Matter Transmission: Mediation in a Paleocyber Age 1501339486, 9781501339486

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Prologue
Matter is media
Brute materialism
The chapters
Chapter 1: Biographies of Matter I: Limestone
Mattering
Landscapes
Limestones
Movements
Experiences
Breaths
Commodities
Fatalities
Chapter 2: Biographies of Matter II: A Cave’s Life
The site
Lascaux I
Lascaux II
Lascaux III
Lascaux IV
Chapter 3: Human to Humus
Ashes to Ashes
Species to species
Seism to jism
Bone to stone
Flesh to slush
Chapter 4: When Walls Could Speak
Parables of the cave
Writing on the wall
Beast of Lascaux
Speaking of walls
Colors of Altamira
Hill against hillside
Chapter 5: Prehistories of Media I: Immersion
I Walked to Prehistory
The grotesque immersion
VR media goes back to the cave
Chapter 6: Prehistories of Media II: The Screen
Despite the Passing Reference
Modern art claims the cave
Cinema claims the cave
Film animation, ditto
Chapter 7: What Is Paleocybernetics?
The Reinvention of Paleo Living
Paleocybernetics
Paleolithic State
Practicing paleo
Chapter 8: Astronauts and Cavemen
Interstellar Cave Painting
Earth relativism
Coming back to the cave
My own personal prehistory
Epilogue
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
References
Index

Citation preview

Matter Transmission

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Matter Transmission Mediation in a Paleocyber Age Nicolás Salazar Sutil

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Copyright © Nicolás Salazar Sutil, 2018 Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Nicolás Salazar Sutil All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3946-2  ePDF: 978-1-5013-3948-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-3947-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents Prologue 1 Biographies of Matter I: Limestone 2 Biographies of Matter II: A Cave’s Life 3 Human to Humus 4 When Walls Could Speak 5 Prehistories of Media I: Immersion 6 Prehistories of Media II: The Screen 7 What Is Paleocybernetics? 8 Astronauts and Cavemen Epilogue Notes References Index

1 17 43 69 111 143 167 201 227 259 269 280 287

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When I was seven or eight I came across Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The novel begins, like this book, with the memory of an illustration. The narrator, a pilot stranded in the Sahara Desert after a crash landing, remembers an illustration he had seen as a child of a boa constrictor eating an elephant. Saint-Exupéry’s pilot goes on to detail his encounter with a finely dressed little boy who, having appeared in the middle of the desert one morning, unexpectedly demands a drawing. A drawing of a sheep. After several rejected attempts, the pilot gives the Little Prince the drawing of a perforated box. This classic story illustrates my argument. What is mediation? Mediation does not refer to the object, the apparatus, the technology. These are mere caskets, containers, vessels. There is something incommunicable that inhabits matter. And yet, matter is not mute. The medium may well be the message in the case of communication media. In the case of transmission media, however, the medium is the energy. Raw matter is inhabited by a vitality (an energy) that can be transmitted from body to body, from body to land, and back. Mediation is not only dependent on man-made objects or media things, and it is certainly not limited to language and technological media communication. Mediation implies a condition of matter-transmission. My point is that mattertransmission is prior to any manmade system of technological mediation. You do not need a photograph. You do not need a drawing. You do not need a video recording or sound recording to transmit, in a mediated way, the Little Prince’s sheep. All you need, in this case, is imagination, and the material means of expressing it, which can come in the form of a graphic illustration, but also in the form of a sheep-looking outcrop in the desert wasteland or a fluffy cloud that resembles fleece, or a passing wind that bleats. Mediation can be mobilized in the graphic illustration, as well as the rock, or the cloud, the wind. The gap that requires mediation, the space that is filled with transmission, is not necessary between one person and another. Mediation is not just intersubjective, from

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pilot to Little Prince, or from machine to human. Mediation, when considered a strictly material transmission of energy or essentialized matter, is also a go-between that tethers body and landscape. Behind Saint-Exupéry’s image of the perforated box is an imagined sheep. The point is simple. The illustration can exist without its object. Without a drawing, a photo, a motion picture. The Little Prince’s illustration belongs to the realm of the imagination. You cannot communicate that imagination, but you can transmit it. This suggests that there is a fundamental difference between communication media (reliant upon media objects) and transmission media, which relies on an energy that inhabits matter. In the case of the Little Prince, imagination is the energy that feeds the graphic image of the sheep. Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations have been reproduced, imitated, mimicked, remediated. A history of media objects begins with the first publication of this bestseller in 1943. The imagination, however, escapes that history. Memory and the material imagination remain always present in those who have read the book and who cherish it, remember it, recall it, or deploy it to make sense of their everyday lives. The problem with all the drawings the Little Prince discards before opting for the perforated box is that they are too realistic, too representational. In every one of them the narrator unsuccessfully tries to represent sheep. The point of a living image, in this classic children’s story, is not to represent sheep in general, nor indeed to represent the sheep, that is, the particular specimen the Little Prince is thinking of, but to activate the means to imagine. That is why the perforated box is the perfect image, at least in the eyes of the Little Prince. It functions as an opening, a gateway for the mediating force of pure imagination. My choice to include drawings here, as opposed to photographic material, is quite deliberate. This book is about images (optical, sonic, kinesthetic, tactile) which are transmitted by the rocky walls of caves. My focus is the memory, the imagination, and the sensation transmitted via the medium of imagefilled landscape. Since I cannot think of many books devoted to this particular type of mediation, it behooves us to pay more attention to the landesque immersion; to the physical, somatic, sensorial, transmissions of

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life experienced in immersive landscape. To the extent that the medium in question is not a technological one, the medium of the cave is not dependent on the makeability of media in the form of artificial artifacts, objects, things, or systems. The drawings I include in this book do not provide the means for objective analysis, but rather help me consider the way I remember or imagine the subterranean landscape I have experienced and felt over the course of my investigations. Matter Transmission is about prehistoric conditions of mediation that also happen to be contemporary. By prehistory I do not mean a time before the historical past. Prehistory is the imagination before an image, the memory before a photograph, the sensation before a written thought. Histories start with objects, with reification. Transmission, however, does not start with history, nor its objects. Cultural transmission, as mediated by collective imaginaries and memories, are always prehistoric, whether today or twenty thousand years ago. Since that which has the power to mediate is not necessarily media technology and its objects, then media technology can only be the present historical condition by means of which communication and transmission are made possible. Much more substantial than that, I argue, is the mediating power of essentialized earthly materiality. Landscape transmits. It speaks, projects, moves, smells, and tastes; it is full of image and thought, laden with affect it channels itself. If you do not accept that raw nature transmits energy, then drop this book. If you do not agree that rock, tree, cloud, and water are transmission media, you should read no further. The core argument has been exposed. The dominant understanding is that the power to mediate is a function reserved for communication and transmission technologies, to the extent that the content of human group communication is meaning, information, recorded image and sound, hard graphics, which are physically transmitted via guided media (electric cables or fiber optics) or unguided media (radio, microwave, satellite). Landscapes and mediascape are not the same, because both communication and transmission are, as is commonly perceived, technological. But technology has a prehistory, just like the image is preceded by the imagination. The techno-cultural panorama seriously jeopardizes a more ecological sense of material and raw mediation. My thesis can be exposed further: when technological mediation

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is no longer accepted as the sole agency for mediated communication and transmission, what comes to take its place is nature-in-the-raw. Landscape and its elements: these are also media. Caves, for instance, are media. They can transmit physical memories and imaginaries that are always present at the physical and geophysical levels.

Matter is media The word “media” refers to much more than communication networks, media corporations, media technology, and “the” media (a term that somehow assumes priority in many theories of media communication). A materialist framework has been developing in the recent posthumanities that seeks to address this narrow definition of the term. “Expanded media” is a paradigm that accounts for cultural processes which, while understood to involve mediation, are not necessarily dependent upon technology and technological artifacts. Notions such as Bernd Herzogenrath’s “media matter” (after the work of Claus Pias, Joseph Vogl, and Lorenz Engell), or “elemental media” advanced by John Durham Peters and Jeffery Jerome Cohen partly after Gaston Bachelard, or “media geology,” an idea linked to the work of Jussi Parikka (partly after the work of Deleuze and Guattari) are but a few examples of how media scholars have tried to consider the category of “media” beyond a technologically biased approach, Friedrich Kittler style. While the notion of “media matter” hinges on an understanding of materials, materiality or matter as medium, the “elemental media” gambit focuses on the mediological function of natural elements (air, water, fire, earth). Media geology, on the other hand, considers the natural historical processes that have led to the formation of media objects. One example would be tracing the memory capability of computer technologies back to the semi-conductor properties of mineral silicon. What all these frameworks have in common is a sense of media that cannot be reduced to forms of representation (theatre, dance, film, games), to a symbolic system (image, writing, number, code), nor indeed to a technology of communication (printing, telephony, fax). What these materialist approaches to media

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studies have galvanized is an old sense of media as material transmission. Media has become something much more open-ended, much harder to pin down or define in a comprehensive and exhaustive way. In sum, media studies has found the means of enlarging its scope by staging a major debate concerning the wider ecology of media as matter. The term “media” now refers to elemental, physical, chemical, and biological, as well as technological, industrial, or corporative, paradigms. At the heart of this critical project lies a question concerning the folding of “nature” and “culture”—two notions that in a humanistic tradition used to be divided. Because I want to pay serious attention to this problematic division, one of my subsidiary questions is this: How can a re-appreciation of the natural cave as medium contribute to a growing literature on the subject of media matter, and medianature? To write about “nature” without qualifying the term flies in the face of decades of media and cultural studies debate. “Nature” has been extensively problematized based on the commonly held belief that this category is a social and cultural construction or contestation. I will use the term “nature” with an accompanying qualifier, hence my reference to technological nature, urban nature, mediated nature, industrialized nature, or perhaps most importantly, nature-in-the-raw. Upper Paleolithic cave sites lie neither in the domain of nature-in-the-raw nor indeed culture, but somewhere in between. A limestone cave is a natural formation, a geological landscape created by the elements and geophysical forces. At the same time, it can be a place that has sheltered humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years, being thus the site for the accumulation of memories and imaginaries. My understanding of landscape as media exemplifies a theoretical concept coined by Donna Haraway, which is worth highlighting here. Instead of nature versus culture, “natureculture” is a notion associated with Haraway’s work that recognizes the inseparability of the geophysical and social spheres. Haraway has revealed that some cultures are not determined by the historical division of human and nonhuman, but rather exist in a continuum of seamless relations. This argument has enabled media scholars like Jussi Parikka to invite posthumanist frameworks into the media ontology debate, particularly through the concept of medianature. To promote medianature is this book’s ultimate raison d’être.

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Ultimately, caves bear a critical message. If mediacy is not to be found in the technological artifact, in a television set, an iPhone, a laptop; nor indeed in object-specific works of media communication, in a film, a music video, a game; nor in the technologies themselves, then is our present-day obsession for media things a failure to recognize raw nature? Contemporary media culture can veil the transmitted energy of raw nature given the cultural dominance of technological forms of communication media. The opposite is true of transmission media in an indigenous European context. Cave “art” reveals a deep ecological understanding of mediation. The future is indigenous. An ecological understanding of media will require learning from European (and other forms of) indigeneity, and from media practices that sustain an ecological participation of body and land. If you consider the natural cave a medium, as I do, you will realize that the landscape transmits not from an inert basis, not from its position as artifact, object, or thing. A cave is alive. The cave has a lot to say, and a lot to teach us, about the historical conditions of mediation in a paleocyber age.

Brute materialism Generally speaking, matter is not brute at all: it is intelligent, complex, selforganizing. As a system of thought, on the other hand, materialism is a way of understanding which, almost by definition, is rooted in material life. Thus, I make a very important distinction here. Where matter is intelligent and complex, materialism ought to be brute. To get close to that intelligence and complexity found in mattered life, the way to think must be direct, immediate, unimpeded by too much conceptualization; it must be humble, naïve, and it must remain in touch. Of course, materialism is not a single frame of reference, but a collection of many different schools of thought. There is a commercial form of materialism, driven by a love of things that can be bought and accumulated. When Madonna sings: “We are living in a material world/ and I am a material girl,” the kind of materialism that is being alluded to is this seductive love for commercial stuff. But materialism does not have to be synonymous with love for money and material consumption. There is also a dialectical materialism, which is

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Marx’s idea of a material socioeconomic condition historically divided into base and superstructure, proletariat and bourgeoisie, use and exchange, money and commodity, whose critical perspective in fact attacks a lack of class consciousness in consumerist society. On the whole, materialism will typically oppose idealism. A materialist will more likely than not reject metaphysics, and instead will find a sense of continuity and perpetuity in the life of matter itself, in the immanent conditions of material living. Given the highly conceptual character of recent materialist thinking, it is necessary to ask: What is material about theoretical and academic materialist philosophy? A number of related schools of thought have emerged in the recent posthumanities that have sought to push the envelope of materialist thinking beyond Marxism. A few examples include vital materialism (associated with the work of Deleuze and Guattari), new materialism (associated with the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel Delanda, and Jane Bennett), and object-oriented ontology (after the work of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant). The general tenor of these schools is typified by high-level conceptualization and philosophical argumentation; however, that is not the direction I wish to take. In seeking to hash out a sense of brute materialism, my overall intention is to steer away from a recent materialist trend in poststructuralist thinking, which in my opinion has become too ontological in its approach. Although the word “brute” often carries a negative connotation, it need not. The word is commonly used to refer to people as “dull,” “uneducated,” and “unsophisticated,” or to children and “primitive” peoples, via an association with “animals.” The original meaning of the word is, de facto, “farm animal.” You can call me a brute, a dog, or a pig. In truth, I will not feel denigrated. Quite the contrary. As a provocation to think critically from a perspective that sides with nonhuman animals, children, or “primitive” peoples, “brute” is a welcome contribution to a new materialist way of thinking that has become perhaps too sophisticated, too exclusive, and far too removed given its highlevel academic pedigree. It is worth adding that the word “brute” also features in a number of interesting collocations, for instance “brute facts,” that is, facts that cannot be given a scientific or objective explanation; “brute forces,” that is, forces associated with natural phenomena; and “brute materials,”

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which refers to materials that have not been industrially processed. Every one of these collocations brings me a little closer to the subject matter of this book: mediation by means of unexplained, raw, and industrially untouched landscape. My question, more specifically, is this: How can limestone rock serve as medium for cultural transmission? Can a critical way of thinking media emerge from a natural landscape such as a limestone cave? The objectives of this book are threefold: first, to focus on unquarried limestone walls used in Upper Paleolithic times as transmission media. Second, to challenge vital materialist and neomaterialist theory in particular, arguing for the need to contest the dominance of these discourses within the recent posthumanities. I encourage the need to think directly out of materials (limestones in this case), and to open up a materialist ethics that tries to bypass the mediation of academic philosophy. My critique applies particularly to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and a wake of vital materialist authors influenced by these seminal thinkers, whom I consider too conceptual, too removed from brute matter itself. Third, I wish to contribute to the question of praxis. My point is that materialist thinking in a post-Marxist era has lost its practicability and implementation, and that post-Marxist materialism is, by comparison, no longer practice-oriented. While Marxist critical thinking traditionally positioned praxis at the heart of historical materialism (via a call for social and political change), neomaterialism has proposed a more theoretically minded ethos, which is harder to apply given a heavily conceptual agenda, particularly given the attention by neomaterialists and object-oriented ontologists to notional ideas such as nonhuman, posthuman, posthistory, agency. Objectoriented ontology (OOO) is a good example of a recent materialist perspective that, while proposing a framework that goes beyond Marxist theory, has become more interested in the philosophical idea of the object, and its ontological status. My work moves away from OOO and vital materialism, while arguing for the need to develop a more practically minded framework. The praxis I have committed to is not artistic, social, or political. Instead, I argue in favor of life praxis. It has become necessary to consider change at the level of one’s own living. The strategy I have in mind, which is sometimes referred to as the SIMBY approach (Start in My Back Yard), is applicable to

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one’s own everyday life, not to life in some general sense, nor indeed life in some broadly conceived collectivity (social, political, artistic). How one eats, sleeps, rests, works, or, in this particular case, communicates, is the arena for critique, contestation, and resilience. From a methodological point of view, this book is informed by my own background as a critical performance practitioner. I should point out that performance is not understood here as a mode of representation (i.e., theatre, mime, or dance performance), but as a particular way of doing. Performance, in my broad understanding, is when you do something, and attach an agency to what you do, in order to implement transformation at the physical and mental levels. The opposite of performance might be a mode of doing which simply transpires, which takes its course without any notice or effect. Performance is imbued with enough reflection, enough criticality, enough practice, enough awareness and consciousness, to extract meaning or significance from that doing so that a transformation may happen, and that transformation may have social, political, cultural, or even spiritual effects. Performance is not confined to a practice applied to the stage, but a practice applied to life. It is a way of knowing through that praxis, that psychophysical, agential, transformational, and ultimately meaningful way of doing. Bypassing a purely desk-based study of media, and also a descriptive account of mainstream media works, I have opted for a kind of performance ethnographic approach instead. Although I have explored a great number of Upper Paleolithic heritage sites in the UK, Spain, France, and Portugal, this book is devoted primarily to an examination of matter and transmission in three specific cave sites, largely because they are well known. These are: Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet (Pont d’Arc). To access these sites, I made use of research techniques that are germane to performance practice. The kind of methods I deployed include: observation, participation, immersion, and emotional memory, combined with caving and climbing techniques acquired through formal training. My work is novel, I believe, to the extent that I have conducted a paleoexperimental and brute research plan that is indistinguishable for a critical exploration of my own life. Serious attention has been given in this book to: (1) the real transmission of living energy via rock in a specific landscape context (Upper Paleolithic

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European cave art); (2) the way limestone caves afford mediated cultural transmission in a manner that is independent of modern-day technological artifacts (screen media, sound recorded media, written media); and (3) given this independence from technological artifacts, the connection between prehistory and posthistory, particularly in the context of what I call the paleocybernetic age. Paleo is Greek for “old,” but as I will show presently, it is the contemporary revision of “oldness” that matters to me most. This is not a book about media history, any more than it is a book about media archaeology. This is not a book that situates the “old” in the past. The “old” lies in the present, in the current reinvention of prehistory as a contemporary condition of modernday cultural possibilities. In fact, the cultural production of the “old” is, I will argue, the logical consequence of intense innovation and change. Hence, the paleocyber age is largely characterized by the imperatives of newness, novelty, and innovation, which are to some extent prompted by technological progress, and which nonetheless force a contemporary confrontation with those old worlds that new media, new technology (or even new materialism) are leaving in their wake. If transhistoricity is the quality of holding throughout human history, and not merely within the frame of reference of a particular society at a particular stage of its development, there is a fundamentally transhistorical transmission going on at the heart of prehistoric caves. The underground rock that was perceived to be moving forty thousand years ago, when the limestone caves were first lit and its surfaces were first intervened by creative humans, is still moving today.

The chapters The opening chapter of this book deals with limestones. I argue that limestones were chosen as a ready-to-hand medium for the making of cave painting in the European subcontinent during the last Ice Age. Why so? What did limestone, in its brute form, afford the makers of prehistoric cave paintings and engravings? What are the material qualities of this rock, and what does it afford from a transmissional point of view? My answer is: matter-energy. Energy in the form

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of color, shape, texture, warmth, echoic resonance, kinesthetic movement (and myriad other kinds of perceivable transmission). Arguing for the need to understand the rock in terms of its life cycle, I argue for two very different biographies of limestone. One unfolds in the geological process of rock formation; the other unfolds as part of an artificial process of transformation into industrial materials. Limestones are nowadays mined for the making of products like paint, toothpaste, road filling, and garden sculptures. The two very different cultural lives of limestone presented here expose two polarized modes of material thinking, one vitalist and one industrialist; one in which the limestone is understood to possess mediacy (the power to mediate and transmit); and one in which the material is understood to be inert and inanimate. The argument is developed in Chapter 2, where I explore the industrial transformation of brute materials, this time in relation to a particular limestone cave. My case study is the famous cave of Lascaux and its various commodified iterations (Lascaux II, III, and IV, and Lascaux VR). Drawing on a neo-Marxist critique of the commodity, I expand on the idea that commodities breach the natural process of mattering, through a transformation of brute materials into things that have an artificial life within an economic cycle of production, purchase, utilization, and disposal. Based on my own firsthand accounts of Lascaux cave, I argue that Lascaux can be biographed in terms of a “fatal leap” (the expression is Marx’s) from karst landscape, to cultural heritage site, to a commercial brand, to commodity, to money. Money then becomes the universal medium that transmits and communicates the value of the cave to tourists and cave art lovers within a capitalist condition of material culture. Money takes over as prime cultural form of material substance (for instance, from memory, imagination, sensation), and, like a strange spirit or animistic force, it dictates from a plane of total abstract calculability, the standardized mediation of material things and processes. I argue in Chapter 3 that the clash between these two cultural under­ standings of materiality (one vital and one industrial) concerns two rather antipodal ways of constructing a human subjectivity. My argument is that this rift is caused by an abstract and disembodied categorization of the “human.” When “human” refers to a concept, an abstraction, a sense of transcendence,

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a metaphysical agency unique to our species, a self-aggrandized and removed human subjectivity becomes the standardizing value against which a more physical, corporeal, and material sense of subjectivity is effaced. In other words, “human” becomes a way of proclaiming a status that is no longer rooted in the material body, in the intelligence and knowledge that the somatic body and the surrounding material environment can afford. This immaterial sense of humanity is torn from the humus (i.e., the soil or earth). I contend that no such division is possible at the brute materialist level, and that humans are nothing other than a temporary phase in the process of becoming humus. Human to humus, ashes to ashes, bone to stone—the brute materialist perspective offers an earthling subjectivity instead, which affirms the connection and mediation between my material body and the earth to which my body will eventually disperse. To exemplify these ideas, I provide a detailed firsthand observation of charcoal paintings contained in the Salle du Fond, in Chauvet Cave (Ardèche), arguing that Upper Paleolithic peoples may have affirmed a similar kind of earthling subjectivity in their work. In Chapter 4, I advance the notion of “parietism,” the cultural belief in natural walls and their power to mediate. What can a rocky wall transmit? I argue that rocky walls can convey brute forces perceived, for instance, as physical energy in the form of movements or vibrant colors. I reject Plato’s well-known depiction of the cave wall as a surface onto which shadows are projected by an external agent such as fire, or in a more contemporary reading, a screen-based technology. Instead, I argue for a very different cave parable in which the power to transmit energy is not external, but rather emerges from within the medium of the limestone wall. Next, I will introduce the reader to a core conceptual framework, which I refer to as “paleo ontology,” and which draws on the work of cave art historian Jean Clottes. Clottes has proposed four key concepts to better understand the thinking behind parietal or wall art: interconnection, fluidity, complexity, and permeability. These four concepts encapsulate, in Clottes’s analysis, the way indigenous European peoples engaged with limestone walls. These concepts are not abstract—they are embedded in the way Upper Paleolithic peoples treated their material world, in the thinking behind their use of materials, in the way they intervened cave walls, in the way the drew energy from these walls, or indeed in the way they

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made use of minerals to produce color. Drawing on participatory research conducted by the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, I pay serious attention to the ochre paintings found in this well-known UNESCOlisted cave. This section finishes with a brief account of Gary Hill’s video work Up Against Down, which was exhibited at the Mas d’Azil prehistoric cave in 2010. This work further exemplifies a confrontation between digital media and the medium of limestone rock. I address in Chapter 5 the problematic assumption that live media (theatre and digital performance) can claim the cave based on performance techniques and techniques of immersion. I argue that a contemporary understanding of technological immersion proves to be a stumbling block to an understanding of the autonomy and radical alterity of immersive landscape media. As a critical alternative to theatrical and digital performance paradigms of immersion, I offer the notion of the grotesque immersion. Briefly touching on the notion of the material bodily grotesque developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, I argue that immersion in a cave landscape provokes a sense of the body distorted, exaggerated, intensified, and ultimately connected to a larger flesh (the cave itself). Genealogical approaches advanced under the custody of proto-performance theory ignore the contemporaneity of the karst cave as a medium for the grotesque immersion. My argument is backed up by Edmund Carpenter’s famous study of drawing techniques used by Aivilik Eskimos in Canada, and Marshall McLuhan’s collaboration with Carpenter, which supported McLuhan’s critique of Western media in relation to the idea of an “acoustic space.” Acoustic space is not confined to sound media, but to mediaimmersive experience more generally, and supposedly draws on raw-natural experience of immersion to critique a loss of real-world immersion in screenand text-based forms of technological media communication. Crucially, McLuhan’s critique serves as a framework for the understanding of the acoustic function of prehistoric caves, an idea famously explored in Siegfried Giedion’s media theoretical account of parietal art. In Chapter 6, I turn my attention to media archaeology, in an attempt to challenge various related theories that have claimed a genealogical link between screen media communication and prehistoric caves. My intention is to debunk the myths of proto-cinema and proto-animation, arguing that the

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image-filled cave is not the origin of screen media any more than immersive live media. My critique is inspired by Henri Bergson’s attack on the cinematographic method, and by Bernard Stiegler’s more recent notion of archi-cinema, which this author develops via his interpretation of Werner Herzog’s 3D film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. A critical distinction is made later on in this chapter between Herzog’s documentary and my own SIMBY exploration of Chauvet Cave. I argue that technological media and real-world caves cannot be seen as genealogically related, but that they are two fundamentally different ways of understanding mediacy. This chapter also addresses the connection made between prehistoric graphic techniques that evoke motion, and the medium of film animation. To the extent that I also problematize the conventional use of the word “animation,” I find myself having to dispute the notion of protoanimation as advanced by André Leroi-Gourhan and Marc Azéma. Drawing on Gregory Bateson and Gene Youngblood, I contextualize in Chapter 7 the cultural need to reinvent prehistories to propose the future of media, and the looping of old and new, a phenomenon that is now referred to as the paleocybernetic age. Unmarking myself from commercial examples of this phenomenon, for instance the Paleo Diet trademark, I anticipate the need to develop a more critical understanding of paleocybernetics. I turn to critical theory at this point in order to support what some scholars have dubbed a Paleolithic turn in the posthumanities. Of particular interest to me is Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the “Paleolithic State.” In an attempt to move beyond vital materialism, I argue that it is necessary to practice a paleocyber ethics at the level of a life praxis. Drawing on Guattari’s idea that a paleocyber ecology presupposes a re-singularization of subjectivity, a fight against the subjugation of subjectivity from mass media, and a construction of a sense of self based on personal life praxis, I put forward strategies for a SIMBY (Start in My Back Yard) approach to a paleo way of communicating and transmitting. In Chapter 8, I turn my attention to a NASA-led project entitled “Interstellar cave painting,” which involved the design and creation of a symbolic message to be delivered by the Pioneer 10 space mission to extraterrestrial beings. I argue that this vision of cave art for aliens signals a disconnection from an earthling subjectivity, and a radical projection of an abstract human subjectivity to alien  life. Drawing on the conceptual gambit of “multinaturalism,” I argue

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that the scientific enterprise of sending humans to other planets, which will possibly depend on colonization of extraterrestrial caves, opens a new caveman future, a new Paleolithic utopia for the space age, characterized by the relativization of “nature” and “life.” Making a sharp turn away from theory, I argue that in order to affirm a brute materialist perspective, the paleocyber age does not necessarily have to be a period in history during which advanced technological progress is summoning up our Paleolithic past, as in the case of “interstellar cave painting.” In a more personal and lived-in way, the paleocyber age is also the multinaturalism and multiperspectivism that characterizes an individual’s life, from infancy to adulthood, from child to grown-up. The different lives one can live throughout a single lifecycle are mediated via a power that is not technologically prescribed, but which is channeled in the form of material memory and imagination. Drawing on memories of childhood, I conclude with the description of a poem, written by myself aged 7, which conjures up a paleocyber encounter that is as personal and intimate as it is material.

