Rhetorical prehistory and the Paleolithic

ABSTRACT

I contribute to a prehistory of rhetoric by exploring early rhetorical practices in the Paleolithic era. Using new materialist methodologies (Karen Barad, Andy Clark), I theorize how humans are constitutively entangled with material environments and objects. I also emphasize a materialist historiographic method that seeks bottom-up, emergent explanations for cultural innovations. I propose two rhetorical forms in the Paleolithic: first, rhetoric as an emergent development stemming from increased sociomaterial complexity, performed via plaques, beads, pigments, and spatial arrangement; and second, rhetoric as integrated into mysterious cave rituals, which are given lasting inscription in the famous cave images. Contemporary theories argue that some of the cave imagery stems from visions achieved through altered states, but we might well understand such states as something environed—a capacity of human beings elevated to a techne and performed via the material affordances of cave properties. These cave rituals show that rhetoric recruited from other cultural developments, including magic and religion, a point that can help differently illuminate Greek rhetoric as well. My overall goal is to help forge a materialist-oriented prehistory that demonstrates rhetoric to be fundamentally entwined with the emergence of modern humans.

KEYWORDS:

• Paleolithic
• materiality
• prehistory
• cave paintings
• rhetoric
• religion

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented as the keynote for the 2015 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference in Tempe, AZ, and I thank Peter Goggin and Maureen Goggin for the opportunity. Additional thanks to Chris Gamble and Joshua Hanan, who were patient and generous editors, and to the helpful feedback from Jeffrey Walker and an anonymous reviewer.

Notes

1. Qtd. in Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton, 2012), 143.

2. Edward Schiappa, “Did Plato Coin Rhetorikē?,” American Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 457–70. As we have known for a long time, and particularly in light of Schiappa's famous essay, the meaning of “rhetoric,” including the term itself, is unstable and contestable. I use the word “rhetoric” throughout this essay largely as a placeholder, marking a field of contention with a deep history loosely centered on persuasion and epideictic. I attempt to show that we cannot simply thrust that understanding of rhetoric into the deep past, but rather need to see how it emerges from other or associated tendencies. I frequently use the term “rhetoricity” to gloss this expansive, emergent aspect of rhetoric.

3. For reasons of space and focus, I am omitting discussion of animals, on which there are a number of important studies. See George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of a General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21; Diane Davis, “Creaturely Rhetorics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 88–94; Debra Hawhee, “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 81–87. Kennedy also notes the importance of thinking about evolution, and in particular, human evolution, for rhetoric. While I remain indebted to Kennedy's groundbreaking work, refinements in evolutionary theory suggest alternative narratives, where rhetoric becomes an emergent consolidation built from other, earlier achievements and capacities, both biological and material.

4. R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 32–37.

5. For an intriguing argument that we can still detect the faintest traces of Paleolithic thought in language, see Francesco Benozzo, “Sounds of the Silent Cave: An Ethnophilological Perspective on Prehistoric ‘incubatio’,” in Archaeologies and Soundscapes, ed. G. Dimitriadis (in press) http://www.continuitas.org/texts/benozzo_sounds.pdf (accessed May 24, 2015). For groundbreaking work on the symbols accompanying the cave images, see Genevieve von Petzinger, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols (New York: Atria Books, 2016) and Genevieve von Petzinger, “Making the Abstract Concrete: The Place of Geometric Signs in French Upper Paleolithic Parietal Art,” Masters Thesis, University of Victoria, 2009. Petzinger's master's thesis involved creating a database of these signs, of which there are over 20, common to numerous Paleolithic cave sites. The near future may yet see tremendous progress on this front, pushing back the advent of inscribed symbolicity—if they are in fact symbolic—far further than heretofore.

6. The emerging fields of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, heavily indebted to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, argue that signs emerge well before human being, perhaps with life itself. Even a basic sense of learning from the past, where a similarity is established between two events, works on the idea that one event signifies similarity to another, and hence would be a base mode for establishing more complex forms of signification, including, eventually, language. For a quick introduction, see Winfried Nöth, “Ecosemiotics and the Semiotics of Nature,” Sign Systems Studies 29, no. 1 (2001): 71–81.

7. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford, 2008).

8. Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York: St. Martin's, 2012) and Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth (New York: Henry Holt, 2012).

