31 Ibid. 279. It is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari insist that “becoming-animal” is only one form of becoming. See 272.
32 See note 14.
33 Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 481).
34 Ibid. 381.
35 Ibid. 493–94.
36 Ibid. 494.
37 See note 15.
38 Deleuze (Citation2003, 130).
39 Ibid. 46.
40 Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1988, 498).
41 Ibid. 499.