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Biographies of Matter I: Limestone Mattering The difference between organic and inorganic life is a question of where life happens to find itself mattering. Take the example of limestone. Limestone is a well-known and abundant rock. It is made of inorganic mineral. The rock is sedimentary and soluble. That means it forms as a consequence of the deposition and subsequent cementation of material at the Earth’s surface, and within bodies of water. The rock is also biogenic. This means that limestones are created out of the shells of living organisms that dropped to the bottom of oceans or lakes. In other words, even though the mineral component of limestone is inorganic, the rock derives from organic mineral matter (shell and bone). There is a good reason why limestones are so abundant. There is so much animal life in the seas, it is hardly surprising limestones should form lavishly on the planet’s dynamic crust. My point is that limestone is the rock phase of an organic life that thrives on this planet. You will not find limestone, say, on Mars, because there are no calcite-rich biological organisms there that we know of. There cannot be limestone caves in Mars, either, for that same reason. Limestone is recycled by Planet Earth and no other planet that we know of. In limestones one can find a logbook that shows how life manages to weave itself from organic to inorganic, from mineral rock to mineral vertebrate. Coccolithiphores, which are a form of plankton composed mainly of calcium carbonate plates, are the specific organisms responsible for limestone formation. These tiny organisms—along with fragments of other marine creatures such as coral, forams, and mollusks—form vast layers of lime as

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the living specimens die and drop to the bottom of oceans and lakes. These calcium-rich deposits are then subject to geophysical forces that compact the substrate through a force known as tectonic burial. In simple terms, the lime starts to bury itself under new layers of sedimentation accumulating at the ocean or lake bottom. As the lime deposits are pushed down the Earth’s crust by more and more layers of surface deposition, so the lime is cemented and turns into solid rock. Limestone is born. Like a plant or an animal, limestone too has a life cycle. The rock is born, it matures, it dies. If you pay close attention to a rock and its cycle, you will perhaps notice just how intimately woven the inorganic and organic aspects of life are. Although Upper Paleolithic peoples could not have acquired a scientific understanding of the rock cycle, the manner in which cultural memory was transmitted, namely via limestone caves, suggests a cultural recognition of the mediacy contained in the world of subterranean karsts. What subterranean landscape media conveys in an indigenous European cultural context, especially during the Upper Paleolithic, is an understanding that rock lives, palpitates, moves, and changes, just like a living body. “Rocks are books,” my uncle told me when I was a child. “Every rock tells a life story.” Despite the petrification and fossilization of organic matter—in spite of the transformation of bone to stone and back—some of the chemical trademarks remain unchanged. You could argue that this permanence of chemical matter is what provides the continuity of life at the material level, from organic to inorganic and back. Limestone once was shell, as I have just explained. Despite becoming inorganic, it preserves a memory—a chemical memory—for instance, in the form of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is the chemical compound that gives hardness to organic bone structure, as well as to sedimentary rock. In a way, the difference between stone and bone is nonexistent as far as this basic chemical component is concerned. The cycle never ends, and limestone does not remain buried forever under the sea. Through the forces of tectonics, buried layers of rock are lifted to form limestone mountains. The ongoing process of tectonic burial and tectonic uplift establishes the cyclical rhythm of limestone’s dynamic mattering. In other words, sedimentary rock continues to be extruded or buried in the crucible of



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underground magma. To the extent that a geological time-consuming process is in order, calcite follows a protracted cycle involving ceaseless transformation along a journey that takes this mineral in all manner of journeys, from underground to overground, from organic to inorganic, from bone to stone, from nature-in-the-raw to culture. When it resurfaces, limestone is of course exposed. Naturally, the rock comes into contact with wind and rain. Since limestone is a soluble material, the rock starts to dissolve over and underground, creating unique landscapes known as karsts (more on this to come). It is not only contact with air and water that profoundly transforms limestones, however. Although limestones come in many different colors, the characteristic white tone of this rock makes it particularly eye-catching to humans and other animals attracted to life in limestone gorges, buttes, and overhangs. The unique material properties of limestone (malleability, solubility, whiteness) expose the rock to another consequential factor: human culture. The cultural significance of limestone can be gauged not only in terms of the carving of this rock into cultural artifacts, but also in regard to the tendency for the indigenous people of Ice Age Europe to settle, at least temporarily, in limestone-rich landscapes. Having lived in Southeast England for many years, I am not impervious to the sense of collective memory attached to the Seven Sisters cliffs, located near the town of Seaford in the South Downs, or the white cliffs of Dover, located further east along the English Channel. A profound connection can be established between these limestone cliffs and the identity of local community, local county, or indeed an entire nation. “White cliffs of Dover” sometimes refers metonymically to England as a whole. As a geographic form of nationwide identification, these limestone cliffs are comparable to the Rock of Gibraltar (which is also a limestone butte), or the limestone Dolomites in Northeast Italy. There is something monumental about limestone. The monumentality somehow has a bearing on cultural memory. The connection between monumental rock and memory of course extends to a variety of rocks, and not just limestone. There is a profound transcultural affinity between stone and memorialization more generally. As such, these cliffs somehow function as statuesque presences onto which an enduring and unchanging sense of belonging clings.

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Landscapes What is true about limestone rock in historical periods is probably true in prehistoric deep time. Associating a particular cultural identity with a particular rock, naturally formed, is perhaps one of the reasons that drove prehistoric communities to settle near remarkable and attention-grabbing geographic sites. A good example of this is the limestone bridge of Pont d’Arc, located a few hundred meters from Chauvet Cave, or the limestone gorges of the Célé river that provide the setting for Pech Merle cave, or the dominating limestone cone of Monte El Castillo in Spain, the site of a cave containing the oldest known human paintings in the world, or the limestone landscape of Cheddar Gorge in Western England, the home of Cheddar Man, or indeed the Rock of Gibraltar, a limestone promontory that sheltered sapiens and neanderthal communities. These are some examples of major limestone landmarks in whose proximity prehistoric peoples chose to settle, if only temporarily or seasonally. Landmarks enter a naturecultural continuum perhaps where the land is perceived to be expressive, or where it transmits a memorable and imagination-rich energy to the cultural sphere. It is worth adding that the prehistoric landscapes of Europe were free of tall vegetation, and that unobstructed vistas would have lain before Ice Age peoples. The wild landscape of the English moors, for instance in North Yorkshire or the Peak District, certainly has the power to convey a kind of prehistoric mood. The English moors are in effect fairly small reservoirs where prehistoric vegetation has remained virtually unchanged since the Last Ice Age. After these unique highlands once covered in ice sheets de-glaciated, they provided suitable homes for Ice Age plants that died elsewhere in Britain. It is conceivable that the austere and solemn character of the English moor retains the naturecultural sentiment of a prehistoric memory of land wide open and raw. Between forty and ten thousand years ago, roughly speaking, European hunter-gatherers inhabited a landscape of extreme seasonal fluctuations marked by short temperate summers and bitter cold and dry winters. It was a period marked by climate change, but of a radically different kind to the one we speak of today. The Upper Paleolithic coincides with the last glaciation,



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also known as the Würm Ice Age. With annual rainfall levels dipping several hundred millimeters lower and temperatures averaging some 6–13 degrees centigrade cooler than in present-day conditions, Ice Age peoples would have had to cope with an environment that was considerably drier, more bitterly cold, but at the same time, austere and plain. Imagine the Upper Paleolithic setting like a massive moorland. The land would have been populated not by the lush woodland we find in northern and central Europe today, but steppe vegetation. The dividing line between woodland and steppe would have lain considerably further south than it is today, with forested birch areas appearing only south of the Rhone Valley in France. In a world that was wintry, and thus colder, darker, less brightly colored, the presence of moving animals and moving elements (wind, water, fire), as well as the protrusion of limestone mountains, may have provided the most distinctive of contrasts, and a clear conduit for the transmission of cultural information. Landscape media cannot be historicized. The technologically mediated representation of landscape can, indeed, be historicized, but not the transmission of material memories, imagination, and sensation via material landscapes, which is akin to what Frederic Jameson calls a “transhistorical imperative.”1 What the transhistorical imperative affirms, in the case of naturein-the-raw, is a sense of landscape that is not merely a backdrop, a scenery, a beautiful spot. Rather, the landscape is understood to be an agency, a force that is continuously transmitting back to culture. Landscape is speaking, moving, or making signs. The grass is dwindling. For a pastoralist, that is a clear message to move on. Rather than affirm a cultural sense of mediation as a technologically determined imperative, the notion of landscape media that I uncover in prehistoric caves inculcates a sense of mediacy that is not just ubiquitous (like technology nowadays) but omnipresent: the power of mediacy in the landscape is everywhere. Everything can be a vessel for this vital form of communication and transmission: a cave, a river, a wind, a migrating animal, a body. It makes sense, if you live on the move like the Ice Age nomad did, to establish cultural relations with and through the land, and to build a mnemonic network of geographical focal points. The concentration of specific pictographic symbols within particular prehistoric caves suggests that the land

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may have been culturally valorized as an interconnected and fluid matrix, and that this fluid interconnection (as I will show in Chapter 4) may have been foundational to Upper Paleolithic belief systems, or indeed to what I call a paleo ontology. In her landmark study of cave symbols, Genevieve von Petzinger argues that certain symbols such as the so-called tectiform (or roof-shaped symbol) are unusual given their late invention and the small territory in which they are found (tectiforms are exclusive to the Dordogne and the Cantabria region of northwestern Spain). The appearance of the same symbol in two nearby areas can be explained, at least according to von Petzinger, in terms of a social connectivity woven into the land.2 Symbolic communication in the indigenous European context may have been transferred, at least in the case of the tectiform symbol, as a result of intermarriage or trade networks between France and Spain. Whether the networking was social or trade-related or both, it is likely that caves served as sites for the channeling of communication and as conduits for information in a web of naturecultural relations. Landscape is not only a medium. It is, more specifically, a network medium, in the sense that hydrological networks, speleological networks, and networks of different karst landscapes all conspire to create a system of landesque social networking in a European prehistoric context—at least, this is the interpretation derived from the appearance of specific symbols in specific nearby sites. The landscape is a physical web, a basketwork in whose geographical patterns a whole array of cultural and social networking can be channeled, and where material forms of cultural transmission and communication are made possible. The manner in which limestones extrude in large slabs, especially at high elevations, makes limestone landmarks recognizable from a great distance. Limestones may have been in this sense a prime medium for the establishment of landmarks and waymarks to help demarcate the mnemonic mapping of landesque networks. Perhaps limestones found in the landscape helped people remember places and patterns of mobility forged through the land. It is not surprising that limestone caves should have been prime assets for cultural intercommunication in Western Europe as sapiens populations arrived at the subcontinent nearly forty-five thousand years ago, and as the newcomers displaced autochthonous neanderthal populations. After all, limestone caves are fairly abundant all along what is now southern and central France, the



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Franco-Cantabrian Arc, and further north, in western and central Britain. However, it is not because limestone was ready-to-hand that it acquired a media-transmissive function. The question is, why was limestone consistently chosen as the medium for the transmission and communication of Upper Paleolithic imaginaries? What are the properties of this rock that make it so appealing as a transmission medium?

Limestones Some properties of limestone that contribute to its transmissive function are softness, malleability, and color. Limestones often feature narrow runnels, typically caused by the effects of weathering. The lines that tend to appear on limestone surfaces can prompt imaginary figures in the mind, before the line is rendered in a graphic way. In other words, even before a figure is drawn on a limestone wall, the surface is already marked with natural lines that, with or without human intervention, can be a medium for the transmission of images, thoughts, memories. Mediation does not demand a technology of graphic expression such as drawing, painting, engraving, or sculpting—these are layers of expression that emphasize an existing prehistory in the form of expressive rock and expressive landscape. Limestones are soft rocks. They can be easily scratched and engraved. In fact, Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe used the material for more than the purpose of making cave paintings, drawings, engravings, and flutings. Prehistoric Europeans also turned to limestone as a medium for relief sculpture, as in the case of the famous horse reliefs carved in the limestone cliffs of L’Abri Cap Blanc, in the French Dordogne. Finally, limestones are white when free from impurities, given the predominant presence of calcium. Scraping off the limestone surface was often performed by prehistoric image-makers before painting, in a deliberate attempt to whiten the rock before applying black charcoal or ochre red (more on this to come). The whiteness of the rock is significant. It is as if, in the presence of such vibrant whiteness, and amid the blanketing darkness underground, paleo societies identified an energy and a transmissive quality.

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There is one other material property of limestone that is worth highlighting. Limestone dissolves in water containing weak acid solutions. It is a highly porous rock. Porosity is highly significant in this context, insofar as the property bears upon the construction of a unique material way of thinking in the Upper Paleolithic. Through the handling of porous materials, raw matter facilitated a cultural way of thinking that may have been grounded, at least according to the conceptual framework I will introduce in Chapter 4, on the core rubric of permeability. Limestones are porous because calcite—the chemical component of limestone that was once organic—is soluble in the presence of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide gets inside the cave, dissolves the calcite, and washes it away by the medium of underground rivers. This is how a cavern is formed, effectively. Limestone is therefore a vessel which carries the medium of memory and imagination and also helps transubstantiate this mediating essence from an experiential reality to a psychic, spiritual, or affective reality. In other words, the memory of a real-world landscape, and the memory of a real-world animal, is brought into the cave. Subsequently, limestone functions like a sieve. These real-world memories are morphed into imaginary or even fantasy images (a spotted unicorn can be seen in Lascaux cave). The geological porosity of limestone, that is, the rock’s capacity to absorb and filter water (especially acidic water), is given a cultural function, to the extent that limestones supported a porous and permeable cosmology in the Upper Paleolithic (more on this to come). It is as if limestones provided a filter through which the reality of everyday life could be substantialized and essentialized, in order to be reanimated as a reality of imagination, memory, and spirit.

Movements The European Ice Age landscape was befitting of megafauna, that is, large animals adapted to long-range mobility. Humans were thus part of a world of large and ruminant fauna that could move freely, unimpeded by thick vegetation. In a world without roads, borders, cartographies, or territorial prescriptions, movement is lord. What the Ice Age landscape afforded was an



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unimpeded and all-directional movement that was firmly connected to the nonlinear rhythms of land: the seasons, the availability of pastures, rainfall, temperature. Total freedom to move was not inconsequential to the Ice Age lifestyle, nor, it seems, to an Upper Paleolithic sense of mediation dominated by movement. Tundra-like landscapes marked by pronounced seasonal variations induced many animals (especially ungulates) to cover long migration routes in search of grazing pastures. Thus, the large grazing animals of the Ice Age followed seasonal variations affecting the land, while predators would have had to follow game in order to survive. For Ice Age humans, setting up permanent camp up would have been inconsistent with the surrounding ecology, in part because sedentary living would have prevented communities from following the migratory animals that provided families with food and clothing (among other resources). Permanent settlement would have amounted to a failure to communicate with a dynamic environment. The nomadic subjectivity, in my analysis, is an ecocultural imperative, in the sense that the need to move on is spurred by the need to pay heed to the signs, portents, and insinuations that the changing landscape transmits. To obey the signs of the land—for instance in terms of following weather patterns, animal mobility, pasture availability, and temperature shifts—was not only an economic factor for the nomad, but an affirmation of an ecocultural sense of mediation. Nomad subjectivity is characterized by a sense of belonging or identity that is carried around, rather than fixed to a static sense of territory. This mobile sense of self-identification determines quite fundamentally how mediation is conditioned in a nomad worldview. Everything in the nomad’s landscape might be transmitting meaningful physical information, and thus, landscape and mediascape cannot be split apart. It is only in a sedentary condition of possibilities, where the land ceases to acquire the function of a dynamic agent, that a mediascape can be rationalized and technologized to function in the form of media communication in the conventional sense of the word. Movement is lord in a nomadic hunter-gatherer’s lifeworld, not least because it is not only the animal that incites the hunter to follow, but the animal motion. Animal motion acquires an independence from the actual

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animal, from its body or anatomy. Hunters do not necessarily see the object of their hunt, but sometimes only the traces and spoors left behind on the landscape. Indeed, I would argue that the hunter-gatherer of the Ice Age followed animals in more ways than one. Hunter-gatherers were obliged to follow the animal they needed to hunt, but also the land on which that animal would have been found feeding, or the weather patterns that would lead the grazing animal to move onto greener pastures, or the traces left by the animal. Thus, the Ice Age hunter-gatherer would have had to follow a great number of ecological flows, all of which functioned as means of communication and transmission that were incorporated into cultural systems of signification. In other words, what the medium of limestone rock reinforces is a general perception of movement among Ice Age peoples, acquired through nomadic living. This sense of transmission via landscape is, in my understanding, deeply embedded within a mobile lifestyle and subjectivity. In sum, the medium of limestone cave painting and drawing reveals a sensitivity to seasons, to migration patterns, to ethological animal behavior and action, to the morphological changes of karst landscapes, to the sensation of movement and change on the material surfaces of rock. Since free movement and free mobility could be the prime medium to establish connections between cultural and wild natural spheres in a nomadic worldview, it makes sense that great attention should be given by Ice Age nomads to the movement evoked by limestone walls. Indeed, the sensitivity that Ice Age peoples showed to limestone rock underpins perhaps an ethical and ecological consciousness of the importance of transmitting with and through rock. It makes sense that the rock’s evocation of movement (for instance, through wavy rock contours sculpted by running water) should have been interpreted as signs of the living and dynamic landscape, particularly in terms of evoking animal motion. When the Ice Age nomad went inside the cave, he or she brought into the cave a mobile imaginary and a collective memory. But this fuse that was ignited inside the caves was not only a projection of memories and imaginations collected over the course of a life spent following the flows of the land. The rock itself was transmitting to the visiting nomad its own sense of flow and energy.



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Take the example of the famous cave of Lascaux. As you make your way inside past the modern entrance of the cave, the first major opening is called the Hall of the Bulls, which I will describe in more detail in a later section (see Chapter 2). From an architectural point of view, the hall is shaped like an oblong cupola. On the walls, you can clearly see the effects of water erosion. You can see how the water that once flowed underground carved the rock, leaving lines and shapes that flow in the direction the river once surged and gushed. It is this swelling and denting of the walls that creates a natural sense of sculpted movement. Implied movement can be traced in the folds of rock found in the cupola’s ceiling, or in the curvature of the concave walls, or in the stratified layers of sedimentary rock, or indeed in the wavy and smooth patterns of erosion. A cave wall that moves in some implicit way, or explicitly given the effects that a fire-lit candle or lantern naturally evokes, is unpredictable. Spatial relationships inside a cave can be felt to change continuously. One element that could be said to define the experience of a firelight cave, is surprise. At every movement of the light, the cave turns into a different shape, revealing a different presence, a different set of movement forms or grotesque variations. The Magdalenian and Solutrean occupants of Lascaux not only acknowledged the surprising and unpredictable qualities of the immersive cave, but also may have assimilated the natural limestone morphologies within a set of nomadic beliefs that assigned transmissional value to this kinesthetic rock. In other words, because physical and geophysical movements are a prime medium for the nomad, the limestone’s unique properties take on a very explicit mediological function in indigenous Europe, propping up the nomadic imagination against the flows and supple twists of limestone walls. While outside the cave the nomad followed real-world or actual animals, inside the cave the nomad followed imaginary or remembered animals. The flows of life expressed through the medium of limestone rock led the hunter to another prey, where the hunt involved tracking down visions and memories. The outdoor hunter turned into an underground image-maker, a hunter of images. The hunter had to search the cave for the right limestone surfaces and proper textures. Could this help explain why the same slabs of rock were used time and time again by many generations of image-makers, and why for tens

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of thousands of years indigenous Europeans sustained an ecological relation with particular rocky walls, characterized by particular material properties, and particular material energies? Can this hunter-like perception partly explain why the makers of the painted caves “tracked down” images on the limestone walls by following the rock, or by haptically retracing the lines on the cave walls before depicting graphic imagery? Did the painters not “hunt” the image within the cave, searching for the propitious wall that would communicate living movement to the follower? It is as if the hunter-gatherer had brought to the limestone cave a vision trained in a life of following and tracking, where the pictorial image stems not from some mental imposition of human over wall. It is not the human that draws or paints on the wall, but the wall that chooses the human. The wall must be followed patiently until it reveals its own life. If Ice Age peoples hunted down images of animals floating on limestone walls, one could speculate that the ethos of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer is not necessarily to kill the hunted animal, but to establish means for the continuous transmission of animal life through limestone rock. If the hunter only desired the animal as an object of economic sustenance and food provision, why take the trouble to hunt imaginary shapes found suspended on the limestone, which provide no economic benefit at all? If the gaze of the hunter was not preoccupied by the flows of life as a means of transmission of a cultural substance (possibly spiritual), why risk life inside a landscape as dangerous and treacherous as the limestone cave? Why bother tracking down limestone walls for volumes and shapes, for textures and colors, and why spend so much effort drawing and painting these movements so that they reveal animals in motion?