9. See, for instance, James Fredal, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) and Mindy Fenske, “The Movement of Interpretation: Conceptualizing Performative Encounters with Multimediated Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2006): 138–61. Fredal is also attuned to materialist factors of embodiment and environs, demonstrating how ancient rhetors utilized their “surroundings—spaces, object, movements—as a symbolic field for persuasive performances” (51).

10. The literature on complexity and emergence is vast, but see Deacon for one introduction, pertinent here because it addresses evolution, arguing, as I do here, that more complex formations (such as rhetoric) coalesce in nonlinear ways from other, often simpler formations. Terrence Deacon, “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub,” in The Re-emergence of Emergence, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Sheldon Davies (New York: Oxford, 2006), 111–50. See also Deacon, Incomplete Nature.

11. Barad, Meeting, 376.

12. Deacon, “Emergence,” 127.

13. Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (New York: Oxford, 2000), ix.

14. Ibid., ix.

15. Ibid., 3; Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, tr. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins, 1983), 81–104.

16. Walker, Rhetoric, ix.

17. See Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004), 71–98. Note that Orpheus is famed for journeying to the underworld and returning, and hence, is also strongly associated with caves as well as music. As Burkert points out, “Orpheus controls the terror of the underworld with his music” (85). My argument in this essay hopes to shed light on the mutual resonance of these motifs: caves, music, religion, and transporting experience.

18. Fredal, Rhetorical, 4.

19. Barad, Meeting, 32.

20. For more specifics, see Peter Bellwood, First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), 58–66. I am also indebted to Tomlinson for much of these paragraphs. Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Modern Humanity (New York: Zone, 2015).

21. Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas, “Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior,” Science 324 (June 2009): 1299–300.

22. Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 144. Deacon further explains that emergence is thus associated with what appears as newness, novelty (145).

23. Barad, Meeting, 393. Barad attempts to distance herself from complexity theory, but it is unclear to me that she has a target if her objection is that complexity theory does not have a viable sense of entangled immanence (see 180, 438n83). Putting Barad and complexity theory, in particular theories of emergence, into more direct conversation would be a productive pursuit.

24. The term “exaptation” was introduced by Gould and Vrba in their classic article. See Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation—A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–15.

25. Tomlinson, Million, 12.

26. Ibid., 16.

27. Powell, Shennan, and Thomas, “Late Pleistocene,” 1298–301.

28. Tomlinson, Million, 222–3.

29. Ibid., 225.

30. Ibid., 248–9. We might keep the sense of benefit in our sights, since that is itself already a striking innovation. By analogy, consider Burkert's illuminating point about Axial Age wisdom literature providing the ground for philosophy to develop: wisdom literature is “based on the hypothesis, which is anything but obvious, that it is helpful to have wisdom, that it pays to learn from wise men—an optimism of the logos, one might say” (58). With the Aurignacian pipes, then, we see a first, material trace for an optimism of the sonic.

31. George Q. Xu, “The Use of Eloquence: The Confucian Perspective,” in Rhetoric Beyond and Before the Greeks, ed. Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 116, 124. See also Yameng Liu, “Nothing Can Be Accomplished If the Speech Does Not Sound Agreeable: Rhetoric and the Invention of Classical Chinese Discourse,” in Rhetoric Beyond and Before the Greeks, ed. Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 147–64.

32. Jacques Jaubert et al. “Early Neanderthal Constructions Deep in Bruniquel Cave in Southwestern France,” Nature May 25, 2016; 534 (7605): 1–4. doi:10.1038/nature18291.

33. Ibid., 4.

34. See Dean R. Snow, “Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art,” American Antiquity 78, no. 4 (2013): 746–61. Snow not only demonstrates that the majority of hand stencils are female, but ties the argument back to male biases at work in archaeology in general. Snow's argument further resonates with the views of many scholars that Paleolithic societies tended to more communal and egalitarian, including between the sexes, than later societies; for a quick overview of this perspective, see Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 40–42.

35. While I will be emphasizing the spiritual element of the cave images, it is important to underscore that there were undoubtedly many purposes behind the images; nor are all images even well drawn—some are practice, doodles, or simply poorly done. This suggests that not all those who drew were good, and that Paleolithic painters practiced. Guthrie provides abundant evidence to this. Children were often present, and sometimes “fluted” their fingers over the images; see K. Sharpe and L. Van Gelder, “Evidence for Cave Marking by Paleolithic Children,” Antiquity 80 (2006): 937–47. In short, it is important not to overemphasize the spiritual element.