Experiences The experience of having lived in close proximity with wild animals no doubt provided indigenous Europeans with physical and lived-in knowledge of the many species depicted in their works, for instance in terms of their anatomies, movements, positions, and ethological behavior. If the Upper Paleolithic worldview can be defined by an understanding of the world that is permeable, it is worth considering how a material property, that is, porosity, may have



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facilitated cultural transmission. To argue that limestones are characterized by porosity does not only imply that this particular rock filters water, but that it permeates a material way of thinking. Limestones are media through which indigenous European peoples transmitted experience of their surrounding world. What is sponged in and relayed by limestones, therefore, is deep ecological experience expressed as material imagination and memory. I have made illustrations of a great number of Upper Paleolithic cave images (some of which are included in this book), and I have never failed to be amazed by the level of detail that the image-makers expressed on the limestone walls. To be able to draw from memory such clear-cut figures as the giant aurochs of Lascaux, the great lions of Chauvet, or the crouching bisons of Altamira clearly reveals a great deal of lived-in experience of the animal world. Indeed, this proximity and this experiential depth that emerges in the drawings and paintings of indigenous Europeans is an essential feature, I believe, of an ecological understanding of transmission media. If the bare landscapes of glaciated Europe were teeming with wildlife, then the barrenness of the moors, the tundra, and the ice-covered fields served as sharp contrast to the many species that roamed the subcontinent back then: bison, horses, deer, bears, mammoths, rhinos, hyenas, lions, leopards, to mention but a few. It is not proximity to wildlife in general that ends up being expressed in the limestones underground but a very multiplicitous and multinatural lifeworld. Experience of living alongside many different other animals, and experience of following them closely in different ways, consolidates a lived-in, physicalized, and immediate sense of multinatural mediation and transmission. The only means of relaying that energy felt inside matter, in a world void of “advanced” technological mediation, is immediate experience. What allowed people to carry the energy of matter from one landscape to another, and from one generation to another, at least in the context of indigenous Ice Age Europe, is not an “advanced” media technology (for instance an image or sound recording technology) but a memory or imagination of experience. Through these faculties, a physical transmission of energy (a transmission of color, movement, shape, warmth, and so on) was relayed from body to body, from wall to hand, from animal to animal, across a vast medianatural ecology. The function of limestones, according to

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my interpretation, is the handing down of a physically perceived energy from geophysical to biophysical life. This more-than-human transmission anchors the entire worldview and the whole paleo ontology of indigenous Europe to a sustainable relationship between raw nature and culture. An independent technological world, with an independent technological media (independent, that is, of raw nature) threatens that ecology and that integration of culture and nature-in-the-raw. This, then, is the critical angle that an indigenous sense of landesque mediation provokes. To the extent that media technologies are nowadays conditioning lived experience in general, and re-naturalizing human life, present-day technoculture cannot provide an embodied experience of raw nature. Without that immediate transmission, it is hard to carry the energy of raw nature in memory and imagination in the same way as Ice Age nomads may have done. Furthermore, to the extent that media technologies tend to standardize the making of experience for mass consumption, experiencing limestone caves as transmission media is almost inconceivable in a mass media context. Today, it is not common to access landscape as media at all. Instead, a contemporary sense of experience is commonly mediated by mass forms of communication (film, television, radio, books, magazines) or by technological forms of transmission media (electricity, microwaves, satellite). To access the felt energy of landscape, and to enshrine that energy as the content of media culture, is perhaps the realm of a utopian and paleocyber future. There are two sides to this argument. First, the dominance of technologically mediated and designed experience can curtail or simply block direct and immediate access to the experience of nature-in-the-raw. Second, the absence of nature-in-the-raw in an increasingly urbanized and environmentally devastated modern-day world means that the makeability of experience is increasingly reliant upon an artificial sense of nature. As I was making the charcoal and pencil illustrations you will find in later pages of this book, I marveled at the depth of experience that would have enabled prehistoric peoples to draw, in one go, and without rubbing out or correcting their works, the animal life and animal motion that they are so obsessed about. And I thought: How much experience is there behind these works? Plenty. So much, indeed, that the function of limestones becomes a necessity, given the abundance of lived-in memory and life-enriched imagination



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that the Ice Age image-hunters carried with them as they roamed. In other words, filling the limestone walls with images of moving animals becomes a necessity, I would think, given the ebullience and profusion of experience that these people acquired through living with the land. Expressivity is perhaps the natural impetus of a life-filled experience. The emergence of such expressive cultural horizons as the Upper Paleolithic in Europe is perhaps due to an intuitive and irresistible life-force that fuels a burgeoning raw material sense of mediation. Experience is what vivifies the medium of material memory and material imagination. When lived-in experience—nurturing crystal-clear memory and vivid imagination of nature-in-the-raw—meets the shiny whiteness of limestone, the porosity and dynamic motion of rock, a fuse lights up, a spark flashes in the midst of the most shameless subterranean darkness.

Breaths In summer, the difference in temperature between the warm air outside and the cool air within produces an outward-pouring airflow. During warmer months, caves exhale. In winter, they draw the air in. Like volcanoes, which also release electrically charged gases from beneath the ground, the streams of cave air blown out in the summer are intensely ionized. Atmospheric particles will come into contact with this air, producing electrical discharges in the form of lightning. It is not surprising that in Greek mythology thunderbolts are conceived as the fire of Vulcan, an Olympian god who, according to myth, stored his bolts in the chthonic depths of the earth. Mythology anticipates by some thousands of years the scientific explanation for the influence on atmospheric phenomena of subterranean particles conveyed by way of caves. Lightning, and the nitrogen that lightning bolts bear, is mediated by the earth, as ionized air rises up from the underground and is apt to return there. Lightning is more subterranean than celestial. Meanwhile, the sounds heard in the bowels of the earth are caused by atmospheric air inhaled and exhaled by caves, as air pressure sometimes brushes against ringing rocks that make stalactites sing like giant pipe organs.

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A cave can play an indirect role in the nitrogen cycle, which delivers atmospheric nitrogen back to the ground by way of electricity. The nitrogen that lighting delivers back to the ground will in turn be transformed into the organic components that make up nitrate-rich earth. In other words, caves feed the air with ionized particles, which prompt lightning, which in turn feed nitrogen to the earth. The nitrate will feed microbes and plants, which in turn will feed humans. Maybe there is a little bit of lightning inside human bodies, a little bit of cave energy in human brain activity. And in the same way that the chthonic world is fed into the material body, so the material body feeds the chthonic. Humans will die, and in average conditions, a cadaver will decompose in the ground, where organic matter will mix with the nitrate to form compost. All living things are recycled in an unstoppable ecology. Natural science provides empirical explanations. In seeking a rational answer to the brute facts, science has objectified the elemental world, stripping it of its grace. And so even if geologists can paint a clear picture of a rock cycle and a nitrogen cycle, the brute materialist perspective has been suppressed by a rational solution that often cancels out ways of knowing that prioritize awe and intuition. One need not be a hunter-gatherer from the Ice Age to believe in the mediating power of the natural world, and the power of landscape to transmit. One would have to question how deep the understanding provided by scientific rationalism is, however, if it fails to recognize that all these connections are happening because matter itself is expressive and transmissive. Matter is not an object for human intelligence to rationalize, so much as a vessel for the transmission of a more-thanhuman energy. The idea that caves breathe dawned on me during one of my first explorations of a prehistoric cave site. My discovery took place in the Cave of Massat, located in the Ariège region of the French mid-Pyrenees. Over the many days I spent caving in the Massat complex, I realized that gradual changes in air pressure and temperature could be felt as I moved from one hall to another. Subtle variations in pressure made the air drift along vents and narrow passageways. The air of a cave is like the air inside an organism. Caves resemble networks of cavernous lungs that facilitate the passage of an elemental media.



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I have breathed the air of a cave, and I have tried to attune my material body to that space, as if I myself was being breathed by the cave, or as if I was a system of lungs and other cavities within a larger system of lungs and veins, or as if I was a homunculus within the larger internal body of a living landscape. Brute materialism recognizes that the processes of elemental mediation are not only occurring out there, in the surrounding landscape, but also inside my own body.

Commodities Nowadays limestones are not esteemed quite in the same way as they were in Upper Paleolithic times. Limestones are typically valued as inert and brute material for the making of commodities. The material is purposeful, in a contemporary cultural sense, to the extent that it can be transformed into artificial materials and products. As limestone is exposed to human demands, so the raw material is severed from its natural process of mattering in order to be exploited and industrially processed. The largest limestone mining operation in the world is found in Port Calcite, a mine located in Rogers City in the state of Michigan, USA. High calcium carbonate limestone is extracted in this site at a rate of 7–10.5 million net tons of material per year.3 In addition to such aggressive mining operation, the industrialization of Michigan limestones involves a violent industrial transformation of the raw material through burning, crushing, or high-temperature heating. More specifically, the burning of lime is carried out in order to use the resulting material in steel making, in water and sewage treatment, in acid waste neutralization, and in road base stabilization. The crushing of lime is needed to make concrete, building materials, and road fillers. The heating of lime, on the other hand, is needed to make more resistant and compact industrial materials. As a consequence of this industrial process, artificially processed limestones are transformed into materials that have no continuity in natural cycles of mattering, since industrial limestones sometimes cannot be recycled given the toxic effects of industrial mixing and synthesis.

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Limestones will live out their new industrial life not necessarily as industrial materials, but also as manufactured objects or products. The manufactured commodity, which is typically an ensemble of various industrially processed materials, gives new purpose to limestone across many different commodity lives: for instance, toothpaste, paint, baking powder, and bicarbonate of soda. The many commodity lives that limestone can take reveal just how useful it can be. At the same time, use value condemns the rock to mass industrial exploitation at a worldwide scale. The critical point I wish to make is that limestone rock is mined for the making of materials that have no other purpose than what humans demand and supply. The rock is deprived of the possibility of continuing its own earthly process of self-transformation as its value is abstracted within an economic sense of use and exchange. Manuel Delanda, often considered one of the leading figures of the new materialist wave in poststructuralist philosophy, has developed the notion of a “geology of morals,” which is worth highlighting at this stage. The notion was first developed by Deleuze and Guattari, who in turn coined this expression after Nietzsche’s well-known “genealogy of morals.” According to Delanda, the moral geological perspective pries open a philosophical stance that rejects ideas of progress not only in human history but in natural history as well. Thus, according to Delanda, living creatures should under no circumstances be seen to be better than rocks, since the same basic processes of self-organization take place in the mineral, organic, and cultural spheres. Delanda speaks of naturecultural spheres in terms of a “sedimentary humanity” and an “igneous humanity,”4 but it is not clear to me what this moral geology means in practice. The more relevant question, to my mind, is this: Does a limestone (or any other rock for that matter) live in its own terms, and if so, does it share the rights of a living organism, an animal or plant? If certain animals cannot be killed given a culturally, socially, and politically prescribed rule of law, or given a moral sense, why does the same not apply more widely to soils and rocks? In other words, why don’t rocks have rights? In addition to human rights and animal rights, there ought to be rock rights, soil rights, water rights, air rights, and so on. For new materialists like Delanda, this is a moral question. However, the new materialist ethos is so invested in a philosophical debate concerning the ontology of matter, or the theory of a political agency of matter, it is hard



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to imagine how a moral understanding of limestones could change popular attitudes in real-world terms, where philosophical discourse and academic debates may fall on deaf ears. In real-world terms, implementing a moral geology would require changing a widely held opinion that limestones (and useful minerals in general) are natural resources for private and state organisms to openly exploit. It is necessary to trouble the dominance of a capitalist and industrialist practical materialism, where knowledge of rock is condemned to an instrumentalization and exploitation of minerals. Brute materialism must resist industrial and capitalist practices, advocating instead for heuristic life practices implemented at the level of personal action. This critical form of a brute materialism must ultimately provide a lived-in standpoint, which does not come to rest in high-level theory, but which engages the layman in a more direct debate, recasting the moral question in plain and brute terms: Do rocks have rights? Do they have lives? Do they matter, and if so, can a rock matter in its own terms? Although Delanda’s critique is one I fully embrace in theory, it is perhaps necessary to speak of something less cryptic than a geology of morals. Rather than proposing a political or artistic praxis, however, the brute materialist position proposes a personal change: a knowledge of one’s own consumption of mineral life. Although I personally cannot avoid consumption of basic commodities such as toothpaste, paper, glass, and other materials that contain industrial limestones, I would like to think that I have inculcated a sensitivity toward unquarried and unprocessed rock—hence my repeated journeys to limestone landscapes, and my celebration of its vital life in this book. Of course, this book could have been written about any other vital material. This could have been a book about trees and their right to exist as trees rather than wood, about pigs and their right to exist as pigs rather than meat, about bees and their right to produce honey without it being usurped for human consumption, and a number of other moral questions that could be posed from a more-thanhuman ethical perspective. Limestone is just one example in an entire earth filled with living entities that express, transmit, and communicate vital life which may be threatened by human activity. In my own modest way, I would like to think that writing a book about limestones and limestone caves as agencies of media transmission may help sensitize and raise consciousness of

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how earth itself functions as a force for transmission and communication. This book is therefore a critical account of just how poor the contemporary sense of media communication is, given the narrow conventional understanding of media as a human-only and technologically biased activity. That the life of rock is expressed gradually, almost undetectably as far as the human is concerned, does not mean that rock is not moving or changing. A human life is too short and fast when compared to a rock cycle, and thus the human mind is often incapable of grasping the way rock lives. Jane Bennett is another vital materialist who draws on Deleuze and Guattari to consider the philosophical articulation of a moral geology, also in relation to the relativity of material duration. Bennett’s project consists of thinking slowly an idea that runs fast through modern heads. For Bennett, the idea of matter as passive stuff, as raw or brute, is preposterous, which is why the vital materialist can invoke, in this author’s own words, a “theory of relativity” in regard to which the rocks that confront us as fixed are understood to be slow-moving compared to the human bodies participating in and perceiving them.5 As with Delanda, it is not the ethical point of view I question, but the exclusivism of the philosophical register. Brute materialism does not have to invoke a theory of relativity, nor indeed a dense conceptual framework, but a direct call to act at the level of one’s own life. When philosophy of matter argues that it is necessary to think slowly, what is being put forward is the theoretical version of an ethos that proponents of the Slow Movement put in practice, through a lived-in appreciation of slow food, slow cities, slow art, and even Slow Media. One of the many critical points raised by supporters of Slow Media is that the faster the means of technological communication, the less time people have to react, to switch off, to carve time for themselves, and to contest or critique the effects of fast-paced and mass-transmitted media channels. Drawing on the paradigm of Slow Eating, Slow Media opposes unhealthy diets of media consumption. The aim of Slow Media is to support critical responses to complex media formats and instant communication methods characteristic of digital culture. Slow Media questions the high volumes of information that are updated in social media platforms (particularly Facebook and Twitter), or the relentless machinery of 24-hour news cycles. Slow Media has proven particularly useful in addressing the perceived lack of depth and credibility



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of information produced and consumed in fast-paced media outlets, while drawing attention to the many SIMBY strategies that can be employed to resist all-day/all-night social media consumption, and the odd circadian disruptions of non-stop digital media connectivity. Slow Media brings me back to limestone, and to limestone caves. Limestones take millions of years to form, and so the life transmitted by this rock is imperceptibly slow-coming. The kinesthetic qualities of this material evoke great dynamism, and yet the change happens at a pace that is inordinately slow when compared to the movements of a human body. Limestones are living examples of ever-so-slow media. To gain a personal awareness of where to access natural limestones, where to sense their energies, where to test their mediacy, it is necessary to move beyond a desk-based ethics in the vital materialist tenor, and to incite a brute materialist perspective that seeks immediate rather than instantaneous connections. It is necessary to experience stillness, and to cultivate it, in order to gain a sense of just how slow the transmission of limestone energies is at the somatic level. A personal appreciation of a limestone cliff, a visit to a limestone gorge, an intimate and barefoot encounter with limestone grounds, a few hours of mineral stillness next to these rocks, open up not only channels for a personal interaction with slow earth, but also a critical consciousness of the human responsibility to pay heed, and to be sensitive to, what vital matter is transmitting, however slowly. It never ceases to amaze me that in all the hours I have spent perched in absolute stillness, for instance in the limestone gorges of the Ardèche, Cheddar, or the Ariège, my body ever so gradually acquired inner rhythms from its surroundings—my temperature changed accordingly, the breathing found its ecological cadences, the silence penetrated, and a sense of vibration, an almost audible sense of motion, could be heard in the seemingly imperturbable limestone landscapes.

Fatalities The transformation of raw materials into industrialized stuff is a fatal leap. As industrialization of life recasts every natural resource into man-made things

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for human purpose and use, direct contact and knowledge of material life is increasingly mediated at the level of what we touch and handle. As I sit on my living room sofa and write these words, I see around me all sorts of artificial or industrially processed materials and fabrics. Other than a few limestones I keep as mementos of research, the rest is all wood, cement, glass, plastic, ceramic. These processed materials mediate my tactile connection with the world, and establish a daily separation from unquarried rock, natural soil, or even unlevelled grounds and walls. It is not the transformation of raw materials into industrial materials that constitutes the fatal leap, however. The process is fatal when all materiality is mediated by the medium of money, and money serves as the prime go-between. What separates me most fundamentally from a raw material encounter is not only the industrialized nature of the materials that fill my house, but the fact that these things are mine, that I own them, that I have bought them and thus have sentenced them to a commodity existence. As soon as brute limestone is processed to make industrial limes (e.g., chemical grade limestone, crushed limestone aggregate, milled limestone, quicklime), the life of industrial materiality is condemned to an existence as monetized commodity, within lifecycles of use and exchange. Once industrialized, limestones assume the objectified form of commercial products. A reification occurs, such that matter itself may be manipulated as an object, a thing. Now thingified, limestone can be valued in a real economic and monetary sense. It is this sellable and buyable property of industrialized limestones that forces the rock into a life of subordination to a social reality, forcing the transformation from vital to industrial existence, akin to what Marx famously described as the salto mortale of the commodity.6 The salto mortale or fatal leap is performed by the commodity the moment it is sold. The leap can be considered fatal insofar as a concrete sense of value is killed off, such that value may be assigned in purely abstract terms. The leap, therefore, refers to the distance between concrete reality in itself, and calculative abstraction. In other words, value is generated in relation to something immaterial, a quantity measured in terms of reified labor time, which is a calculation that has no intrinsic material reality. Economic value



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turns its back, through calculative abstraction, from concrete and actual materiality. Because of the calculative rationality of a capitalist system, it is only money in quantities that mediates the gap between the between buyer and seller, between social and wild natural world. The problem is that money serves as a prime medium in relation to which materiality on the whole is mediated. That is to say, money becomes the primary medium in a capitalist economy and culture, in regard to which all other forms of cultural mediation, including media communication, are ultimately accounted for. It is not only the food you eat, the bed you sleep in, but also the media artifacts you consume (films, videos, songs, books) that are monetized. Because money is a universal medium of equivalence in relation to which material objects and reified time can be valorized, nothing escapes the mediacy of money, not even human communication, which is likewise manufactured within the conditions of reified time. Time spent online, amount of texts sent, length of phone calls—these are examples of how interpersonal communication is reified and measured so as to be monetized. Money changes not only the ontological status of material things. The human status is also affected, insofar as a person no longer stands in a horizontal relation with the surrounding material world but adopts the vertical status of a buyer/seller as a result of money’s intermediation. This norm, and the materialism it foments (the gross love for money and commodities) is hugely significant to a critical version of brute materialism, not least because in order to connect with a matter reality at the brute level, it is necessary to avoid not only the excessive mediation of a philosophical discourse, but also and much more importantly, the dangerous ideology of calculative capitalism. To think that money can mediate every social relation is the most pernicious aspect of a capitalist belief system. The trouble is that only humans accept the reality of money, so although money can buy anything in a social sphere, only an individual with money can wield the power to move the material world. A tree cannot buy itself and save itself from turning into woodchips; a limestone rock cannot purchase its freedom. As a medium that mediates the whole of the material world within a social system of valorization, is it not unfair, if not so say immoral, that matter itself should be governed by a strictly social form of exchange

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established through the arbitrary convention of money, which only some humans can wield? Marx pointed fingers at the artificial power that fuels capitalism, which is the circulation of capital along processes of transformation from money to commodity and back. It has also been noted that the aim of capitalism is to keep moving, and that circulation and capital growth is the telltale sign of a lively capitalist economy. The problem is that capitalism, in a traditional Marxist critique, understands the nature of motion in a completely independent sense—independent of a strictly material and kinesthetic energy or effort. Allow me to explain. For commodities to keep circulating, and for capital to keep moving, the substance that generates value is not physical labor and energy, but reified labor, labor as a measure of calculated time. Unlike physical exercise and effort, which is rewarding given the obvious health effects, the effort performed in reified labor is alienating, since the fruits of reified work cannot be felt by the laborer, at the physical level or otherwise. Because effort is understood in abstract terms as a measure of calculated time, and timecapped work is subsequently monetized, capitalism instills a rationality and calculative ideology that alienates the body from its own effort. A natural limestone wall may have no value. An industrial limestone that has been injected with the substance of reified labor time, however, will. In this classic reading of a capitalist system of valorization, substance is, in Marx’s own terms, independent. More simply put, money is a substance. Money is spirit. But it is an independent spirit. A spirit that exists in a plane divorced from physical, material life. It is a soul, or substitute soul, that exists in a purely calculative sense of reality. Whereas the substance of value is reified labor, the substance of capital, what injects life into the system as a whole, is the independent substance of money—independent in the sense that the reality that money brings into existence only operates within a social world of exchange, not within a natural material world. Plants do not abide by the rules of money, nor do nonhuman animals, rocks, insects, or chemical compounds. When value takes the form of money, capital is endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are the temporary guises capital can assume and cast off in turn. This independence of substance is what protects a capitalist ideology



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from a proper participation in material life. Capitalism does not inculcate a genuinely materialist way of thinking, but a calculated materialism, a love for commercially valued matter. This false consciousness has led Marxist critics to associate the commodityloving mentality with a fetishistic ideology. In other words, the belief in an independent substance that moves the world (money) can be described as a modernized form of primitive belief system grounded in an assumed power animating all material things. Capitalism recasts many aspects of an old animism (more on this in Chapter 4), for instance, the belief in a transferability of substance from object to object, the transformation of things due to a lifeforce inherent within material things themselves, and so on. Capitalism is like a tribal religion, and it is “feral,” as critical geographer David Harvey puts it.7 Behind the calculative rationality is an irrational belief in the power of money to buy and to animate the social world. Commodity fetishism hinges upon the bizarre premise that what gives life to society is abstract. Money is a god, a mammon. Like all gods, and like all economic currencies, money is the by-product of a madness that is inherent to humans, to an abstract sense of human subjectivity. Yes, we are becoming mad. More and more so. Money is a chronic and degenerative madness. Eight thousand years ago, more or less, sedentary people invented a mad world of humanized gods, and money spirits that could give life, without any vitality whatsoever, to an urban and technologized society unable to communicate with its own geography and its nature-in-the-raw, where transmission only happened between fellow humans, via remote technological media. From an Upper Paleolithic perspective, would all this not smack of pure madness?

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Biographies of Matter II: A Cave’s Life

Darkness has all come together, making an egg. Ted Hughes

The site A tree-covered hill rises from the green valley below—it is not topographically remarkable, but the hill is high enough to impose a view over the river’s meandering corridor. The cave is located atop, near the hill’s summit. From the mouth of the cave, the land inclines toward the valley, narrowing down in an arrow-like shape, as if the whole hill was aiming at the river. Located near the town of Montignac, in the southwestern French region of the Dordogne, Lascaux has been the subject of countless interpretation, description, analysis, artistic depiction, and philosophical debate. It may have been a more conspicuous rock shelter back in the days of early modern humans and neanderthals, before the natural entrance collapsed—today the entrance to Lascaux consists of a small cobbled staircase and stone arch, supporting an iron-gate that tourists cannot trespass. The cave is closed. It is my intention in this chapter to write a biography of this cave. The question is, whose life story am I to tell? Does the life of Lascaux refer to the original cave, to the replicas, or the metamorphosis of the contents of the cave into a number of different cultural artifacts and media goods? One could cite the speleologist, who might argue that the cave can be studied in terms of its karst lifecycle. One could cite the archaeologist, who may well argue that the cave is a site of occupation where people lived and died tens of thousands of years ago. One could cite the artist, who might see the paintings

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of Lascaux as independent objects of cultural life. One might cite the media archaeologist, who is typically concerned by the material history of media cultural phenomena. From a critical point of view, what interests me is the clash of two very different notions of life or lifecycle—one unfolding within a natural sense of duration (i.e., the lifecycle of the geophysical cave and its material limestone), and the other, within a cultural and economic sense. My intention is to present different vignettes of the life of Lascaux, but increasingly to signal the narrowing of life to an ideological condition of cultural valorization within a capitalist framework. The narrative will therefore unfold in the direction of a capitalist sense of lifecycle that squeezes the more-than-human life out of the cave and imposes an economistic and profit-driven vision of the cave as commodity fetish.