36. For a graph depicting all the signs that have been found, see Petzinger, First, vi.

37. Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson, ed, Archaeoacoustics (Cambridge, U.K.: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006) and Iegor Reznikoff, “On Primitive Elements of Musical Meaning,” The Journal of Music and Meaning 3 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005), http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=3.2.

38. David S. Whitley, Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 32.

39. For an overview of previous models, see David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 41–68.

40. For one example among many studies, see Catherine Wan and Gottfried Schlaug, “Music Making as a Tool for Promoting Brain Plasticity across the Life Span,” Neuroscientist 16 (October 2010): 566–77.

41. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 183.

42. Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010). Deutscher explores the curiosity of the Greeks’ inability to see blue as well other, similar examples hinging on the relation of experience to language.

43. For a general overview of the comparative rhetoric approach, with remarks on the emic/etic split, see LuMing Mao, “Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border: Mapping out the Future of Comparative Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2013): 209–25.

44. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 125.

45. Ibid., 126.

46. Ibid., 128–29.

47. Ibid., 129.

48. Davis Lewis-Williams and Sam Challis, Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushmen Rock Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).

49. See Petzinger, First; her cataloging of the signs has brought greater insight, but finding there meaning may never be possible.

50. Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2013), 194.

51. Stringer, Lone, 129.

52. Ibid., 129.

53. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 79.

54. But there is a further point that should be emphasized: examples such as Blombos demonstrate that what took place in the caves of Europe is not the “Creative Explosion” it is taken to be in Eurocentric narratives; rather, such cave art is itself tethered to long and incremental developmental histories, without which it could never have been accomplished. There is a clear parallel with the creative explosion we associate with Ancient Greece, too often glorified as a singular pinnacle, as if there were not profound contributions from other cultures such as Egypt, Sumeria, and others. But focusing on such moments for their advances distorts the importance of other necessary developments, distributed over distant times and places. Thus, while the Paleolithic caves are upheld as the first time we see art in ancient peoples, this is not quite right. “Art” didn’t suddenly “arrive” on cave walls for the first time in Europe; it had long developed and been prepared for by instances of nonrepresentational cognition extending back thousands of years, and it is difficult to say when a new tipping point was reached where aesthetics came into its own.

55. Harrari, Sapiens, 56–7.

56. Ibid., 56–8.

57. Ibid., 58.

58. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 77.

59. Ibid., 78.

60. Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), xviii.

61. Lewis-Williams and Challis, Deciphering, 146–52.

62. See Guthrie; Sharp and Van Gelder.

63. Petzinger, First, 243–61.

64. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 185.

65. Ibid., 194.

66. Reznikoff, “Primitive Elements,” 2.1; 2.9.

67. Lewis-Williams, Mind, 199.

68. Paul Kingsnorth, “In the Black Chamber.” http://paulkingsnorth.net/journalism/in-the-black-chamber/.

69. I am extrapolating from Clark's discussion of the Principle of Ecological Assembly, which suggests that organisms recruit on the spot whatever problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort; see Clark, Supersizing, 13.

70. Brian Hayden, Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 53.

71. Winkelman, Shamanism, xiv.

72. Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen,” in The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy Part II, ed. and tr. Daniel W. Graham (New York: Cambridge, 2010), 755–63. For more on the deep connections between Greek rhetoric and magic, see Jacqueline De Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1975). For shamanistic and magical aspects of Parmenides and Empedocles, see Peter Kingsley, Reality (Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003).

73. See Kingsley, Reality. For an overview of caves in Greek society, ritual, and philosophy see Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (New York: Oxford, 2009).

74. See Benozzo, who traces these connections as a way of introducing the methodology of ethnophilology. Further, to connect enthusiasm, that sense of bedazzlement by the gods or the muses, to rhetoric is not to idealize a kind of rhetoric, say persuasion, and impose it on culturally related phenomenon; rather, it is to say the opposite. Enthusiasm is already a form of rhetoric, an attractor suffused by the call/lure/belief in altered states and the divine, one grounded in culturally modulated biological experience. While the Greeks, particularly in the philosophical tradition, are understood to be shaking out such inspiration to find new grounds, even in the key texts for this abandonment odd elements remain, such as Plato's Phaedrus. Regardless, what is telling is that rhetoric's spelling is never so very far away, speaking to a deep interconnection that is perhaps irrepressible because it is an always available and, in the sense of being an attractor, attractive possibility.