Lascaux I Questions over what exact period of the Late Stone Age this cave was visited and when it was “decorated” are still being debated.1 There are a number of distinctive characteristics in the pictorial style that can be cited as evidence of a late Upper Paleolithic cultural horizon. These conventions include, according to Norbert Aujoulat, bison horns shown in front-view; front horns of bovines depicted by a simple curve while the rear horn is more sinuous; deer antlers depicted in a specific perspective, and so on.2 Another important feature of this site worth highlighting is the degree of stylistic unity, which may indicate that many of the paintings and engravings contained in Lascaux were created during a relatively short period of time, possibly by a limited number of individuals. Judging from the Lascaux paintings, it is clear that the people who painted the walls of this cave were highly skilled, and that the activity of making images was not haphazard. Even if the images prompted by the wall were elicited spontaneously in the imagination of cave visitors, the material activity of realizing these images through the medium of painting was not a spontaneous affair. Painting the walls of Lascaux cave would have required a



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great level of preparation and planning. Across the Upper Paleolithic matrix one finds an enormous variety of pictorial styles, techniques, motifs, and painting materials, all of which point to multiple cultural motivations and various material cultural conditions. Rather than trying to find a monolithic theory that explains cave “art” (i.e., shamanism, sympathetic magic, etc.), it is perhaps more useful to consider that the premeditated effort to turn spontaneous imagination into a cultural image-making convention rests on an effort to weave imaginaries and memories with a landscape at a collective level. Painting the cave is not just a personal or artistic way of saying that the cave is alive, or that the depicted animal is alive, or that the human is alive, but a way of embodying this, and turning this ethos into a cultural and group action. September, 1940. In a leafy hill near the French village of Montignac (Dordogne), Marcel is taking Robot, his dog, for a walk. The dog is excitable. He is on the look-out for rabbit. It does not take long before Robot picks up the scent. The dog tenaciously follows the trail along the wet undergrowth, getting closer and closer to the target. Inevitably, the rabbit decides to run. Robot gives chase. This time it will be a short pursuit. The rabbit will come out the winner and Robot ends up stuck in the rabbit hole. Marcel scrambles up the hillside to find a large opening on the ground caused by an uprooted tree, felled during a recent thunderstorm. Robot is stuck several feet underground now, and Marcel cannot make his way down to rescue the dog. He runs back to the village, and calls on his friends Jacques, George, and Simon for help. He tells them that he has found a very large hole on the ground, and that Robot is stuck at the bottom of it, but that the opening is deep and dark, and that he can’t reach the bottom on his own. Marcel then guides his three friends to the location. As they begin to clamber down, they soon realize that this is no rabbit or fox den. The fallen oak has lifted up a large chunk of earth, revealing a shaft that leads to a dark cavity underground, a secret passageway to a hidden cave. Outside, there may be a war going on, and the fear of Nazi occupation is palpable among the grown-ups of the village. For now, the boys are a world away from the chaos of war. The dog is safe, and the cave welcomes these young men like a warm womb. They are the first people to set foot in Lascaux for tens of thousands of years.

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As the four boys light up their candles at the rocky bottom of the shaft, they realize that the opening in the ground leads onto an underground passage. They continue their way, and soon find themselves in a large egg-shaped room, containing colorful paintings of animals. The limestone cave yields what can only be described as a treasure trove. The four boys have found a pristine cache of Ice Age paintings, except that they do not know that yet. They amble through this extraordinary cupula underground; they find a giant painted bull, a spotted unicorn, a race of black horses. The images are so vivid it seems as though they had been painted only the night before. Of course, the paintings are old. Maybe the children do not see it that way. Not long after the four boys chanced upon the cave, eminent prehistorian Henri Breuil, the so-called father of prehistory, was called to authenticate the find. Like H. Alcalde del Río in Spain, the Abbé Breuil explored, authenticated, and discovered a large number of prehistoric sites throughout France. The appropriation of prehistory by a national expert constitutes the first step toward a narrowing history of research and scientific interpretation of France’s prehistoric past. Lascaux was chronicled and systematically analyzed according to the scientific understanding that mattered to prehistorians and archaeologists in the early decades of the twentieth century. The dog, the tree, the children, the lightning, the cave itself—they all ceased to play a role in the biography told by the experts. And the cave, in a manner of speaking, was sealed off again. Instead of a landslide, the imposition of an archaeological narrative led to the foreclosure of other stories, other biographies, other lives. In order to gain access to the cave today, one would have to be authorized by the relevant government body, and by an expert team of archaeologists, speleologists, and conservationists. It is they who have the authority to safeguard the cave and interpret its contents for the rest of us. April, 2016. Upon stepping into the first of the major halls of the cave, I am immediately struck by the dynamism of the space. The Hall of the Bulls, as this first opening is called, is a near perfect oblong cupula. The painted panels to the left convey a luminous sense of onward motion, prompting me to follow. An entire procession of animals can be seen on this wall, not least a unicorn, which is located at the rear of the charging bestiary. The Lascaux dome, with its frieze of gigantic animals, as well as the passage that leads from



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it (called the Axial Gallery) reveals an expert handling of image-making in curved, irregular, and continuous surfaces. This sanctuary ultimately shows how the graphic image can work in many different orientations, directions, and flows. In the overall context of the cave, the imagery depicted by Upper Paleolithic image-makers is characterized by one fundamental premise: it obeys no rules other than full immersion in a multicentered, multidirectional, and multimodal spatiality. Consider, for instance, Lascaux’s Hall of the Bulls. The imagery contained in this hall consists of extinct cattle and magically colored horses, which are all freely disposed at various angles. The giant bulls of Lascaux reveal a common dynamism in that their tapered heads and necks are positioned such that the rest of their bodies curve over the cave ceiling, following the natural undulation of the limestone. Underlying these images is a different way of looking. It is a way of looking that seems to ignore, intentionally or not, a static viewpoint or objective center. It is a way of looking that does not adjust all perception to the vertical and the horizontal plane of representation, or the position of the “I” that looks. It is a way of looking from the perspective of the rock itself. My eye is drawn to a panel to my left, which contains a black horse depicted in running position. Known as the “Frieze of the Black Horses,” the panel is located in the lower section of the chosen wall, beneath a series of larger and more vividly colored horses and aurochs. All eight animals rendered in the frieze, whether complete, partial, or represented by a single anatomical section, move along the same (imaginary) line, which consists of a change in coloration and angle on the wall. All eight horses have had the same color administered (black). They all feature the same stylized small head. Should they be interpreted as many horses running in file, or as one single horse depicted in sequence? Several individuals in the Frieze of the Black Horses were left deliberately incomplete. The horse’s appearance is limited to the forequarters (second horse); the head, neck, and initial section of the back (third horse); or a simple outline of the head, neck, and first part of the back (fifth horse). Thus, the entire frieze conveys an almost ghostly ephemerality. It is almost as if the movement was granting the horse an immaterial power, a blanket of invisibility that enables the equine body to disappear into the rock, or else to

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Figure 1  Detail of the Frieze of the Running Horses (Lascaux). Drawing by the author

appear out of the rock. Indeed, the horses fade in and out, leaving room for the vivifying imagination to complete the picture. It is as if the painters were inviting you to use your own imagination to fill in the missing information. The image of the running horse is not enforced graphically on the eye, imposing a photo-realistic rendition. From the implicit motion of limestone rock, to the vivifying movement of the human imagination, a material and physical mediation has occurred that has enabled the sense of life (or anima) to pass freely from rock, to horse, to human image, to material imagination, and back to living rock. The images are not representations of animals. A drawing of Robot, Marcel Ravidat’s dog, would be a representation of this particular dog. But the animals inside Lascaux are not versions of some other animal. They have appeared to the image-maker on the wall, elicited by the limestone’s lines, malleable surface, and color, which incited a vivid and experience-rich memory. What is being communicated here is real, not because the black horse running on the walls of the cave existed in the everyday or real-world outside the cave, but because it is felt to be alive in that mediating power between transmissive rock, active imagination, and vivid memory. The horse is felt to be moving along, and the movement is always caught between the physical sensation elicited by the wall itself and the imaginative effort of vivifying the rock. Between landscape and mindscape, between dynamic rock and affect, raw mediation finds its sure footing. As the walls of the cave start to swallow and tighten up against me, the effect is intensified. The cavalcade is heading inward, as if rushing into some ritual meeting-place deeper down. The Hall of the Bulls leads through a narrow squeeze into the Axial Gallery, a narrow passage where the limestone is pressed against my body. To the right is another line of running equines



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Figure 2  Frieze of the Little Horses (Lascaux). Drawing by the author

known as the “Frieze of the Little Horses,” thus named by Henri Breuil. These horses are running in the opposite direction to the incoming visitor, in the direction of the gallery’s entrance. This smaller panel of five horses finishes off with yet another deliberately incomplete specimen—all four legs are missing. The animals are positioned in such a way that, as the eye moves along the panel from left to right, an undulating eye-tracking pattern occurs, once again offset by an undulating movement evoked by the wall itself. The undulating pattern seems to emerge from the rough-grained wall, permeating the locomotional movement of the slender horses. This effect is intensified by my own physical movements as I make my way through the cave (the floor would have been irregular back in the days of the Ice Age). The sense of movement would have been enhanced even further by the titillating light of the wood and marrow lamps used to light up these pitch-black interiors back then. Inside the electrically light high-tech replica in which I find myself, it is perhaps easy to forget that karst caves are pitch black. As a tourist attraction, the Lascaux brand capitalizes on UNESCO-listed status, on the popularity of painted caves in local culture industry, and the attraction of the Dordogne region more broadly as an international holiday destination. Such is the level of attraction, however, that the cave has not been able to cope with the vast streams of tourists. Since 1963, Lascaux has been closed to the public due to the detrimental effects of mass visitation. Not only does the encroachment of an industrialized way of using the landscape preclude an environmentally sustainable human visitation to the cave, the re-structuring of Lascaux for the purpose of tourist visits also imposes a rationalized tour-guided experience over the site, which includes a leveled floor, an artificial light design, a lineal narrative, and a conceptual framework based on theories of cave “art.”

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A way of thinking that is heavily mediated by rational explanations stands in the way of an unimpeded sensorial engagement with the space. It is as if the silence or echoic resonance of the cave, which is a natural condition, was being canceled out given the noise of tourism. Having to wade through overcooked explanations and a densely factual guide, the tourist is not allowed to sense the space slowly and in silence. Lascaux II to some extent encapsulates a modernday condition of excess mediation and a state of societal disconnection from the immediacy of natureculture, or from the direct experience of landesque immersion, which is typically slow and still. After visiting the site in the mid-1950s as part of a guided tour, Georges Bataille bemoaned the experience in similar terms, arguing that it is not possible to descend without being weighed down by the historical present. Bataille complained that entering the cave resembled the experience of going down a Paris subway station. What Bataille experienced in the mid1950s is not dissimilar to my own experience of Lascaux II, the replica cave. What the guided tour of Lascaux II highlights is a tremendous disconnect caused by industrially programmed experience (mass tourism), which justifies the need for layer after layer of mediation provoked by expert knowledge, technological image-reproduction, architectural re-planning and spatial re-design, anachronistic popular cultural references, cave art theory, and so on. The entry rule to Lascaux II, as is clearly noted in a sign that stands at the entrance of this replica, is that so long as the animal is carried in the arms of its owner, only small domesticated dogs are allowed inside Lascaux II. It is paradoxical that in a site that was allegedly discovered by a dog and which is filled with images of different animal beings, management should not let “animals” in other than tourists and their small lapdogs, which are not permitted to walk the floor anyhow. Along with Bataille, I lament that the experience of descending into Lascaux has been irreversibly tailored for social activity that is alien to the mobile imaginaries of indigenous Europe. Tourism can be characterized as mobility for entertainment, where people adopt mobile behaviors for a relatively short period of time to be temporarily distracted from their sedentary lifestyles. In the same way that Bataille felt history follows the tourist down the cave, I sense that sedentary



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life follows the tourist down the holiday package experience. There is a kind of sedentary imagination obstructing the appreciation of Lascaux as a mobile imaginary, or as a testament to a nomadic way of life. It is as if I were carrying with me an imagination prefabricated by popular media representations of Ice Age that in no way connect with the living space itself. The Lascaux II tour guide focuses on factual information. The tourist is given the date on which the cave was painted based on radiocarbon dating. The tourist is given in digested form all the main archaeological data and the material analytical data. Is this data memorable, in the same way that the sensory stimuli are, or the experience is? Will tourists remember all the facts, or even the main ones? Does anyone remember when Lascaux cave was discovered? Does anyone care? If one of the main cultural functions of the cave is the transmission of cultural memory, why does a modern-day experience focus on data that is so easily forgotten? Why not allow the tourist to experience that which is unforgettable, the silence and the intimacy of the land? The image of the giant bull or the spotted unicorn is stripped from the walls, as the images acquire a life of their own as media res, variously reified as photographic reproductions, virtual reality reanimations, t-shirt images, fridge magnets, comic books, etc. But does the image, thus reified, not deny the prehistoric imagination? What fills the image with life is imagination, memory, sensation. Why get rid of this life in order to create inert and dead objects, commodities and media things that are mass-produced and utterly unimaginative? George Bataille reported that the transformation of Lascaux into a commodity had already happened in the original site, and as early as the mid1950s. He wrote: “If we see ourselves in these beings who decorated Lascaux, it is because they offer us the feeling of wealth, this measureless feeling that would take us by the throat in Lascaux if the poverty of today’s world did not enter the cave along with us.”3 The Lascaux brand takes advantage of this “measureless feeling” and capitalizes on mass tourist demand for it. Demand for the consumption of measureless feelings, and authenticity, becomes a form of use value. That measureless feeling is rather paradoxically turned

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into a monetized package experience. That feeling, once designed for tourist consumption, is quite measured. The tour lasts forty minutes. Time, thus reified, can be calculated and given an equivalence in the form of money. You pay your ticket, and you get forty minutes inside the replica cave, as well as unlimited time in the shop, conveniently located, as you might expect, on the way back to the parking lot. It is this linear and finite sense of the space and time that leads to the chronization and ultimate objectification of visitor experience. The visitor pays an entrance fee. The visit is thus measurable, from the visitor’s point of view, not as a vital life experience but as a value-for-money experience. Bataille’s report on Lascaux highlights the wealth of the original cave and the poverty of a capitalist worldview. Instead of valuing the wealth of the site in regard to the transmission of life forces, and in terms of an elemental mediation between human life and living landscape, the site is more readily valued in a calculative sense in terms of the numbers of visiting tourists per year and the gross revenue amassed from such capital. Rather than focusing on the question of wealth qua economic profit, let wealth also be synonymous with health—that which promotes life in a physical way. The health of the land is of critical concern here, especially since the effects of mass tourism between 1940 and 1963, the period during which the original Lascaux cave was open to mass tourism, have caused environmental damage to the paintings and to the ecology of the cave, which for many conservationists is now irreparable.

Lascaux II Located only a few hundred meters from the original site, Lascaux II is a lifesized and one-to-one scale replica of two of the original cave chambers (the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery). The plan to replicate the cave began in the 1970s in order to meet increasing public demand for the reopening of the original site, which as I pointed out earlier had been closed down due to environmental reasons. Sponsored by the La Rochefoucauld family, former owners of the plot of land where Lascaux II was built, the creation of a replica facsimile was entrusted to local painter Monique Peytral and sculptor Peter



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Weber. In 1978, and after numerous financial difficulties, the Dordogne General Council decided to buy the facsimile. Work resumed with a large team of painters, sculptors, and decorators. On July 18, 1983, the first tourists made their way into Lascaux II. Today, the replica caters to a significant number of international tourists.4 Hordes of visitors are squeezed into a relatively small and dark room where they are told the story of Marcel Ravidat’s discovery, and where they are shown a number of replica finds before being herded into the replica cave itself. The visitor is told that Lascaux II has provided an opportunity for specialized research across a number of key areas of interest: cave topography and architecture, digital scanning and 3D mapping, and not least, reconstruction of Upper Paleolithic pictorial techniques, tools, and processes. The media forensic effort to bring Lascaux back to life in the form of a replica signals the beginning of a very different kind of biography. The effort to turn a cave created over millions of years of geological activity into a man-made building for tourist heritage consumption shifts the value of the cave away from a vital to an industrial life. To what extent does this new lifecycle acquire a momentum that sends Lascaux into the orbit of a capitalist cycle of commodification and monetization, thus performing Marx’s fatal leap once again? To understand how a commodity changes and moves along different systems of valorization, Igor Kopytoff has encouraged a method based on Marx’s theory of the commodity known as the “cultural biography of things.”5 This approach makes no distinction between commodity as living being (worker), land (Lascaux cave), or object (replica cave). Taking his cue from Marx, Kopytoff has argued that commoditization is best looked upon as a process of becoming, rather than a state of being, in the sense that a commodity passes through many different stages of commoditization and de-commoditization over the course of its existence. Becoming commodity involves the time-consuming process in which capital transforms, as substance, from commodity to money and vice versa, or indeed from one commodity to another. This process is unique to each commodity—every single exchangeable thing follows its own unique path, and thus every commodity has its own story to tell. When objects become sacred, the thing will achieve a status Kopytoff calls “singularization.” From the point of view of a critical biography, then, Lascaux II

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begins its commodity life from a point of singularization, which is the original cave, considered by many to be one of the most important Upper Paleolithic sanctuaries in the world. In order to understand the value of a thing, it is not enough to understand its current worth, but the cycle that has led a thing to its present-day value, or the pathways that have led to the present singularization of a thing. In the same way that a thing can be pulled out of a commodity sphere through singularization, it can be pulled back and de-singularized, since from a status of sacralization, an object can be commodified once more. This is precisely what happens when the original cave is replicated in the form of Lascaux II. In Arjun Appadurai’s well-known critique of the sacred, sacral places are dubbed “terminal commodities,” to the extent that sacralization diverts place from a commodity pathway after production.6 Diversion in this case amounts to a societal convention whereby some places achieve a cosmological status (e.g., the birthplace of a god, the entrance to heaven, the place of ascension, and so on). The making of prehistoric cave replicas such as Lascaux II, Neocueva de Altamira, or the Pont d’Arc/Chauvet replica all point in the direction of a trend toward the de-singularization of sacred prehistoric sites, and their reification as monumental replicas that enable a commoditization of Upper Paleolithic spiritual worlds. The salto mortale can be performed with the best intentions: to invigorate local economy through tourism, to give access to history and world heritage to hundreds of thousands of visitors, to encourage forensic research into paleoartistic techniques. The fatal consequences of this transformation at the cultural level, however, cannot be ignored. Sacred land, which in Appadurai’s thinking refers to lands spared from capitalism, are a Mecca for tourists. By replicating the sacred, de-singularized commodities acquire enormous social and cultural capital, which can be exploited in various economic ways. In the case of the Lascaux sanctuary, the cave can be reanimated not only in the form of a life-sized replica (e.g., Lascaux  II), but also in the form of a technological artifact (e.g., Virtual Reality Lascaux). The sanctuaries of Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet have all been closed down due to conservation issues, which is why the public has demanded alternative means of accessing the sites. Replication of the original site must cater for millions of visitors. Because the sanctuaries themselves are



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not accessible to the public, the demand for a true-to-life commodity increases, which partly explains the trend toward more monumental and large-scale interpretation centers associated with these sites. Kopytoff ’s theory in this case illuminates a very specific aspect of the process of commodification; namely, that packaged experience de-singularizes un-repeatable and unique events. In other words, whereas the experience of going down a natural cave on my own is characterized by the uniqueness of the event, and as I mentioned earlier, the unpredictability of the experience, the design of a timed-out tourist visit is characterized, quite on the contrary, by continuous resumption and repetition. Tours resume one after the other, day after day, tourist after tourist. This non-stop process of packaged experiencemaking, which will never be singular again, levies an industrial design of experience on the singularity of life experience.

Lascaux III In 2012, Material Sciences PhD and business entrepreneur Olivier Retout launched “Lascaux, the International Exhibition,” also known as Lascaux III, a touring replica of the original cave designed, developed, and managed by Retout himself. At the time of writing, Retout is the CEO of Lascaux PLC, the company that owns this international exhibition.7 Lascaux III’s business model is conceived around the rental of the replica cave, either in terms of a monthly fee or in terms of a fixed amount with profit sharing. Since 2014, Lascaux III has embarked on a city-hopping international tour from Chicago, to Houston, to Montreal, to Brussels, to Versailles, to Geneva, to Gwangmyeong (Seoul), to Tokyo. Lascaux III consists of a mobile and reassembled 1/10 scale version of the original UNESCO-listed cave. Sponsored by the Dordogne General Council, the project has managed to reproduce various portions of the original site omitted by Lascaux II, including the so-called Nave gallery. Like its predecessor, Lascaux III is intended to provide an interdisciplinary as well as international perspective on the study and appreciation of the cave, bringing together anthropological, ethnological, and aesthetic approaches. Lascaux III

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is also interactive, with a number of touchscreen installations and 3D film interfaces that provide a supposedly participatory experience. The international exhibition exemplifies the way in which, through the combination of an expertise in business and material sciences, an entrepreneur was able to produce a technologized reanimation of the Lascaux landscape, and subsequently managed to make business out of the Lascaux franchise. To the extent that Lascaux III is a temporary exhibition designed to go on tour, it acquires value not only because it gives the public access to heritage that is otherwise inaccessible. Moreover, the cave is designed to be mobile, and it has an international profile. Lascaux III has been conceived as a radically different form of landscape that moves wherever capital propels it to move. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, where money becomes the sole medium for the intermediation between human and material world, the substance that fuels material life is no longer a vital energy, but an artificial or independent medium. Lascaux III will tour wherever there is a partner willing to pay for it. As a business venture, what drives Lascaux III is the circulation of global capital. In this case, the selling point is the international fame of the Lascaux bulls. At least two critical issues have come to the fore. First, the kind of mobility that Lascaux III acquires is fundamentally polarized when compared to the mobility whose collective imaginary is depicted in the heritage cave. Second, Lascaux III reveals a radically different cultural sense of transmission, particularly in terms of the energy to be transmitted. The point I would like to stress here is that a nomadic culture rooted in landscape, and a sedentary culture unrooted and connected to the virtuality of hyperscape, are poles apart. This fundamentally irreconcilable contradiction between landscapespecific culture and global culture is not only caused by the opposition of nomadic and sedentary subjectivities. Moreover, the two Lascaux exemplify a clash between a prehistoric sense of multinaturalism and a postmodern multiculturalism. Whereas the prehistoric cave shows a world relative to many animals and many animal natures, where the cultural convention of painting these animals seemed fairly consistent over large sways of time and large regions, Lascaux III functions in a very different condition of possibilities. In a post-nature world, to use Bill McKibben’s apt phrase, the very opposite is true. Raw nature becomes unified under a global worldview. I will return to



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this clash between multinaturalism and multiculturalism in the final chapter of this book. For now, it is worth adding that the manner in which landscape media is reified in the context of an economy-oriented mobility and a global culture industry shows an almost irreconcilable disconnection between culture and nature-in-the-raw. The experience of visiting Lascaux III seems to forget that the heritage cave is a raw landscape, a more-than-human and earthly setting for the transmission of elemental media. As a state-of-the-art touring exhibition, Lascaux III is designed to function within an urban space, for urban and technologically mediated interactions and not, as the original cave, for interactions between body and landscape. The cultural mobility that Lascaux III exemplifies has nothing to do with the need to follow vital resources (water, pasture, game), nor indeed an ecological form of mobility. Instead, Lascaux III evinces the rather more rationalized concern for the acquisition of the artificial resource that is money within a global market. The transformation of the cultural function of movement and mobility is the determining factor, since the prehistoric cave and Lascaux III are designed under two radically different and even polarized modes of mobilization. Whereas Lascaux was conceived as a naturecultural site for the manifestation of a nomadic cultural memory and a nomadic cultural imaginary, where the substance to be transmitted by the cave medium is vital movement, Lascaux III is an example of how presentday media commodities can be designed to move in order to both gain economic traction and make money. Lascaux III is traveling around the world allowing visitors to access the replica cave in a physical location which, rather paradoxically, is far from the Dordogne. Like the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower or the Suzhou replica of Tower Bridge, Lascaux III is a hyperscape, a landscape that is no longer fixed to a physical or geographic locus, but which is designed to follow the abstract world of capital circulation in a global culture industry. Lascaux III is not trying to mimic the original landscape of the Dordogne. The cave is designed to exist as a traveling entity, like a circus. Hyperscape is not a substitute for landscape. Hyperscapes are liberated from a single geographic location, resulting in yet another fatal leap from a physical material reality to an abstract sense of space and place.

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Each new dislocation may well offer a different cultural modulation of the hyper-reality experienced in Lascaux III. For instance, the Korean premiere of Lascaux III was staged at the famous site of the Gwangmyeong Cave, a vast system of underground tunnels within the urban sprawl of suburban Seoul. An abandoned gold mine dug for industrial mining mainly during the Second World War, the network spans almost eight kilometers in length. Gwangmyeong lies in a metropolitan area easily reached from the capital, which is why it receives copious visitors not only from surrounding suburbs, but from central Seoul as well. Reopened to the general public in 2011, the cave features a permanent light and sound display, a fully equipped performance space, an aquarium, a wine cellar, and a museum space, which is where Lascaux III was housed. Mounting Lascaux in Gwangmyeong strikes me as the setting for a limbo-like experience. The second point that can be gauged from a critical biography of Lascaux is the polarized cultural sense of energy that these caves generate. According to Arjun Appadurai’s critique, the dynamics of global culture industry are defined by what this author calls dimensions or “scapes,” which have essentially transformed modern-day culture from a landscape-oriented condition to a more abstracted spatiality defined by five key dimensions: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.8 Each dimension of this global culture is defined by a movement: the movement of peoples, the movement caused by technological automation, the movement of capital, the movement of information and communication, the movement of ideas. Unlike the world of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, where as I have intimated above, movement is anchored on a fluid and dynamic sense of landscape, postmodernism is characterized, at least in Appadurai’s critique, by the heterogeneity and abstraction of these “scapes,” and the abstract motion these spaces afford. In addition, there is a fundamental polarization in terms of the cultural construction of a sense of energy. These “scapes” that Appadurai has categorized as telltale signs of the heterogeneity of postmodernism are also dependent upon an energy that can fuel the movement that defines these spaces. A finanscape, for instance, is fueled by the movement of capital and money. Money becomes the energy that keeps a finanscape moving.



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Ethnoscapes are defined by the human need to eat and consume energy; technoscapes are defined by the consumption of gas, petrol, and electricity predominantly; mediascapes are typically fueled by electricity; and ideoscapes are fueled by the energy of innovation, creativity, and singularity. These are energies defined by the scapes they fuel, either in the form of natural resources to be exploited for the fueling of industrial and technological production, or else as techniques and technicities for the productivity of a rational and calculative ideology (science, academia, curricular education). Production and productivity are therefore the guiding imperatives of this complex matrix we live in, if you agree with Appadurai’s framework. Lascaux III is as an emblematic hyperscape that combines the features of finanscape, mediascape, and technoscape, all of which hinge upon a postmodern cultural sense of energy for production and productivity. We live in a world obsessed by energy—a synthetic material universe driven by electricity, gas, petrol, oil. Like the exploitation of limestones for the making of commodities, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, the exploitation of fuel resources for the making of energy is grounded in an industrial and postindustrial cultural ideology that assigns no vital life, say, to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil also originate, like limestones, in a previous life. Fossil fuels, after all, were formed by plants and animals (biomass) that existed in the geological past. The cultural perception that coal is just an inert thing to be mined, a piece of rock that has no previous or ongoing life, is supposedly justifiable given the large demand for natural resources and fuels. It is necessary to efface the independent life of coal as a geological process of vital mattering, and to ignore the moral geological problem. Turning a blind eye on life allows us all to consume it as if it were inert and lifeless. However, there is life in minerals, particularly minerals that derive from plants and animals. To the extent that modernity at large, to borrow Appadurai’s famous expression, does not understand landscape as a unifying multinatural web for human culture to be woven into, but a resource to be exploited for the construction of many different versions of industrial culture, landscape has been supplanted by many different scapes, while nature-in-the-raw has become broken down into many different contestations of the same nature, as John Urry and Phil Macnaghten have pointed out. This breakdown of landscape

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has also meant that a sense of integrated transmission and mediation, once incorporated within a cultural sense of natureculture, has been rationalized within an independent scape, such as the mediascape. In other words, the idea that a landscape can function as media communication and transmission has become largely incompatible in a modernity that has specialized and compartmentalized the function of mediation. That cultural function is preserved within the apparatus of the media, media technology, and media objects, all of which make up the horizons of a modern mediascape. Landscape is no longer understood to possess its own mediacy. Landscape has become a scenery, a backdrop, a tourist attraction, a space reserved for leisure. All in all, it is inert and object-like, to be consumed like any other commoditized place. Upper Paleolithic peoples, it seems to me, were also obsessed by energy. Except that Ice Age peoples did not count on energy in the same culturally construed sense. Energy, in the case of the Upper Paleolithic cave of Lascaux, probably refers to something that cannot be reified, that cannot be piped and cabled to fuel industrial production and capitalist productivity. Landscape does not fuel a rational ideoscape either, defined by innovative, creative, entrepreneurial thinking. Landscape fuels a physical and concrete energy that cannot be mentalized, but which is consumed by the somatic body. The energetic land is the medium that establishes a healthy and deathly flesh across landscape and body. As such, there is no need for a separate scape, a mediascape, that monopolizes the industrial production of communication and transmission. Nature-in-the-raw takes on that function. Nature-in-theraw is the prime medium. The energy that fuels landesque mediation is not information, message, data, or media money, but life. Going back to Bataille’s critique, the wealth of the prehistoric cave is not monetary; rather, it is synonymous with health, with the ecological health of landscape, and the health of nomad bodies that lived in an ecologically sustainable way. One of the main reasons why Lascaux III was created in the first place is because the original cave of Lascaux became too polluted, too fragile, given the unsustainable activity that is mass tourist visitation. By ignoring the schism between wealth and health, energy and life, nature and culture, or animal and human, the ecological intelligence of the Upper Paleolithic nomad exposes the limitations and inconsistencies of modernity at large. But



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as Bataille aptly puts it, modern knowledge has not affected or dampened the spirits of an archaic humanity. On the contrary, what Bataille calls “archaic humanity,” and which I call earthlingness, in part survives in our midst, like a modern archaism or paleocybernetic conjunction (more on this to come). Bataille writes: “Archaic man was mainly taken up with what is sovereign, marvelous, with what goes beyond the useful [or use-value] . . . that is precisely what [modernity] relegated to a dubious and condemnable semidarkness.” And he adds: “Modern man disregards or undervalues, he tends to disparage or deny, that which archaic man regarded as sovereign.”9 What is sovereign, in the case of the original Lascaux, is the cave, the landscape, nature-in-the-raw, and the multinaturalism that it affords—the many different animas or living forces, embodied in many different animal species, all transmitting somatic life to each other. An earthling knows that “sovereignty cannot be the anticipated result of a calculated effort.”10 Bataille finishes off thus: “we should calmly ask ourselves if the modern world we have conceived in accordance with reason is itself a viable and complete world.” Bataille’s answer is this: “[modernity] is a world of the operation subordinated to the anticipated result, a world of sequential duration; it is not a world of the moment.”11 It is not surprising that Bataille should come to this realization after visiting the original cave of Lascaux, or that he should compare the modern tourist experience of visiting Lascaux with a visit to a metro station, since the modern consumption of place has lost the capacity to fuel and energize space with life, in the moment. The modern consumption of space is characterized by endless resumption and repetition, by standardized technological mediation and transmission, all for the sake of mass consumption. Yes, we should calmly ask ourselves the question: why has landscape become so mute?

Lascaux IV The Centre International d’Art Pariétal Montignac-Lascaux (or Lascaux IV for short) is a €50 million interpretation center that opened to the public in December 2016 in the town of Montignac. The aim is to preserve the “integrity” and “authenticity” of the cave. The project website claims “site-specific

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integrity” as one of the guidelines for this project, which is expected to appeal to a large international public and tourist industry interested in cutting-edge museum and visitor experience. The website reads: Inside this replica, the atmosphere is that of a real cave. Visitors can enjoy the splendor of the works in an authentic atmosphere, with a minimum of interruptions. This space is devoted to contemplation. In groups of 32 people you will experience life in as personal a way as possible, enriched by the explanations given by the guide who will accompany you throughout this contemplation.12

A space devoted to contemplation.  .  .  . And yet a guide will follow you everywhere you go and provide explanations to everything. How could that possibly count as contemplative? The project has invested in the application of latest media technology in the design of authentic spaces that preserve “site-specific integrity.” The promise of a new media life for Lascaux makes me wonder: What do the words “authenticity” and “integrity” mean in the website literature quoted above? How can one experience life in a way that is personal if one is being shepherded by a tourist guide along with thirty-one other strangers? How can one achieve contemplation if a tourist guide will accompany you the whole time, like a fly that will not go away no matter how hard you swat at it? Does Lascaux IV account for the fact that the karst cave is liable to environmental decay; that many of the animals depicted inside the cave have disappeared from the subcontinent; that the way of life of the earthlings who visited the cave during the prehistoric era is gone (or at the very least has been subsumed within modernity at large); that many of the animal species depicted on the walls of the cave are extinct? Does Lascaux IV show integrity to climate change, extinction, and death? I do not doubt that Lascaux IV informs the visitor about the environmental conditions of the cave back during the era of global freezing, and the broader ecological issues raised by Lascaux in an age of global warming. The difference is that the prehistoric cave is a living ecology. The cave is dying because all living entities that form part of an ecosystem must die for the continuation of material life. Lascaux IV promotes technological afterlife, but do I sense a double standard? How ecological can



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the desire to achieve digital reanimation be if technology delivers precious little in the form of recyclable materiality back to earth? The prehistoric cave of Lascaux has been colonized by bacteria and fungi that have degraded the paintings. The main problem faced by conservationists today is the cave’s colonization by a fungus (Fusarium solani) that has produced large black stains. The marks now cover many of the prehistoric paintings. This colony is the result of human presence in the cave, not least since the fungi thrive on the carbon dioxide pumped into the cave by breathing humans. In fact, the fungi and bacteria that are eating the surface of the limestone walls have flourished as a result of twenty odd years of unplanned mass tourist visitation to the prehistoric cave, and a failure to recognize the environmental impact of mass human visitation on the delicate environment of this karst system. The closure of the cave in 1963 came too late. Furthermore, it has generated another set of problems. In light of the impending decay, and the inevitable re-collapse of the cavern, how can Lascaux be preserved or saved? The answer is Lascaux IV, a center that provides a digital reanimation and technologically mediated perpetuation of the cave’s contents. But even if Lascaux IV saves the cave from its death at the hands of fungi, or from its impending collapse, it is still not clear to me what kind of life a technologically mediated reanimation can afford. The question is, what kind of afterlife does digital media afford? In other words, to what extent is Lascaux IV’s ambition to preserve the contents of the heritage cave in digital format hinge upon a culture-specific understanding of permanence that is technologically a priori? Does this attempt to technologically remediate the cave hinge upon the non-vital sense of afterlife proposed by digital media? Why is the geophysical process not seen as permanence, since the death of the cave is part of the natural process of recycled matter, which will enable rock to continue its never-ending cycle? Why is the natural decay of the site not a form of permanence, since it is precisely death, and the process of having to pass away, that fuels living memory? Without that death, there would be no memory. The digital preservation that Lascaux IV boasts fails to recognize that tens of thousands of years of cultural memory are contained in Lascaux cave, and that all that memory was animated by death and by new generations of bodies that entered into material contact with the limestones and the ochre

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paintings, thus reactivating physical memory in an immediate way and in the moment. How much of that organic and embodied memory is lost when the medium to preserve the contents of the cave are flat-screen and computergenerated visualizations and reproductions? Lascaux IV may well be truthful to the aesthetic qualities of the site it is trying to reanimate. What about the imagination that lies beyond the graphic image? In other words, is the Lascaux IV project focusing on the surface “look” of the cave and the graphic images it contains, or does it also take into consideration that the images convey something invisible, the power of a landesque memory and imagination? To the extent that the Lascaux IV project website claims “site-specific integrity,” one could assume that the effort to imitate the way the cave looks is in no way true to the prehistoric paintings, since these are, I insist, nonrepresentational and invisible. It seems reasonable to suppose that “integrity” in this case has to do with a narrow set of priorities dictated by architectural and art design. The architects, digital artists, and scenographers behind Lascaux IV have taken into consideration the formal characteristics of the cavespace. The reanimated site may well achieve integrity to a set of formal elements of composition: shape, color, texture, form, and space, all re-interpreted according to principles that are faithful to an original. It also seems reasonable to assume that those responsible for bringing Lascaux IV to life have conceived this project in such a way that it is befitting to the expectations of present-day tourists. In other words, the aura of authenticity that Lascaux IV offers is one that is designed around audience expectations, and not necessarily in relation to the experience of going into a prehistoric cave and experiencing it in the moment, on your own. There is a mismatch here, for the same reason that tourism and the prehistoric cave of Lascaux are very much incompatible. If integrity implies a sense of wholeness, who does Lascaux IV pay its allegiances to: the tourist or the cave? The actual cave cannot be visited, as I mentioned earlier, and not only because of its fragile karst ecosystem, and the appearance of bacteria that have colonized the limestone walls. The karst cave is not suitable for the purposes of mass tourism also because of the hazardous conditions, and the size of the cave. How do you capture that intimacy and that danger in a high-tech replica?



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Lascaux IV is spacious enough to conveniently house thousands of visitors. By contrast, there is something ultimately inconvenient, from a tourist’s point of view, about a small cave that can cause major safety risks. When I go inside a cave, the space presents all manner of dangers and hazards. This intensifies my sense of thrill. The danger gives me a rush and reminds me that my body is alive. The addictive kick of the caver pivots around the experience of a threatening darkness, a sobering encounter with dangerous chasms, a fear of the unknown and the real possibility of accident and death. To ignore that death, I argue, is to bypass a conscious sense of being alive. Which is to say, death is as much a part of my existence as is life. There is one more ethical and moral geological question to be raised. Why does a project involving high-tech reanimation not consider the importance of death in the construction of landesque memory? Why does Lascaux IV not pay attention to the story of deaths and extinctions, expressed so evidently in the rotting walls of Lascaux cave? Memory is often constructed on the basis of leaving material life behind. The prehistoric cave is a testament to everything that Ice Age peoples had to leave behind, including the painted cave itself. The karst cave collapsed, and it was buried underground for thousands of years before it was found by Robot the dog. In a sense, the cave was not allowed to die. The paintings were not allowed to fade away. The modern-day obsession with saving and keeping material wealth says quite a lot about how far modern-day mind-sets have moved from the prehistoric cave. Death has no economic value, which is why death is so often a singularity in Appadurai and Kopytoff ’s sense of the word. Death sacralizes, because it sends formerly living things into a condition outside commodity status, and gives things a value (or lack of it) outside the sphere of material economic use or exchange. Given the power of technology to digitize, to save, and to store, digital media technology can prevent cultural memory from falling into oblivion, or it can stop material cultural artifacts from dying out and disappearing. But is the digital reanimation of life, at least in the case of Lascaux IV, an impossibility of the sacred? If technology is religious, it is also wholly unsacred. Only a few hundred meters from the prehistoric cave of Lascaux, at the top of the hill, lies a burial ground. It is twice as old as the Lascaux paintings.

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The site was discovered by chance in 1954 by a local landowner, Roger Constant, who after seeing the water rush into a hole through the ground in the courtyard of his farm, decided to dig in the hope of finding the natural entrance to the cave of Lascaux. While Constant initially believed the hole was connected to the Lascaux cave system, it was not. The hole proved to be one of the oldest burial sites in the subcontinent, as it yielded a human jaw dated circa 70,000 years of age. The remains found inside the rock chasm of Le Regourdou do not belong to a sapiens human, but to a neanderthal. Sapiens had not yet arrived at the subcontinent at the time of this individual’s death and inhumation. What makes this site so extraordinary is that the neanderthal skeleton is believed to have been buried intentionally there. Alongside the human jaw, a large number of bear bones were also unearthed, which has led some archaeologists to believe that the neanderthal human and the bears were perhaps interred alongside one another. I have to think about this calmly. Was this neanderthal human deliberately buried alongside a bear almost seventy thousand years ago? And if they were not buried together, then who placed the bones side by side? Had the bear eaten the neanderthal when he died, or vice versa? The evidence is inconclusive. If some kind of ritual practice enabled neanderthal humans to establish some degree of connectivity with bears, and if that connection was assumed to be established through common inhumation, are we to believe that earth mediation was a knowledge cultivated by neanderthals as well as sapiens humans? Archaeologists have drawn plenty of attention to the sophistication of neanderthal culture in recent years, not least to their ability to make cave cupules, a circular cup-like dentation carved onto rock that is considered by some to be the earliest form of art.13 These mysterious formations have largely been ignored by art historians and archaeologists, since they problematize the very notion of what primitive “art” should look like. If the activity of cupule-making is indeed an art, then art is not only the by-product of homo sapiens ingenuity. Maybe art was invented by neanderthals. It is not entirely inconceivable that the cultural celebration of material transmission via cave walls, and the mediacy felt between human and nonhuman, was a practice that sapiens adopted with, or from, neanderthals. In either case, the story



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of Le Regourdou is not entirely irrelevant to the biography of Lascaux, not only given the proximity of the two sites—what separates them is a mere fiveminute walk. The story of Le Regourdou is also significant because, while there was a relatively brief time when neanderthals and sapiens shared the limestone hills of Lascaux, their fates were diametrically opposed. One of the species became extinct, while the other flourished to the point of dominating the entire planet. The death of that neanderthal individual, and the extinction of that entire human species, may receive a passing reference in digital reanimation displays in Lascaux IV, but there is something about the site (the rock, the human jaw, the bear bones) that refuses to be objectified and reified, and which thus refuses to be buried in some archaeologically defined prehistoric past, or in some technologically stored future. That binding of human, animal, and humus in a common ground is a transhistorical imperative. Because of death, the transmission of life in the form of memory is sustained. Why do we memorialize the site of a dead neanderthal? Does the materiality of that land where he fell not function, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, as a means for the transmission of memory, imagination, and a shared sense of being alive on earth? Although the temporal gap between sapiens occupation of Lascaux in the Solutrean era (17,000 BCE) and neanderthal occupation in the Mid-Paleolithic (70,000 BCE) may well be considerable from a chronological point of view, the deep time of prehistory is characterized, if anything, by a lack of linearity, and the continuity of material change. There is no historical chronology between Lascaux and Le Regourdou, no line of action, no sequence of events. The connection can be made in material terms, through the land itself, and through the common rhythms of life and death inscribed on the land. There would be no memorial value attached to Le Regourdou were it not for the neanderthal jaw and the bear remains. There would be no Lascaux without the animal life and death that is memorialized on the cave walls. The sites speak of a common animal death, and also of extinction. Like neanderthal humans, the giant aurochs of Lascaux are now an extinct species, as are mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave lions. Death is vanquished not through technological permanence, but through memory, which is the living and

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embodied continuation of a life that has passed away. While standing over the humble rock shelter at Le Regourdou, I thought to myself: What better way of keeping the memory of this dead neanderthal human alive than by showing care? Not care for the technology that will preserve images, facts, canned sounds, and other data, but care for nature-in-the-raw, for the limestone rock, the water, the soil, the mediacy of the only planet we have in common.

3

Human to Humus Ashes to ashes It is worth taking etymology seriously in case buried meaning comes back to the surface. For instance, take the word “human.” Eight thousand years ago, when Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was supposedly spoken by Eurasian pastoralists, “human” might have in fact meant “earthling.”1 I mention the etymological root not because comparative linguistics lends some credibility to my argument, but because the root of this particular word illustrates in more ways than one a thought that is beginning to crystallize, like an animal emerging from volumes of limestone. How do all those images inside Lascaux reflect upon the subjectivity of the people who painted the walls? Implied within the notion of “earthling” is an understanding of Earth as home or abode. Earthlings are entities who not only share a common earth, but also identify with others who they take to be like themselves in certain ways. If I am an earthling, it is because I transmit energy to other beings like me and because they too transmit back to me, which means that I am not an entity that is ontologically divided from others. I eat other beings, and they in turn eat me. Language and reason create the illusion that I am something other than earthly matter and something other than animal, hence the need to categorize my subjectivity as “human.” If I accept my material and earthly body, then the abstract notion of “human” must be exposed as such: as madness. The human species can be diagnosed as a divided self by definition, torn from the concrete world, and caught in two places at once, in mind or body, in culture or nature, in abstract or concrete realities, in immanent or transcendent life, forever split, schizoid, and utterly maddened.

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In the recent posthumanities, this abstract sense of human subjectivity has been hard to shrug off, particularly since many of the terms that have been advanced recently are historical extensions or negations of humanism. This applies to terms like posthuman, inhuman, nonhuman, more-than-human, or posthumous humanity. Earthling, as the etymology seems to suggest, exists prior to this differentiation. Perhaps the subjectivity of the people who expressed their memory and imagination in prehistoric cave sites was aboutto-be human, not-yet-human. If there is a sense of subjectivity that is prior to human, and the posthumanities has tried to articulate a sense of our own subjectivity that is posterior to the human, might the two meet somewhere, in some transhistorical limen or wormhole? “In truth,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari, “there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity . . . the head is a part of the body, but a body that is already deterritorialized and plugged into becoming animal.”2 Vital materialism introduces a subjectivity that is far-reaching, insofar as it elides with a prehistoric understanding that is not human. To say that my body belongs to earth surely presupposes an understanding that does not only negate humanism, which is what Deleuze and Guattari have tried to do, but has also made necessary the conjuring up of a positive affirmation of that prehistoric subjectivity. In a roundabout sort of way, I am trying to suggest that the people who painted caves were not human. They were not inhuman either. They were earthlings. So long as the mind-set we use to try to understand the works of prehistoric people is humanist (or inhumanist), there will be little or no connection. My body is another material medium like any other, and the capacity for my body to transport and transmit life (and death) is in no way better or worse than the medium of limestone rocks or limestone caves. The point I wish to stress in this chapter is that not only am I a conglomeration of chemical compounds that will be delivered back to the ground sooner or later, but that there is no material alienation between me (earthling) and soil (humus)— only a psychological alienation caused by my rational sense of “I” (human).



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There is a passage, a transfer of energy that makes me part of a common materiality. The connection is vital, or rather, deathly. Allow me to explain by way of an old saying. In the traditional English Burial Service, one hears the expression: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The colloquial phrase is adapted from the Bible (King James Version), which reads: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”3 As I intimated at the end of Chapter 2, death is an important reminder of life’s continuity. It is not surprising that this proverbial expression should be pronounced at Christian inhumations. That the human body should undergo inhumation (burial) is the inevitable fate of the organic body after death. The reason why the body dies is so that it may rejoin the ground, the soil, and become life for other entities, other earthlings who share the same chemical trademarks (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, hydrogen). The body falls to the ground and returns to dust, or rather, to humus. Humus is soil made up of decomposed organic entities (animal and vegetal). That is where all living things are humbled, where we dead bodies become food and nutrient for the living. What happens to the human body when it dies is that it falls to the ground, and on the ground it rots, transferring its chemistry to the organic soil. But to the extent that this process of going to the ground to die, and going underground after death, involves a transfer and a transmission of vital chemistry, the process also involves a form of matter-mediation. Deleuze and Guattari call this phenomenon to be “mediatized by the earth.”4 My living body goes down into the cave seeking the ambivalence and transformative experience of life-in-death. What lies between human and humus is not just the medium of death. What happens in between is transformation. The earth and its landscapes—the cave in this case—perform that mediating function. The cave is not just a symbol, a concept, an allegory. It is a physical space where that sense of mediation and transformation between organic and inorganic, between dead human and living humus, can be given concrete and grotesque cultural expression.

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Species to species I am in the Salle du Fond, the final hall in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc. It is not the original cave I find myself in, but the full-scale replica. “Fond” in French means far end, or bottom, as in the “bottom of the ocean,” or “the bottom of the bottomless” (le fond du sans fond), which is Gaston Bachelard’s characterization of what he calls “wonder caves.”5 Judging from this extraordinary replica, the original Salle du Fond must be nothing short of wonderful and, to be sure, bottomless. The original “Hall at the Bottom” is located several hundred meters from the cave entrance and is beset by the deepest darkness. It is in this recondite section of Chauvet Cave that one of the most striking works of Upper Paleolithic image-making can be found. The panels in question are now one of the best-known compositions of European prehistoric “art,” made famous by Werner Herzog in his documentary film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (more on this to come). The images found in the Salle du Fond are also believed to be among the oldest works of the Upper Paleolithic cultural matrix—dated to the Aurignacian era, the earliest period of the Late Stone Age. A series of large charcoal drawings can be found to the left of the incoming visitor. It is perfectly conceivable that these panels were not drawn by a single individual, and that they were not all drawn at once. Perhaps they were made over many months, decades, years, centuries. Temporality is altogether different in that deep time of prehistory. And yet, there is a certain degree of stylistic and thematic unity that lends a sense of overall cohesion. I am told by the tour guide that the panels depict an impressionistic scene. Although no exact meaning has been attributed to this work, it is safe to assume, according to the tour guide, that the animals depicted here are involved in a hunt. I stare at the wall, and I wonder: If this is, as the expert says, a representation of a hunt, where is the background? Where is the depiction of a scene? If this is a work of representation, why doesn’t the image in the panel show the lions attacking? My appreciation of these works is based, unlike the tour guide’s appreciation, upon an embodied and material encounter that does not seek interpretations. What I seek is transmission. What kind of energy is conveyed by means of



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this cave wall? Kinesthetic? Yes. Chromatic? That too. The Salle du Fond is not communicating an impressionistic scene, in my understanding, but a sensation of movement and change, laden with energy, which is sustained by and suspended on the rock. Let us focus on the area of this hall where the charcoal images are most heavily concentrated. It makes sense to follow the drawings from right to left. Thus, as you pan to the far right of the wall, you will find a section called the Panel of the Felines. This section contains several large lion heads and partially depicted feline bodies. From the illustration in Figure 3, you will see that every single individual in this section of the wall is facing (and moving) in the same direction: left. That is why it is useful to start looking at the composition from the far right, so as to follow the implied motion. The movement does not only come from the imagined animal, as it is clear from the gestural flicks that the image-makers executed to evoke movement above the large heads. Look closely, and you will see that above the head of two of the felines (the two most clearly and boldly delineated) the image-makers have passed their fingers over

Figure 3  Detail of The Panel of the Felines (Chauvet). Drawing by the author

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the fresh charcoal in order to leave a gestural wake that evokes the blurring effect of movement. The movement of the lions is not only externally conveyed by means of a graphic convention (blurring), but, to the extent that the imagemakers passed their fingers over the charcoal and flicked their fingers, they also felt the natural contour of the wall, and thus extracted, gesturally and tactfully, the implicit movement of the limestones. This is one of the most fundamental distinctions of cave painting and drawing, as opposed to screenbased media: the movement evoked is at once internal (caused by the implied motion of rock) and external (depicted via graphic techniques). I will return to this point in Chapter 6. It is also clear from the section of the hall illustrated in Figure 3 that the people who drew this composition were keen to group individuals according to species. The drawing in Figure 3 shows a group of lions; however, the entire wall is a collection of many different animal species, all grouped together. It is not accidental, therefore, that the changes in the volume of the rock, and the wavy contours of the limestone, were also used to convey transitions from one group of animals to another. In other words, as the surface of the cave wall bends in and out, so the curling wall provides a natural transition for the transformation of one animal species group into another. Not only does the wall elicit a sense of movement, but also a sense of ongoing change and morphogenesis (i.e., a change of form and shape). Since the changes from one species group to another is likewise determined by natural transitions in the curvature and surface area of the wall, some panels are tightly packed within small surface areas, whereas others cover more sprawling sections of the cave wall, as in the case of the Panel of the Felines, depicted in Figure 3. You can see quite clearly that the lions are stalking their prey and that they are about to pounce, judging from their flexed legs and bodily attitude. It is the attitude of the lions that has led experts to interpret the panel as a representation of a hunting scene. Before I explain why this panel is not a represented scene, I must add that there are about ten or fifteen felines in this panel—it is hard to tell how many there are exactly given the superimposition of figures, and also given the use of what appears to be a motion blur technique within this ensemble, thanks to which different head positions might be depicting a single individual in motion. Regardless of the number, all the felines (but one) are



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facing the same way: leftward. They are staring at something with eyes wide open and half-open mouths, excited and almost hypnotized. It would seem that the tour guide’s interpretation of the Panel of the Felines as an impressionistic scene is irresistible, if it were not for four very basic details. First, the animals on this entire wall have been grouped. There are six groups of animals arranged by species in this entire wall. As you pan from right to left, the animals are grouped into a pride of lions, five bison heads, three woolly rhinos, three or four mammoths, a horse, another group containing several rhinos, and one more pride of lions. I am not suggesting that there is a reason why the groups have been arranged as they have been, or that the number of individuals per group is symbolic or meaningful in any way. I am not going to follow André Leroi-Gourhan down a structuralist interpretation. Other than the lonely horse, which is situated in a very small niche at the center of the wall, all other animals are arranged in packed groups per species. There is no order, and there is no structure to this grouping. However, there is unity and integrity. It is also clear that the lions on the far-right section of the wall are not necessarily stalking the animals to the left; they are simply portrayed in an attitude typical of this animal species. If you look closely at the group of bison heads, you will notice that they seem scared, not necessarily because they are under attack by the lions, but because the wide-opened eye of the bison is typical of this particular species. The rhinos, on the other hand, have been depicted running and charging, possibly because this action is characteristic of this particular species. Second, there is no spacing or separation between each of the groups dep­ icted in this panel. In other words, the drawing conveys a sense of continuity. The transition between lion and bison, bison and mammoth, mammoth and horse, and, finally, horse and woolly rhino is seamless, just like the waving surface of the wall. If this was an attempt to represent life in a realistic way, the image-makers would have not superimposed the group of lions over the group of bison. They would have drawn the lion and the bison in a particular setting; for instance, they would have drawn the scene of a bison being chased, and then they would have drawn a separate scene showing a bison being pounced upon, and then a third scene showing a bison being bitten. Instead, the figures overlap, making the passage from one species group to the other quite

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indistinct. There are no separate scenes, only continuous morphogenesis—a continuous change of shape. Contrary to the tour guide’s explanation, there are no impressionistic scenes involving two animals of a different species in action; for instance, one biting another, or one kicking another, or one mounted on another, and so forth. If the intention is to represent a real-world scene in an impressionistic way, and given the technical ability of the image-makers, why did they not depict anything resembling a scene or backdrop? Why not show a horizon, a few bushes at the back, some tall grass? Unlike the stone reliefs depicting lion hunts in the walls of the great Assyrian palaces, where detailed impressions of an actual royal lion hunt are depicted in lurid detail, this composition does not portray a scene. The images found in the Salle du Fond, like many others found in Upper Paleolithic sites, is an event in itself. What is this continuity trying to evoke, if not the passage of life from living rock, to moving animal, to vivid imagination? This leads me to the third key factor. The animals depicted in transition zones, that is, in the zones between two distinct species group, are not depicted realistically (Figure 4). Whereas the individuals closer to the center of a species group are depicted in realistic style, the ones that are found in transition zones have been deliberately deformed. Given the fact that this convention is applied to the entire wall, and that it is common in Upper Paleolithic art, it is hard to

Figure 4  Detail of the Panel of the Felines (Chauvet). Drawing by the author



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believe that the depiction of indeterminate, deformed, grotesque, or chimeralike animals was not intentional. A sense of grotesque deformation can be perceived, for instance, in the zone between the lion and bison groups, at the top end of the panel. You will find a lion with a large hump on its back. The figure in question has the head of a lion and the body of a bison. It is so schematic, though, it is hardly a speciated animal at all. Further to the left, between the bison group and the woolly mammoth group, you will find a cartoonish figure with long nose and large mouth. This particular figure does not resemble any known species either. Why not? The depiction of the lions, bison, and rhinos elsewhere in the panel are realistic, as you can tell from my earlier drawing in Figure 3. In Figure 4, however, there is very little realism left. The image-makers were highly skilled and could convey realistic images with ease. Why the deliberate need to draw an animal that does not look like any clear-cut species? What do these cartoonish figures do to you, when you experience them in the flesh? Possibly, they evoke a feeling of change, of ambiguity, of grotesque transformation.

Figure 5  The Three Small Mammoths (Chauvet). Drawing by the author

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On another section of this large composition in the Salle du Fond, you will find a highly stylized mammoth with long legs and balloon-like feet, similar to a Dalí elephant. The section is known as “The Three Small Mammoths,” since it depicts one fully outlined and shaded individual enclosed within two larger and more tenuously outlined woolly mammoths. Look closely: there is a fourth outline within the darkened figure, which means that the imagemaker(s) depicted two exterior and one interior outlines in addition to the main mammoth at the center of the composition. This would suggest that there are possibly four mammoths here—not three—all of whom follow the natural curvature of the limestone wall. It as if the darkened figure of the main mammoth was appearing in the mind’s eye in a series of waves emerging from the natural undulations of the rock. There is a fourth factor that betrays the nonrepresentational character of the charcoal drawings in the Salle du Fond. So, in addition to overlapping, continuity, and deformation, these panels are characterized by the incompleteness or partial rendering of the figures. Why have some of the figures been left incomplete, and deliberately so? Why were drawings and engravings across the Upper Paleolithic matrix so commonly depicted without legs or heads? How could this be a representational and impressionistic effort? In a low section of the Salle du Fond wall you will find a group of three woolly rhinos, which appear slightly detached from the composition as a whole. One of the animals was deliberately depicted without a head, as it lies very close to the edge of the wall. The animal is shown in jumping position. It is as if this specimen had leaped and managed to break free from the wall. At least its head has irrupted from the rock, and it has been left out. The head is free, open-ended, accessible to the wide-open horizons of the imagination. Perhaps the Aurignacian who drew this rhino did not consider the edge of the wall a limit, but a seamless passage into the material human imagination. The images contained in the Salle du Fond are not intended to “mean” something. The lions do not mean “male,” as Leroi-Gourhan claims, any more than the grouped lions represent “a hunting scene.” To represent a scene would imply that the reality the image-makers were experiencing



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Figure 6  A Pair of Rhinos in the Salle du Fond (Chauvet). Drawing by the author

was found elsewhere, presumably outside, in real-world events involving hunting lions. However, the Salle du Fond is a reality in itself. The lions can be felt transforming into bison, or vice versa, due to the grotesque mood of the composition, which is characterized by overlapping, continuity, deformation, and incompleteness. To the extent that a sense of transformation can be felt in the moment, in situ, as it is transmitted by the cave to the body, the walls of the Salle de Fond are an event. The walls are actually moving. They are alive. At the top left end of the wall, past the midpoint marked by the Alcove of the Horse, one finds the extraordinary Panel of the Rhinos, which depicts a group of woolly rhinos in motion. One of the drawings is particularly eyecatching, as it depicts a specimen that appears to be charging, thanks to the graphic technique known as motion blur. The most pronounced charcoal lines show the long and curving horn of the specimen. In addition to the actual horn of the specimen, the image-makers drew six more silhouettes of the horns, less pronounced and blurrier—four behind the main horn, and two in front, suggesting a blurring effect. Is it too much to assume that

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lines of motion were used deliberately to create figures that are perceived to be moving along the wall, as in many modern-day comic illustrations? Rather than the convention of film animation or comic illustration, however, this cave drawing conveys the blurring effect of motion as a material and concrete cause. Motion is not just a special effect. In this case, movement causes change and transformation. One of the lines of motion created by the charging rhino is extended along the dorsal back of the animal, and becomes the curving trunk of a schematically rendered woolly mammoth, as you can see in Figure 7. It is as if, out of the movement of the rhino, a mammoth was allowed to appear. Out of motion, out of this life manifested in the form of kinetic energy, transformation occurs. I insist: motion blur is not just an effect, to provoke an optical sense of realism or vividness. The movement is coming from within the undulating walls, and it is internalized by the living imagination, or the living memory. Simultaneously from within and without, the energy that is being transmitted here is an always-moving, always-changing, selfemergent life.

Figure 7  The Panel of the Rhinos in Chauvet (detail). Drawing by the author



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The famous running rhino of Chauvet is not an icon that represents a religious idea. This rhino is quite simply a physical, gestural, and fully embodied affirmation of material life in flux. To begin to feel that transmission, it is not entirely necessary to visit the cave. If you draw the rhino, as I have—if you draw it as opposed to merely look at it or rationalize it—even if you draw it based on a very close examination of digital imagery, you will perform an action that releases a material way of thinking revealed via gestures. If you draw the running rhino, you will soon discover that one or two fingers were placed on the fresh charcoal, and that these fingers were then dabbed and flicked quickly toward the right-hand side of the composition. When you embody that gestural action, you will grasp why there is no meaning, but only a brute material encounter with a life that moves and that is very moving. To draw the rhino, as I have, involves running your own fingers, laden with charcoal, so as to re-embody the gestures of previous hands and previous bodies that materialized the image tens of thousands of years ago. Their bodies and mine are simultaneously caught in the same gestural present or presence, as the depicted rhino starts to come to life before you, gesture after gesture, line after line. With regard to the expression of motion in Upper Paleolithic graphic works, André Leroi-Gourhan commented that although no one can tell precisely what movements the image-makers wanted to render, “the way their animals do move is odd, as if they were swept up by a twoway whirling motion.”6 As I intimated above, the movement is coming internally from the wall and also externally from the beholder. At once, the two-way motion gets caught up somewhere between viewer and wall. We will never know the rituals, stories, actual memories, and the overall cultural context that lies behind works such as the Panel of Felines in Chauvet. This is not only because the image-makers were unmindful of the power of writing technology to help explain the meaning of these images. It is quite possible that the paintings were produced over such a wide expanse of time, maybe not even the image-makers themselves had a sense of what the images meant in some unified sense. Despite attempts by art historians and archaeologists to interpret and give universal meaning to the images, the idea that this panel is depicting a hunt scene seems to

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me as far-fetched as any other interpretation. The images are like the rock itself. Over thousands of years, the images were layered on the rock and they grew. Unlike my illustrations, and unlike this book, those prehistoric works are incomplete and unfinished. The impulsive and spontaneous need to layer the cave walls, alive as they are, with materializations of the human imagination, is a never-ending project of earthling participation. The idea that drawing on caves is like creating finished works of art and literature, like my illustrations and a book such as this, is preposterous. The actual cave images inside Chauvet are unfinished and unfinishable business. They are incomplete, they overhang, and they suspend indefinitely. They are spontaneous aggregates, compactions, layers, superimpositions, and thus form, as life itself does, over a thousand years of non-directed, nonlinear, and organic creativity. The depiction of a sequence of animals moving, and subsequently transforming as they move, is also the theme of the Panel of the Women Bison in the cave of Pech Merle (Lot and Célé valleys), and some of the panels contained in the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux, described in Chapter 2. By comparison, the Panel of the Women Bison in Pech Merle is much simpler. It consists of several schematic charcoal drawings placed in a nonlinear arrangement, as if obeying no rule of direction or sequence. In his own illustrations of these enigmatic figures, Leroi-Gourhan chose to include only four of several figures and placed them on a horizontal line—one next to the other. Clearly, Leroi-Gourhan wanted to simplify the idea that the Panel of the Bison Women conveys a sense of zoomorphic transformation. However, as you can see from the illustration below, there are more than four figures in the original cave wall, and they are not arranged in a line. Nor is the sense of transformation sequential, like frames on a film screen. The idea that movement is expressed inside the prehistoric cave in a manner that resembles film animation, that is, via linear succession of “frame-like” compositions, is entirely anachronistic, as I will show in Chapter 6. Indeed, the sense of transformation that cave media transmits is quite deliberately nonlinear, such that the process of transforming from sapiens to bison and back can start and end at any point. This form of mediation is depicted not only through conventional means, via overlapping, continuity, deformation,



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and incompleteness, as I pointed out earlier, but also by the fact that the figures are all-directional. Leroi-Gourhan was very keen to impose his idea of a male/female dualism, at the expense of a deliberate perversion and misrepresentation of the actual imagery contained in Pech Merle cave. For this reason, he grossly exaggerated the female attributes of the figure found at the top right corner of the illustration found in Figure 8, by depicting it with breasts. Like the perverse depictions of Altamira bison and the Trois Frères sorcerer made by Henri Breuil before him, Leroi-Gourhan’s drawings of the Bison Women of Pech Merle reveal how the limestone cave has induced modern imaginaries to be imposed on the Upper Paleolithic imagery. What appeared before Leroi-Gourhan is an idea this French intellectual brought to the cave with him: structuralism. The cave is a medium which, within and without history, simply evokes whatever image, whatever vision, whatever idea, you bring to it. In his short story The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, set in a fantasy world that resembles Scotland in the time of ancient clans, Neil Gaiman tells the story of a dwarf who, in search of gold in a treasure cave, discovers that the

Figure 8  The Bison Women of Pech Merle (detail). Drawing by the author

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cave will only reveal whatever mental image the visitor has brought with him. Like André Leroi-Gourhan, who brought his own structuralist mind to shine inside the cave, or Henri Breuil, who imposed a horned Celtic Cernunnos on the walls of Trois Frères cave, the dwarf sees whatever his past allows him to see. Rather than gold, what appears to the dwarf inside Gaiman’s cave is the image of a dead daughter. Offended by the skeletal apparition, the dwarf demands an explanation. It is the cave’s voice itself that explains: “I took [the image] from your mind.”7 If you do not take modern rationality to the cave, you will not see anything of that sort. The Bison Women of Pech Merle are not only spread in random positions on a peculiar cave wall, but also quite deliberately ambiguous given their degree of schematization. The figure on the top right (see Figure 8) may be a woman, but may not be. Leroi-Gourhan depicted the figure with breasts to make it unambiguous. Perhaps he could not cope with ambiguity, for it defeated his structuralist mind-set. The figures on the bottom right section may be bison, but again, may not be. Ambiguity is an intrinsic aspect of the grotesque immersion. Why did Leroi-Gourhan not see this ambiguity? Why was the meaning so clearly structured in his mind? Leroi-Gourhan only saw in Pech Merle what his own modern mind and scientific reasoning allowed him to see. The Bison Women of Pech Merle have been interpreted as a progressive transformation of women to bison (or vice versa), but I must repeat: the images are not found arranged in line in the original cave, but in a random order, ignoring the convention of sequencing and linear progression. If indeed this panel conveys transformation between woman and bison, the change goes both ways and radiates in all directions. The image-makers were not trying to suggest that bison turns into human, and that humans somehow gain the upper hand in a process akin to Darwinian evolution. The change depicted here is far more chaotic. It must be pointed out that only a few inches below the supposedly female figure, there is a schematic drawing of a mammoth, beneath which is another schematically rendered bison (I have omitted them in my illustration). Perhaps the indication here is that the possibilities for multiperspectivism across species is not limited to a one-toone process (human to bison), but as I have just said, to a distributed and



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rather chaotic change in all directions (human to bison to mammoth and so on). If the conventions of an abstract linearity are irrelevant or nonexistent in Upper Paleolithic media, the concrete situation and material context are allimportant. The wall that was chosen to depict the enigmatic figures illustrated in Figure 8 is highly relevant. The Bison Women of Pech Merle are located in a limestone wall hanging above an underground brook that disappears into a hole just below the panel. Close association between the imagery and a geographic cavity that sucks in water is perhaps hinting at sexual imagination. The sexual imagery is not unique to this part of the Pech Merle complex, either—elsewhere in the cave system is a hieroglyphic depiction of three schematically rendered women covered by a mammoth outline. As you might expect, Leroi-Gourhan’s interpretation of the Bison Women is that they symbolize the female in a dualistic worldview. Another interpretation, however, is that the Bison Women were characters in an oral tradition, perhaps a heroine germane to prehistoric myth. In both cases, experts have ignored the possibility that there may be no meaning behind these figures, but only the physical and concrete material thought. Life is evoked by the wall, and further mediated by human imagination. What is transmitted is an immediate energy—a vitalism that does not need discursive explanation. Foregrounding the back wall in the Salle du Fond (we are back in Chauvet Cave now) is another enigmatic drawing made on an overhanging stalactite immediately to the right of the Panel of the Lions. It is known as Bison Man. There is evidence in a number of Upper Paleolithic cave sites in southern France and northeastern Spain of this eponymous hybrid (half man, half bison). There are strong similarities between the charcoal painting of Bison Man in Chauvet and a similar figure found in the cave of El Castillo (Cantabria), which I was fortunate enough to visit on several occasions. Engraved versions of bison men are also found in the caves of Gabillou and Trois Frères in France. In the case of Chauvet Cave, the triangular shape of the chosen stalactite is imaginatively exploited to delineate a pair of female hips, which Bison Man is found mounted on. The image of Bison Man mounted on a Venus figure is nonrealistic and nonrepresentational: it is not a scene of a bull man humping a virgin maiden, but an evocation of a grotesque

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sexual imaginary. The cave is evoking sensations and sensualities in a state of intensified physical change and transformation. The legs of the woman and Bison Man lock in a single and grotesque body. The eyes of the beast stare at the vulva, which is in turn glaring back from the cracks in the limestone like an eye. Insofar as the makers of these images  themselves knew, from an embodied perspective, what it feels to be aroused, what it feels to look into the eyes of an aroused or scared bison, or what the feeling of looking into a woman’s genitals can provoke in a desiring partner, the makers of the image were involved in a process of earthly mediation, since the feeling of sexual and sensual energy passes through bodies, in addition to being transmitted by the limestone stalactite, the flowing stream, the balmy temperature, the sticky darkness. That energy is felt by anybody who stands before the rock, whether today or thirty thousand years ago, whether man or woman. All you need to do is let that earth-mediated energy hit you and tickle you. The feeling surges from within the rock and slips into a sex-filled imagination. Yes, a cave wall can sexually arouse you. Caves are filled with obscenities. You are surrounded by curves and cracks: everything around you is a potential breast, a penis, an asshole, a burst of spunk and squirt, a resonance like the aftershocks of a tremendous orgasm, filling the space with spiritualized sexuality.

Seism to jism Since human bodies are made of mineral bone, is it possible to regard bodies as geophysical entities? In this section, I will explore that tantalizing possibility. Can I consider my own body as landscape? Generally speaking, a human body is made up of potentially the same water, the same oxygenated and carbonated air, the same calcite as, for instance, a subterranean limestone cave. The matter that makes up my chemically rich body is found not only in my own biological organism, but also in the geological or, rather, to abuse a term associated with Karen Barad, it is the product of an “intra-action,” a halfway meeting between bio life and geo life. It is not matter itself, however, that I will consider here as the telltale sign of my geophysicality, my landscape



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body. It has become necessary to turn my attention to another feature of matter; namely, its energy. If matter is said to be “vibrant,” in Jane Bennett’s apt phrase, it is because living matter is the vessel for the transmission of fundamental energies (kinetic, thermal), biophysical energies (sexual, mechanical), and mental energies (memory, imagination), all of which make up the complex matrix of what I call matter-transmission. I must introduce the notion of “seism” next. Seism, as I intend to use the term, refers to the energy of earth, as expressed in movement. Limestone mountains and caves often bear the marks of seismic events, of imperceptible and quaking movements of the earth’s crust. In addition to the tectonic forces causing the clash of solid rock against rock, rocks form and move as a result of the combined elemental forces of water, air, fire, and other rock. By “seism,” I do not just mean tremor or earthquake, nor indeed the energy released through the friction of continental plates, but in a more speculative and philosophical sense, I mean the energy that keeps rocky matter moving and changing (whether it is expressed through geological, elemental, or fundamental physical forces). One major earthquake is enough to wipe out a whole history of human thought and other human edifices. The seismic, as I hereby deploy the term, does not have to do only with the energy of earthquakes and tremors, I insist, but with the energy of dynamic land in general. The moving and changing earth is resonating, it is vibrating. That energy is emblazoned in rock. Rock moves even when the earth is not shaking. However imperceptibly, the resonances or ripples of motion persist in the living rock. When gazing at the undulating contours of a rock relief, for instance the wavy surface of a subterranean limestone wall, the rock often shows evidence of the forces of water and air erosion, and sometimes even seismic energies, which act upon its matter. That energy is captured in the rock, and it is transmitted via rock. Rock then serves as a vessel for matter-transmission. My critical point is that this hard-to-define energy is not only found in rock. Seismic energy is also internal to our own mineral anatomies. In other words, the energy in question is also found in our own somatic bodies. As such, the energy I am trying to convey (most prosaically) is not only perceived as a result of graphic qualities of rock formation (as transmitted by the shapes, textures, and color of dynamic rock). There is a more intimate sense of seismic

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energy, which is even harder to pinpoint, as it does not concern aesthetic and describable sensation, but an interoceptive sense of energy within. The kind of energy I am conceptualizing here is not found somewhere outside the anatomical body. Matter-energy is also found passing through the somatic body, and it is a part of the somatic body—or rather, the body partakes in that seismic energy. Matter-energy should not be understood as a metaphysical notion, let alone an esoteric idea. By “energy,” I do not mean a deus ex machina, a power coming from some celestial god above or some transcendental Olympus. What I am referring to, however, is an immanent condition. Even if this energy cannot be communicated, even if words fail to give a full account of what this energy is or how it may (or may not) be represented, seismic energy can be transmitted. This is the critical point. Words collapse when the earth moves. The quaking and quivering earth is not only a geophysical means of transmitting energy, but also a biophysical means of transmission, to the extent that this energy is also evoked by human bodies in panic, in pain, in motion, or more appropriately, in the act of generating cultural memory and imagination (which could be characterized as the mentalization of that seismic energy). Transposing seismic energy to what I call “jism,” which is the energy of matter as felt or perceived by the human body, is enshrined in cave “art.” That is why, as I have argued, a practice such as cave painting cannot be looked from an art history perspective. Caving needs to be addressed more ethically as an embodied practice that involves climbing, breathing, sweating, and rubbing the body against rock to produce friction. Caving involves aligning the mineral spine against the mineral rock. This somatic approach to cave “art” involves touching, feeling, and sensing one’s own body caving in. A cave, understood as a cultural means of media transmission, is the space where body and land meet. Together they form the same energetic space. What is needed to appreciate the somatics of cave exploring is an immersion within vibrant darkness and echoic resonance: a penetration into the affective geographies of subterranean landscapes. The quest here is not for human “art” (paintings, engravings, flutings), but more-than-human energy pent up therein. That energy cannot be culturally prescribed in communication media, I repeat, not least because matter-transmission does not pertain symbolic or technology-



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dependent language—only perhaps the concrete layer underpinning a spoken language (i.e., the phatic emission or energetic qualities of verbalized sound). For instance, only the breathing, the sounding, the rhythms, and pulses of phatic speech can begin to transmit that earth-shattering energy that enlivens the living rock. A seemingly inert cave can be recast now as living being, and as vessel for the naturecultural transmission of life, from body to land and back. A cave can be a site whose cultural function is to mediate the space between geophysical and biophysical, leading to a loss of categorical distinctions. It is as though land was no more or less than one’s own living mineralism extended. If land is one’s own flesh expanded, mediation does not have to do with a technologically a priori process, but an immediate energetic passage from body to land and back, opening up a third corporeality at once seismic and jismic, at once human and more-than-human, at once natural and cultural. The Upper Paleolithic cultural imaginary discussed in earlier chapters is imbued with that more-than-human ontology. Paleo ontology is also finely attuned to the importance of matter-transmission, not least given the environmental conditions of life in the last Ice Age. For a person living in glaciated Europe, energy sources (fire, warmth, movement, friction) were no doubt necessary for survival and self-preservation. Hence, the cave is significant as a temperate (i.e., warmer) environment, and as a place where firelight and body-crammed spaces could generate energy, both at a physical and mental level. As I have already pointed out, the reliefs and contours of subterranean limestone walls often evoked in the imagination of prehistoric Europeans the energy of animals in movement (going back to Chapter 2). The evocation of that movement in graphic media is a celebration of the perceived energy within the rock, and within the landscape itself, which is being transmitted to human perception not via a purely optical encounter (in the manner of visual “art”) but via the embodied practice of touching, feeling, and warming oneself against the vibrant rock. According to cave art expert Jean Clottes, the study of markings and traces left by prehistoric peoples inside caves indicates that people rubbed their hands (and bodies) against particular rocks to elicit an energetic encounter, and in order to connect with parietal imagery.8 It is also clear that prehistoric peoples in Europe chose particular sites (and specific

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walls) due to the vibrant color and texture of a given rock, as well the resonant sonic properties of a given underground space.9 Cave formations or speleothems (for instance stalactites and stalagmites) typically evoked in Upper Paleolithic peoples a strong sense of sexual imagery, and for obvious reasons. Clottes has pointed out that the physical properties of caves have often been likened to human body parts, particularly sexual organs or wombs.10 It is likely, at least in Clottes’s informed interpretation, that prehistoric caves may have been deemed female or male. This is not so much given an a priori dualistic vision, but simply because the experience of moving in a vulva-like alcove, or holding onto an erectile rock formation, and so on, is extremely evocative and provocative. The feeling of touching or moving against the sexualized rock is intensified by the saturated air, the echoic resonance, the absolute darkness. It is in this context that I must introduce the notion of “jism”—which is the charged energy of landesque immersion felt and perceived by the body, typically as sexual energy. To establish a sexual and sensual connection with land implies that the body and its surrounding landscape are not tethered by a purely mental energetic connection, but more powerfully still, by love and desire. What opens up in that space between body and land is an erotic ecology. Jism can be defined as the embodied vigor of matter. Etymologically speaking, jism is a term used in American slang. Apparently, it is one of several possible sources for the word “jazz”—early jazz music performance, not the music or dance genre per se. According to music historians, early jazz music performance originated in brothels and live sex houses, and the music was developed to accompany, and provide a backdrop to, sexual activity.11 Jism, in the vernacular sense, also means “spunk.” Equally, and more interestingly and in the context of this current discussion, the word “jism” can mean the spirited force of a bodily encounter. Take the line, from Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck: “brandy gives a man spunk!”12 Spunk is hereby something other than just semen. Spunk is not just the viscous substance a man ejaculates. As in the case of the Drum Major in the eponymous play, “spunk” denotes “courage” or “valor”—a certain spiritedness that is associated with, but is not exclusive to, the male sex. The same applies to jism. Jism is not only a synonym for semen, but an ambiguous association with a spiritedness that is embedded within our



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sexualized animal nature, and which can be transmitted as orgasm, as sound, as jazz music, or dance. Elsewhere, I have associated the term more closely with what ecophenomenologist David Abram calls “erotic creativity of matter.”13 If the vigor of sex can be “transduced” or “transmediated,” for want of better words, and if indeed jism can be turned into a form of vigorous music or dance, then jism is not specific to a single body, bodily practice, sensory modality, or artistic medium. In other words, jism is an energetic (rather than material) substance between bodies, and it can be felt in the energy of sex, as much as it can be felt in the energy of jazz music, or indeed some other medium of energy transmission—whether in the realm of art or not makes no difference. This energy that brings bodies together is not confined to a human-only event, but to a more-than-human phenomenon of attraction and repulsion, akin perhaps to what the elemental Greek philosopher Empedocles called philía and neikos. Empedocles posited that two forces work in a kind of seismic way, leading to both creative and destructive dynamics mediated by the elements. Empedocles personified these as Love (Philía)—a force of attraction and combination—and Strife (Neikos)—a force of repulsion and separation.14 These forces are envisaged neither in simple mechanistic terms, nor indeed as intensive properties, but as both. Jism is likewise both an internal and mechanistic power. I have envisaged jism as a driving force and fueling energy that can be performed as a human-only dynamic (for instance as sexual attraction or repulsion), but which cannot be confined to humans, nor indeed to human sex alone. Jism is also zoophiliac, botanophiliac, and geophiliac. More holistically, jism is the provincial human expression of a larger seismic energy, which is continuously driving matter together and apart. Sex is only a local way of bringing material bodies together or drawing them apart within the broader context of the erotic ecology. In my understanding of the term, jism is not only the mechanical process of two or more bodies moving together and apart, but it is also the spiritedness of that attraction and repulsion. Jism is sex-spirit. Jism is a scalar energy that cannot be discretized, that cannot be assigned to countable bodies, but which exists in the uncountable and nonquantifiable (one might say intensive) realm of intra-action. Jism is the space across bodies, it is a gap, an in-between.

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Polish artist and author Ewa Kuryluk has pointed out that the subterranean cave is central to the understanding of sex in grotesque art. It is love and death (echoing Empedocles’ allegory) that serve as “the moving forces of the grotesque world . . . injected into landscape.”15 Kuryluk’s concept of the “cave of sex” is suggestive of an energy that is injected by landscape into body (and vice versa). As such, the “grotesque” (which incidentally means “cavelike” in Italian) refers to a world where the nonhuman is an integral part of artistic (as well as everyday) creativity. For Kuryluk, the grotesque is an outlet for antisocial impulses, but here I must digress or add: the grotesque is an impulse for antihuman impulses. In other words, through the grotesque, and through landesque immersion, it is possible to incorporate landscape energies into bodily energies. Kuryluk argues that “grotesque worlds,” from the prehistoric cave onward, bear an “affinity with the complicated structure of organic life and the opaque and highly eroticized nature of the inner self.”16 I will turn that sentence on its head so that it reads thus: the grotesque bears an affinity with the complicated structure of inorganic life, and the crystalline and highly eroticized nature of the expanded body (as landscape). Kuryluk adds: “the grotesque offers a refuge for ambiguous, unverbalized feelings. . . . The grotesque could act as a vehicle for emancipation and, significantly, it explodes in times of unrest and spiritual crisis. . . . The subterranean is thus too authentic and thus too strong to be eradicated.”17 Upper Paleolithic peoples turned to the seismic vigor of caves. Perhaps it was that proximity of land and body that emancipated indigenous European cultures from a humanist ontology. As Clayton Eshleman puts it, Upper Paleolithic imagination is “about-to-be-human.”18 It is posthuman, in a strangely cybernetic and contemporary way (more on this anon). Over the course of the Upper Paleolithic in the European subcontinent, drawings of breasts were made on stalactites (Pech Merle); wall formations were emphasized with female genitalia (Chauvet, Bédeilhac, Cosquer); giant phalluses were engraved in ithyphallic limestone walls (Trois Frères, Grotte du Sorcier). What these images evoke is a ubiquitous sense of the sexuated imagination provoked by the exuberant cave. The people who painted and engraved the walls of the abovementioned sites (and many others) were not just thinking about sex. They were feeling it. They were touching the sexualized



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rock and engraving it (or carving it). As Clottes has pointed out, the careful examination of flutings, markings, engravings, and carvings found in these sites reveal the fundamental importance that touch and bodily gesture had on the transmission of a supposedly spiritual energy underpinning prehistoric cultural practices.19 If Upper Paleolithic peoples purposefully visited caves to touch or rub themselves against the rock, what was the expected outcome of the friction? What was the body gaining from rubbing against limestones? What exactly was passing from stone to bone and back that demanded such an ethical care and physical love for underground rock? If sexual imagery is abundant in parietal “art,” it is even more abundant in the case of Upper Paleolithic mobile “art.” Horns and bones were often exploited to make objects that resemble sex fetishes. A vast number of phallus-shaped batons have been retrieved from Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites across prehistoric Europe, which suggests that carrying such objects was perhaps a common practice, at least during certain periods and in particular regions (i.e., the French Magdalenian). Whether or not these seemingly fetishized instruments were used for sex, or as symbols of power (as a chieftain’s baton or a shaman’s staff), is anyone’s guess. What I would like to stress, however, is that the energy in question is not necessarily found in the object itself, but in the fetishistic power that is believed to be channeled by the material. It is not the material artifact itself I am focusing on here, but its matter-energy, which is an elusive notion to account for. That energy can be evoked by a number of material properties found in the artifact, including shape, hardness, and texture. One example of this sexualized form of matter-transmission is a bone rod found in Abri de La Madeleine, a rock shelter located near Tursac (Dordogne)—the typesite of Magdalenian culture. The portable rod, which is on display at the Museum of National Prehistory in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, depicts an intricate and surreal image. At least in the detailed section shown in Figure 9, the engraving starts out as a phallus, then branches out into a vulva or tree-like formation, and then turns into two testicles and another phallus, rightward facing. Opposite this rightward-facing phallus is the head of a bear, who appears to be licking the penis. A strange arrow-like symbol further emphasizes the bridging of the space between bear and penis.

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Figure 9  La Madeleine rod. Drawing by the author

Alexander Marshack argues in his study of the origins of art, symbol, and notation in Upper Paleolithic culture that the La Madeleine rod depicts an “emanation” extending from phallus to bear, which raises a number of questions. Marshack proposed the rather controversial theory that notches and lines carved on Upper Paleolithic bones such as the La Madeleine rod were in fact a notation systems, used for lunar time reckoning.20 Setting these heavy-lifting interpretations to one side, the questions that this arrow-shaped “emanation” poses are not new—indeed, they have been raised before. Is this bear just performing fellatio, or is it rather “feeding” on an energy, an emanation? The images carved on the rod manage to weave together the bear animal and the human animal (i.e., assuming the double penis is an imaginary expression of human anatomy). The image also juxtaposes bone material and plant imagery, highlighting a common force in between. It is “jism” that acts as the energetic and emanational go-between. What is also distinctive about this rod, is that it draws on the properties of the material itself. Thus, the La Madeleine rod appeals to the baguettelike shape of the bone, its smoothness, and its hardness. Shape, texture, and hardness evoke the properties of a penis-like extension. Many other phallic batons found in Upper Paleolithic cave sites likewise draw on natural shapes (bones and animal horns). Jism was not an energy imposed on materials. The Madeleine rod, in my speculative interpretation, is not a conventional art sculpture. The sculptor(s) did not force the bone into whatever shape he, she, or they had in mind. Rather, it is the material itself that announced its own jism, its energy, to the craftsperson. The bone is long and hard, and so elicits the vigor, the virility, and the power, of an erectile penis.



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In Clottes’s interpretation of Paleolithic belief systems, associating bone and stone, hard rock and penis, is informed by a set of beliefs, according to which all things are animated by a continuous matter-spirit. Clottes has inferred, based on his lifelong study of European cave art, that the ubiquitous celebration of matter-energy in Upper Paleolithic cultures in Europe is underpinned by a belief in a material spirituality, not so much a religion as an ethics. According to this alleged worldview, the entire material world “is seen to be emerging” as a result of spiritualized energies. Clottes adds: “far from confining themselves to a distant and inaccessible Olympus, the presence [of these energies] is immanent everywhere; they pervade and govern all.”21 Immanence, therefore, is central to a paleo ontological sense of the world. Nothing is fixed. Humans are changing into animals—rocks are turning into phalluses. All matter is ultimately mattering. Nothing transcends, nothing ascends to Olympus or an everlasting Heaven beyond. All things are in a continuous earthly process of becoming Other. A distinctly contemporary philosophical inflection can be gauged from Clottes’s speculative theoretical reconstruction of Upper Paleolithic ontology, eliding with Deleuzoguattarian and neomaterialist thought (more on this in Chapter 8). The prehistoric understanding of shape is likewise applicable to color, which I will address later on as I turn my attention to Altamira. Life-like properties are not instilled on an object by an “artist,” and as a result of an artistic craft, nor indeed as a result of the human and technologically biased capacity to transform natural materials into man-made ones. Paleo ontology, and its paleocybernetic cultural reverberations in contemporary culture, must surely rest on a neomaterialist sense of life and power that is inherent to the raw material itself. It is the raw material that is alive, and not by virtue of art’s intercession. All the artists can hope to do is inculcate a sensitivity and affinity for an already-living matter. In other words, there is no “art” at work here. “Art” presupposes a human craft, an ingenuity, a creativity, and a skill devoted to the making of objects. Instead, what is at stake here is an ethics of cultural intervention which, however subtle and discreet, celebrates and highlights a preexisting material energy. In summary, jism is an energetic form of media transmission. Jism cannot be verbalized as language, but it can be embodied, and it can be

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passed from one body to another in physical ways. Jism is, to sum up, an energy liable to cultural forms of transmission, as well as “more-thanartistic” explorations and interpretations. Jism always exceeds the narrow human determination, since jism is also an energy that attracts nonhuman animals and plants. Jism exceeds them, being thus actualized in the seismic energy that attracts and repels rock. Jism is open to a landesque flesh. Jism tethers bodies not only at the intersubjective level, enabling transmission of energy between man and woman, between man and man, between woman and woman. Jism is an energy that, as many images found in Europe’s prehistoric caves explicitly evoke, fosters the continuity and permeability of eroticized matter. Jism draws my body to the caves and attracts my limbs to the rock, enticing my whole body, propelling me to squeeze and rub against the smooth and sensuous contours, to awaken the warmth and light up a common energy.

Bone to stone My interest in the speculative re-invention of Upper Paleolithic thinking, for instance as posited by Jean Clottes, cannot be pursued, in my case, with the aim of advancing the fields of scientific or media archaeology. A contribution to paleo-archaeology or paleontology is way beyond my capabilities. This is, however, a contribution to the development of a new paleo ontology. Indeed, the material thinking I seek to tease from prehistoric sites is not meant to give a better understanding of the prehistorical past, but the present past. In particular, I have been concerned by the elision of two contemporary materialist ways of thinking. On the one hand, there is a material thinking preserved in recently found prehistoric places and objects, which can be accessed through firsthand subjective experience rather than an objective and material analytical archaeology. Empirical studies and rational interpretations of archaeological pasts may be driving contemporary Western culture far away from a brute encounter, a felt transmission, with indigenous material cultures. By contrast, in a paleocyber context, the speculative contestation of old ideas melds with a contemporary or new materialist ethics, and a speculative



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realism, which is likewise concerned with a more-than-human and ecological sense of natureculture. Transmission media, in this paleocyber context, hinges upon a two-way dynamic. On the one hand, energy has an effect upon its matter, as I have just pointed out. The energy of body is infused into material sites. On the other hand, objects provoke energy given certain perceivable properties (shape, color, texture, movement). In other words, transmission is always occurring, at least in the sense proposed here, as a two-way channel between matter and energy. Energy possesses matter, while matter serves as a vessel for energy. Mediation here involves the carrying of fundamental energies (kinetic, thermal), physical energies (sexual, mechanical), and mental energies (imagination, memory), and the feeding of these energies into the materiality itself (the limestones, the cave formations, the atmospheric conditions of the site). Conversely, mediation also involves taking material objects to the cave in order to summon a particular energy. In sum, the cave-goer either brings energy into the material environment, or else uses a material thing to trigger energy, in order to cause a two-way transmission. I have already discussed how a particular energy (for instance sexual) can be injected within a broader sense of the seismic land and its materiality. What remains to be seen is how, in a converse movement, particular materials can galvanize energy-rich landscape. Jean Clottes has argued that in addition to image-making, the activity of visiting caves during Upper Paleolithic times involved a number of other conventional (and potentially) ritualistic activities. For example, Upper Paleolithic peoples often inserted bones and teeth into selected walls and floors of caves. Clottes lists a number of sites in Spain and France where bones and teeth have been found deliberately inserted or buried underground.22 Why did indigenous European peoples perform these gestures? According to Clottes, “for a great many millennia, Paleolithic people performed very similar gestures in a large number of caves,” and adds: “the bones, flints and other stones and bone objects were often deposited or inserted with some direct connection to parietal artworks. Special gestures were hence performed in very particular locations.”23 What is significant about these gestures is their double valence. The object in question was inserted

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into a crack or muddy floor of the cave, and perhaps acquired significance as a result of the gesture itself. In other words, the chosen object, whose material properties evoke an energy of sorts, may function as a medium through which materials are transformed into something less palpable and more essential. Through the act of inserting the object into a crack, the object is perhaps essentialized and energized. The gesture frees the object from its inert material condition and connects matter to its concomitant (spiritual) energy. The peculiar material properties of flint, bone, or tooth thus serve as go-between. Clottes makes a compelling conclusion: “It was not [only] the object itself that was of importance, but rather the gesture, the will to enter into contact with the power within the rock or in the floors and to harness a fragment of this power.”24 A sense of interconnectedness, fluidity, and permeability is established, at least in Clottes’s conceptualization. Mediation, in this paleo ontological context, is borne of a deep ecological awareness, which is performed and revealed. It is performance—the doing of the gesture—that generates this affirmative connection between body and land, between bone and stone. What matters is the activity of placing a token bone on a stone. It is the doing—not the saying—that reveals an ecological awareness. Hand printing is another example of the mediating power of gesture. Handprints and stencils have been found on the walls of a great number of rock sites around the world, and across the European subcontinent, too. In Chauvet Cave, handprints are found concentrated mainly near what would have been the natural entrance of the cavern, and in a section known as the Gallery of the Red Panels. The gallery in question contains positive hand prints, which are formed by coating the hand with pigment and pressing the hand on the wall, and also negative prints, which are formed by blowing paint on the outstretched hand in order to form a stencil. The Panel of the Hand-Dots, located in the same gallery, contains forty dots printed on a low overhang. If you look closely at the dot arrangements in Figure 10, you will see that the prints vaguely resemble the shape of a legged animal, perhaps a bison or rhino. Like other paintings found in this hall of Chauvet Cave, the markings are made of red ochre, which is an eye-pleasing coincidence or choice, since the natural floor of this section of the cave is also red. Indeed,



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Figure 10  Panel of the Hand Prints (Chauvet). Drawing by the author

the ground is covered in a frozen cascade of iron-rich limestone crystals, which looks like a flow of sprinkling strawberry ice cream trickling down the candy-colored walls. Dominique Baffier, a former curator of Chauvet Cave, claimed that one person, using the right hand to apply pigment, was responsible for the entire panel. What is perhaps most intriguing about this prehistoric individual is that he or she had a crooked pinky finger. Baffier also discovered that the individual with the crooked finger left his/her mark—a full positive hand—on another section of the same gallery known as the Panel of the Hand Prints, and also in the Brunel Chamber located near the cave’s entrance. It is not the forensic identification of one individual that astonishes me, but the choices this individual made. The walls containing paintings in the Gallery of the Red Panels are quite low. The chosen wall is located at the left-hand extremity of the gallery, on a low overhang. The individual would have had to crouch or

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sit on the floor of the cave to carry out his/her work. In addition, the panel is not visible from a standing position at the center of the cave gallery, which is several meters high. Instead, the red dots can only be appreciated by someone lying on the floor of the cave, pressed again the wall, and looking up toward the overhang. The individual with the crooked finger chose to create his/her work in a manner that largely problematizes our present-day appreciation of prehistoric art. In some cases, only one body at a time could squeeze into the chosen niches where prehistoric image-makers produced their work. Media transmission is performed in these cases as a personal gesture. What the person with the crooked finger performed was an intimate encounter between bone and stone, involving an act of transmission between an individual body and one particular cave wall. Another site where there is ample evidence of Upper Paleolithic finger gesturing is the Cave of Rouffignac (Dordogne). The late Kevin Sharpe and Leslie van Gelder conducted archaeological work in this site, focusing on the relatively unknown medium of finger marking. The practice, also known as fluting, is characterized by nonfigurative marks made with a single finger on the muddy walls. Like the dots found in Chauvet, the spaghetti-like configurations found in Rouffignac may also underpin a mediological function. Rather than inserting token bones on the walls or pressing the ochre-stained hand against the rock to create imagery, the flutings of Rouffignac Cave show that the entire body could be used as a medium to establish connections with the cave. And in the same way that a token bone could be energized through gesture, so the body could be essentialized through whole-body movement. What is found printed on the walls of Rouffignac, particularly in the gallery known as the Macaroni Room, are not figurative images of anatomical bodies, but abstract movement forms. The traces of a kinetic energy have been captured on the solidified mud. Van Gelder refers to the movement forms captured therein as the “intestines of the underworld.”25 One of the distinctive features of the flutings analyzed by Sharpe and van Gelder is that they were performed by children. Based on measurements derived from the flutings contained in the Macaroni Room, Sharpe and van Gelder identified a number of different individuals aged between 2 and 5. A handful of flutings were also produced by adolescents. Like the individual with



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the crooked finger in Chauvet Cave, what is surprising about the children of Rouffignac is that they made distinct choices. The gestures were performed on selected walls of the cave, which were too high for the children to reach unaided. Sharpe and Van Gelder have pointed out that adults “raised up the children to flute” and that “those holding the children were not only walking, but moving rotationally from their hips, perhaps in whole body movement such as dancing.”26 It is not a fetishized object (a token bone) but the moving body itself, or two bodies conjoined in a synchronized movement, that serves as the material vessel for the energization of rock. In the Cave of Gargas, located in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of Southwest France, over two hundred hand stencils have been found in one site alone, hence the nickname the Cave of the Hands. Who would fail to be touched by the image of a baby hand printed tens of thousands of years ago on the walls of this cavern? The image of a baby hand found in Gargas Cave is remarkable in more ways than one. A baby cannot stretch out the fingers naturally due to prehensile reflex. Nor can a baby possibly comprehend the significance of the gesture. Thus, it is safe to assume that the baby’s fingers would have been pressed by a grown-up or independent child, while pigment would have been blown on the baby’s hands to leave the desired mark. Bearing in mind that the baby hands of Gargas are located in a gallery deep inside this cave system, and since the gallery in question is not of straightforward access, the individual or family members responsible for this gesture would have had to clamber in almost complete darkness, which is hard enough for a modern-day tourist visitor, let alone a barefoot individual carrying a baby. Prehension is the key, at least in the case of the Gargas baby. Prehension is far more significant than comprehension. A baby learns the world through prehension before he or she comprehends the world. A baby’s world can be grasped by physical and sensory means only. The baby understands purely in terms of the transmission of sensation. In the case of the Gargas handprint, the baby understands the cave as a result of warmth, humidity, or smoothness transmitted by the limestone wall. As opposed to comprehension, prehension is a brute way of knowing that is not mediated by language (written or spoken), but by an immediate transmission. The prehensile capacity for the human hand to touch the wall, to grasp it, and to extract sensation from that grasp,

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is primitive not because it was performed tens of thousands of years ago, but because it is performed every time tots learn to move in the world. One of the first pieces of writing I ever produced, aged 12, was a sci-fi story set in a kind of new Paleolithic age, partly inspired by Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet. My grandmother bound the manuscript in leather and kept it with her for many years. She decided to give the book back to me shortly before she died, as a kind of farewell. Many years later, as an adult, I found the book in an old letter box. To my surprise, I discovered a stencil of my own teeny hand drawn on one of the pages. As I lay my adult hand on the stencil of my own former hand, a peculiar feeling of contact occurred. I felt an embodied connection between myself, aged 41, and myself, aged 12, as if the two selves,

Figure 11  Hand stencil of author, aged 12.



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who seem to exclude each other or follow each other in a linear sequence, were in fact simultaneous. A child woke up within. Children are born wild and primitive, joyful and tearful in equal measure. To summon the child within is not unlike the summoning of a contested primitivism within modernity. It is not the summoning of an archaeologically dated past that concerns me, but rather, a way of thinking that is always contemporary to a child’s animistic view of the world (more on this in Chapter 8). Or, as Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it in Wind, Sand and Stars: it is “to primitive men that the future is revealed.”27 Brute material thinking is not regressive. The moment of re-encounter is not a form of infantilism or romanticism. The moment I touch my own teeny hand is a forward step in my process of becoming other. Borrowing the core principle of Deleuze’s philosophy, to which I will return in Chapters 7 and 8, the question for the future is how to become child, how to become primitive, which in some speculative way perhaps amounts to the same thing. This ambition is possibly a sign of personal and civilizational maturity. Something has endured all the alleged progress and economic development of high-tech modern civilization. It is the direct knowledge of the child and primitive infiltrating a joyful and fun-filled immanence. Jean Clottes has pointed out that image-making in Paleolithic Europe can be re-imagined as a ritual practice performed by “intermediaries between the day-to-day world and the immanent.”28 The point made by van Gelder, however, is that the knowledge extracted from Upper Paleolithic sites reveals an impetus for life, which does not have to be conceptualized in terms of heavy-lifting and serious theories of shamanism, but which also must take into account the evidence of children, and the playful activities carried by toddlers and babies underground. Children invest in life, in the present, for the moment. That is why Deleuze and Guattari referred to children as the true Spinozists.29 Children are the only practitioners, if you like, of the ethics of pure immanence. Perhaps the link between Spinoza and children hinges on the idea that to enter the kingdom of the immanent one has to be not so much like children, as in the classic Christian saying, but rather, one has to become child. Or, as the Russian mystic philosopher Pavel Florensky pointed out: “you must convert

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not just into children in general, but precisely into the children you once were.”30 I insist: this conversion is not a regression. Brute materialist thinking is an acceptance of the child’s understanding of the world in terms of brute facts (not rationally explained). It is an acceptance of brute phenomena (not objectified as natural phenomena for scientific investigation) and brute materials (not industrially processed). The person accepting this brute way of thinking is not an immature and childish adult regressing, but a parent learning to play again while growing old. It has been highly instructive to watch, over many years, how my three children draw. What surprises me is not so much the lack of ambition to represent life. Their drawings are not representations but transmissions of a life in the imagination. That is perhaps why, when placing my adult hand on a stencil of my own teeny hand, I may have sensed the energy of the child I was once. When I drew that stencil, I was possessed with an animic attitude to image-making that I have now lost. Writing now is perhaps a means of confronting that loss. My children’s drawings are brimming with life—their drawings are expressions of their high-energy lifestyle. If the drawings are “animated” (I will return to this point in Chapter 6), it is not because my children are trying to represent movement, but because they perform movement—they enact an animic movement energized by the ebullient imagination, and the joyful activity of giving shape and color to white paper. But no. What surprises me is not the lack of representation. What astonishes me is that my children have no intention to transcend. My children draw not because they want to immortalize their drawings as works of art, or because they intend to publish their works, or save them on my laptop, or have them online. The drawings are ephemeral moments of the child’s imagination, brimming. The drawings are intended as presents to Dad or Mom, or quite simply, they will be left behind and forgotten. Where do all those children’s drawings end up? Perhaps, in some hopelessly naïve sense, all those drawings rejoin the consciousness of Paleolithic image-making. Archaeologists may find methodological validity when comparing Upper Paleolithic cave painting with contemporary traditional cultures in Aboriginal Australia or Amazonia. Personally, the connections are found in my own personal prehistory, in my childhood. Prehistoric flutings, like children’s drawings, are evocations of an



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all-pervasive zest for life that persists whatever history throws at children. Children rejoin that consciousness, that paleo ontology, every time they commit to the drawing of life and from life, without aspirations for a beyond.

Flesh to slush Under the appropriate material and environmental conditions, a physical body will start to decompose as bacteria proliferate from within the gut. In a rather ironic turn of events, the stomach—once the organ to be fed—begins to feed on the body, as gastrointestinal bacteria drive the putrefaction and decomposition of the cadaver. Decomposition is thus not only the chemical processes during which organic matter is broken down and reduced to its founding elements; it is also a process that involves the release and distribution of organic matter into the air, the ground, and water. When rainwater seeps through the ground and trickles underground, it absorbs the carbon in the air and soil. The carbon that dissolves the underground cavern is possibly the same carbon released by dead bodies and plants rotting on the ground. Death of the human body is also a process of aerobic bacterial proliferation. In other words, bacteria fill the air during body decomposition due to the production of considerable amounts of gases during fermentation. As oxygen is found within a body at the outset of decomposition, aerobic bacteria flourish during the first stages of putrefaction. Instead of exhalation, the body turns into an emanation, as air is expelled laden with carbon. It is as if the vital chemical ingredient for life, carbon, were being redistributed. Carbon is what all living beings bequeath after death. It is the common inheritance. For the living who continue their wanderings above ground, letting the dead rot represents perhaps an act of humility—literally, a connection with the humus. Letting the dead rot does not mean forgetting or neglecting the dead, but allowing the material body to continue living as chemically rich matter. In a way, to allow the dead to be buried in the naked earth, unmediated by religion, can be considered a way of staying in contact with the deceased. Earth then becomes the endless medium, out of which life emerges continually, and into which it returns again after death: ashes to ashes, bone to stone, human to

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humus, flesh to slush. Earth is the seamless body void of form into which all other formed bodies return, and from which all formed bodies emerge. The earthling body is made of flesh, but flesh is not the same as muscle, skin, and bone. Have you ever turned your arm over to see the veins on your wrist, branching out into your hand? Have you wondered how alike the venation in a plant’s stem, opening out into a leaf, your veins and arteries are? We are part plant, all branch and all ramified inside. And have you wondered how your bones, structured from the minutiae of your skeletal feet, to the long bones of the legs, are nothing other than rock, calcite mineral derived from earthly nutrients growing under your skin? We are plant, we are rock. We are mineral flesh, not in some lyrical and poetic flight of fancy but in the most literal and material sense: we are earthling flesh. Flesh is suggestive of a porous and permeable tissue that envelops the landscape itself, and all those who land on it. Earth and earthling are part of the same living tissue. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh of the world,” which in his later works adopts a distinctly ecological tone. “Nature,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is the other side of humanity .  .  . as flesh.”31 Merleau-Ponty is unwilling to assign flesh a materialist determination, since he considers materialism from a strictly scientific perspective—a theory of corpuscles and atomic composition—which is why his philosophy is distinctly physicalist, rather than materialist in the strict scientific definition. That does not concern me here in the least, since at the brute material level, it is not an expanded sense of experience and sensation that concerns me, but the concrete and solid reality of a living materiality, whether sentient in the phenomenological sense or not. To get to that other side, it is necessary to leave behind the category of human and embrace the humus, the flesh of the raw natural world, which is woven into my own earthling anatomy. Given the porosity of material flesh, my body can extend itself beyond the anatomical confines, and stretch out to a larger flesh. That is what sensations afford, in the phenomenological sense. Flesh is a more open-ended notion than body, because it crosses over to physicality, which is not necessarily understood in terms of individual anatomies. Instead, flesh is a physicality made up of inter-sensational relations and jismic encounters where two or more bodies become entangled in a common web. In David Abram’s



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account of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, “flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity,”32 an elemental matrix indistinguishable from the web of earthly life. There is a bias in phenomenology, however, and a tendency to prioritize the sentient and organic body, attributing animal properties (sensation and sentience) to inorganic living matter. Perhaps most problematically, phenomenology tends to make an implicit distinction between the body one practices and the body one theorizes, as if they were somehow different. If you practice the body, you do not need to explain it, to write about it, to conceptualize it, and to philosophize it. That Merleau-Ponty and his followers are compelled to philosophize the body suggests that he is not a body practitioner, a life practitioner, but more likely a maker of concepts and ideas about the body. The brute materialism of the cave dweller is not grounded on conceptualizations of the body or the flesh, nor indeed a philosophical argumentation. Writing is by definition a problematic medium for the transmission of brute materialist thinking, since writing lacks physicality and carnality. This is a paradox phenomenologists often fail to account for in their conceptualizations of body, flesh, and lived-in experience. My critical point is that, although eco-phenomenology recognizes in theoretical terms the interdependence of body and world, and manages to conceptualize the notion of flesh, a subterranean landscape does what philosophy names; it practices what the writer preaches. It is not enough to write the body. The brute materialist cannot write. I can hardly claim this way of thinking for myself, since I find myself in the utterly inconsistent position, the same as the phenomenologist, of trying to write down what is unwritable. As soon as you write, you leave the carnal body behind, even if you write about, from, or for the body. And so, in order to unwrite my own thinking, or to produce an unworded thought, it is worth considering how this notion of flesh, which is nothing more than a concept, may be undone and returned to brute material existence. I have also drawn this book, and I have walked it, and breathed it inside actual prehistoric caves. It is true that the body feels a sensorial connection with the landscape, and that a larger flesh can be sensed, felt, and experienced prior to its theorization. Abram’s eco-phenomenology opens up

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many compelling inroads into that literature of the senses, and that expanded sense of mediating flesh. Except that flesh is also a process whereby matter is broken down, where the web disintegrates, and where the composition of life becomes utterly decomposed. Flesh is just one side of a pulse that also involves slush: a black world of decomposed flesh. If flesh is mother, then slush is the opposite: it is a countermother, an antimatrix. The medium of the subterranean cave is not only the flesh of the world, but also the slush of the world. The raw material world is not just composing itself, but also, at the same time, and in a process indistinguishable from life, it is decomposing itself. Because raw matter is always poised in that ambivalent state of flesh and slush, composition and decomposition, there is no winner, no force that comes on top, and no ascension, no heaven beyond life and death. Life-death is the inescapable pulse of a material world that is capable, given this quantic condition, of renewing itself endlessly, without linear direction. Why are prehistoric caves littered with bones? Why did many human and nonhuman animals go to die there? How could prehistoric sapiens, and possibly also neanderthals, blur the distinction between the cave of sex and the cave of death? How can the cave provide, in the same landscape, an intimacy for sex and an intimacy for agony? The grotesque immersion is defined by ambivalence, blur, and distortion, and for a good reason. This is where the clear rationality of language can only explain, within the very limited scope of reason, what brute material thinking knows without the need to theorize, conceptualize, and philosophize. Mattering is an endless process not least because of the quantic imperative at the core of things. If matter was not simultaneously vital and deathly, how could it carry on renewing itself? It is because matter is vibrant and putrid at the same time that the continuity of earthly flesh is ensured. Death may be humiliating, in the sense that it drags the body down to the humus soil, but it is not an embarrassment. Death embarrasses the living only to the extent that the human is hubristically poised to live on, to perpetuate a sense of meaning and importance beyond, death. But if the individual human has never acquired a sense of social importance above other humans, and has



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never lived under the false assumption that he or she is somehow more-thanearthly, then this humble human will know that he or she is not unlike the tree that rots. Like a leaf dropped dead with its empty and naked veins devoid of green, the plant-body inside me withers, my veins dry out, and my entire body withers, turning into slushy compost.

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When Walls Could Speak

What is the being that responds to us from shy of the cave’s entrance? I would go so far as to embody it in the form of the very walls of the cave that would (like to) live, or rather come alive with palpitations whose living movement must be grasped now. Jacques Lacan

Parables of the cave There is a man. He wakes up to find himself in a room. He does not know where he is, nor what he is doing there, nor how long he has been there for. He just knows he is there. It is not clear to him whether he is awake or not. All he knows is that he is there. Nothing before, nothing after. There is nothing outside this room. The room itself is full of things. He knows these things because he can touch them, and smell then, and use them. In this way, he can identify differences. He knows that one thing is valuable to him because he can sit on it, and another thing is useful to him because he can lie on it. But he does not have names for these things. Still, all things are full of importance. He can see his own two arms outstretched before him, he can see that he occupies a body, but it is not clear where this sense of having a body begins and where it ends. The room is “me.” The things in the room are “me.” He moves toward the wall, and lays his hands on it. As he pulls back, he sees that a mark has been left on the surface. He looks around, surprised, realizing that the walls are covered in hand prints, variously sized and shaped. He looks again at his hand print, and it dawns on him that the mark had been there all along. “All those hands are me” he thinks. He has understood that there never was a man in there, and

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that this “me” that he keeps coming back to is actually the room. When he falls asleep, the room will still be there. When he wakes, it will be there again. The story is based on Plato’s famous parable of the cave. In that well-known allegory, Plato described people chained to a cave wall, upon which they observe their shadows projected by a fire burning behind them, which the cave dwellers cannot see. Given their predicament, Plato’s chained troglodytes may be forgiven for thinking those shadows moving on the walls before them are “real.” Plato’s cave people are ignorant of the fact that the shadows they see before them are projections and that the source of their appearance is firelight. What they think are true entities are in fact semblances. The cave dwellers will never know the truth. Sadly, they live chained to the wall, which is why they are unable to look back and see the fire, the true source of the world they keep staring at hopelessly. Outside the cave, the sun shines brightly, revealing a reality that the cavemen are completely unaware of. Divine reason (the sun) shines forth, revealing the eternal forms of an unchanging reality. The Socratic understanding of reality is presented in this analogy in an unambiguous way. Reality refers to that which does not change (eternal forms). Only eternal ideas can be called real— everything else is semblance and flux. Eternal forms are not material, since matter is in a state of endless transformation. Reason cannot be delivered to sensation, because the senses confuse and ambiguate rational understanding. It is only to the extent that human beings can understand the world through rational thought that they are connected with the light of an unchanging power, call it god, Logos, Heaven. As Plato made very clear in The Republic, fire is an analogy for reason (logos), which delivers truth to human understanding via the medium of rational language. Although human beings cannot access the ultimate unchanging heaven, they can reach out to it via language and truth. Back in the world of the senses, the cave is a material prison filled with faint clues—mere simulacra—for those of us fighting out our pathetic Judo matches with the meaning of life. The cave is a place of caveats concerning the nature of truth and the good, which in the Socratic sense is eternal. In Socratic rationalism, a segmented line is famously drawn between sensation and reason, or between the chthonic cave and unchanging Heaven. A dualism is borne of this ideological operation that has haunted Western philosophy.



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At the heart of this haunting is a vertical sense of human subjectivity: an elevation of the human self via the power of reason and the medium of written language. There is a very good reason why Plato chose to depict irrational beings as cave dwellers. The Republic is a work of philosophy that supports political life and the State as the ideal form of rationalized social organization. In State conditions, human beings may live as civilized beings under the auspices of language (written law). Life outside the polis amounts, at least in the Socratic tradition, to a destitute and impecunious condition (a barbarity). If political life is repealed, then humans must face a regression to a life chained to irrationality and ignorance, where the phenomenal world reveals only unfathomable and unexplainable semblances. Socrates’s vertical line justifies a number of different versions of the same Western philosophical elitism. Whether the division lies between civilized and uncivilized, between citizen and alien, between Hellenic and barbarian, the elevation of the city dweller above the cave dweller shows how political life effectively brings into existence, at least in Socrates’s teachings, a sense of subjectivity that is believed to be superior, higher, more advanced, and ultimately more dominant or powerful. In my parable, the man (or is he a woman?) is living in a condition of undividedness. There is no split between what is known by reason and what is known by the senses. There is only one way of knowing the world, which is immediate and contiguous to a bodily and material present. There is no source of signification coming from some higher ground. Reality does not mean something abstract. Nor is there a source of goodness and truth that reaches human cognition via language and mathematical reasoning. No distinction can be made within the room in my suggested parable. There is nothing that could be called Real, because there is nothing unreal or other-than-real about the room. There is no signification causing the split of meaning/non-meaning, or truth/falsity, as in Plato’s dialectics. There is no dream and no waking. Everything is just one continuous stream of brute existence. Plato’s cave, by comparison, contains differentiated categories: fire, caveman, chain, shadow, wall. There is a clear sense of distinction between subject and object. The subject is the caveman; the object appears to be the shadow. The shadows are not real categories, though, which means that they cannot be trusted. Real categories conform to a world organized by human

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reason. The understanding that shadows are only projections produced by fire releases the rational man from the condition of imprisonment. The chain, by analogy, is made up of the human senses that enslave human understanding to a false understanding of the world. That, at least, is the Socratic legacy to Western philosophy. Quite a burden, if you ask me. In my story, the person in the room is not chained, nor is this person caught up in some struggle to reach a truthful understanding of his/her lifeworld. Without such division between the planes of objectivity and subjectivity, everything for this person in the room is important based on material utility. Unlike Plato’s caveman, the man/woman in the room is capable of feeling awe and revelation when he/she finds out that, although all material things are in essence the same, his/her body is the source of a certain causality. Even though he–she feels part of the whole room, and the room becomes a continuation of the anatomical body, his/her anatomy has the power to trigger change, to make something happen. This person understands the world through effect, that is, through activity and responsiveness, and through a kinetic and physical corporeal grasp of the world. His–her hands can leave marks on the wall. Indeed, the person in the room has a sort of epiphany. He/she realizes that the mark on the wall, which he–she initially thought was caused by the action of touching the wall, was produced by a causality that was already there in the first place. The mark was there before the action of marking took place. Causation belongs not only to his–her bodily actions. At the same time, it is coming from the room itself. It is not that the human being is the subject, and the room is the object. In the case of my topsy-turvy parable, the hand can touch the wall and affect the room. From the opposite side, the wall is already filled with invisible signs, which affect the hand that touches it. Before I move on to discuss new parables of the cave that have contested, problematized, or rejected the well-known allegory from Plato’s Republic, it is worth pointing out the obvious. My story is set in a room, not in a cave. There is a straightforward reason for this. By setting his old parable in a cave, Plato was making the obvious point that in Classical Greece, in an urban and politically civilized world, the condition of being chained to one’s material and sensual life had been surpassed. Civilization superseded the irrational



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worldview of primitives and barbarians in order to establish a social and cultural world in the form of the City/State. By setting my parable in a room, I am making an obvious statement concerning the contemporaneity of an indigenous paleo ontology. One need not dwell in a prehistoric setting such as an Upper Paleolithic cave site to practice the mindfulness of this man who becomes his own room. Impatient with the hierarchical worldview popularized by Plato’s allegory of the cave, Jacques Lacan provided several alternative cave parables that also illustrate a continuity between the Symbolic (i.e., language) and the material world, which Lacan calls (in a snub to Plato) the Real. As I intimated earlier, implicit within Plato’s parable is a condescending view of cave-dwelling primitives, which are depicted as ignorant and irrational beings enslaved by their senses. On the subject of actual prehistoric caves, Lacan had this much to say: “When we begin to glimpse the operative meaning of the traces left by prehistoric man on the walls of his caves, the idea may occur to us that we really know less than him about what I will very intentionally call psychical matter.”1 We know less. Most definitely. Rationality has limited the human capacity to understand matter as an energy that sustains life, both mental and physical. This brings me back to the parable of the room. The main character of the story is not the man–woman. If matter is psychical, as Lacan believes it is, that would mean that matter can think, that it is intelligent. Matter thinks itself. Matter is not an object of human apprehension through reason. Intelligence is found in living matter. The thought expressed as marks on the walls of the prehistoric cave is not coming from the human who marks the wall, but the wall who, through the human intermediary, expresses its own affect. For Lacan, thought is thrust forth continuously from sensation and desire. Lacan elsewhere argued that the unconscious can and indeed must be compared to a cave—not an actual karst, of course—but a metaphorical one. Like my story of the man in the room, Lacan’s tale is a rebuff to Plato’s original. It stars Freud, who takes on the role of a ravishing and legendary hunter running away from the dogs of rational thought. The point that Lacan is trying to make is that the irrational and the subconscious are not primitive in some historical sense. Human beings did not leave a primitive sense of thought behind when the species ceased to live close to caves, or when a system of social organization

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known as the nation State flourished. Primitive irrationalism simply became a deeper layer of our material psyche, or in Freudian terms, a more repressed stratum of our psychology. The role of the psychoanalyst, in this Freudian tradition, is to dig up a contemporary sense of the primitive, to speak back to a neoprehistoric sense of the human psyche. In Lacan’s new parable, Freud is pursuing the chthonic Diana. This is Lacan again: If a more serious metaphor befits the protagonist, it is one that would show us in Freud an Actaeon perpetually set upon by dogs that are thrown off the scent right from the outset, dogs that he strives to get back on his tail, without being able to slow the race in which only his passion for the goddess leads him on. It leads him on so far that he cannot stop until he reaches the cave in which the chthonian Diana, in the damp shade that confounds the cave with the emblematic abode of truth, offers to his thirst, along with the smooth surface of death, the quasi-mystical limit of the most rational discourse the world has ever heard, so that we might recognize there the locus in which the symbol substitutes for death in order to take possession of the first budding of life. As we know, this limit and this locus are still far from being reached by his disciples, when they don’t simply refuse to follow him there altogether, and so the Actaeon who is dismembered here is not Freud, but every analyst in proportion to the passion that inflamed him and made him the prey of the dogs of his own thoughts.2

Lacan is haunted, as I can tell from this short excerpt, by the question of how psychoanalysis marks a passage to the unconscious, and what might be in store in that place beyond rational thought. Freud finds in the cave something akin to death, which is also a budding life. He finds a goddess that responds to his uncontrollable desire, pushing Freud closer and closer to the edge. Desire for Diana leads Freud to the limits of the most rational discourse the world has ever heard. On the other side of that discourse is pure irrationality. To be able to access this cave of the unconscious, it is not enough to follow Freud in some intellectual or theoretical pursuit, and to chase after him in an academic search for Freudian frameworks. It is necessary to follow Freud in practice to the actual cave of the unconscious, and thus to imitate not the words penned by Freud, but the example of an Actaeon who has died in order to live again. Lacan is saying that to be able to access the unconscious, one has



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to penetrate a level of thought beyond rational structures and the apparatus of repression. Dive into brute matter. One has to forget the purely intellectual and philosophical position and embody the hunter, living out that desire-filled pursuit to the point of risking death. Only then does thought present itself in its entirety. In yet another parable of the cave that Lacan offers in lieu of Plato’s, the unconscious is characterized as a “being” that inhabits the cave. Like the man in the room who realizes that s/he is a room in a man, the being that Lacan summons does not equate with a human subjectivity. This being belongs to an extended consciousness. Before it enters the plane of representation, thought is found inside matter itself, whether organic or inorganic. Thought is omnipresent. Only when thought is rationalized can it be individuated. Only then can one say I think, therefore I am, or rather more egotistically: I am, and therefore I think. These are the dogs of reason that chase after Freud, warning him not to go any further and not to pay heed to his inflamed passion. In the short quote that starts off this chapter, Lacan tells us that the being in question is the walls of the cave. The forces that cause stuff to happen, in my story of the man in the room, are the walls, which are full of invisible handprints. These prints were there beforehand. The man is a vehicle for the expression of a material thought that belongs to an extended being. Over the course of this chapter, I will speak of parietism, a belief in the transmissional power of walls—limestone walls in particular. Lacan’s parables will provide a useful background to reveal how walls express energy in the form of movement, and how that being in the cave can be transmitted via different material media.

Writing on the wall In a famous story from the Book of Daniel, the hand of god is said to have appeared during a feast hosted by Belshazzar, king of Babylon. According to the Hebrew tradition and the Old Testament, the hand proceeded to inscribe a message on the walls of the palace foretelling the fall of Belshazzar’s kingdom. This momentous scene represents a major irruption. In fact, this appearance of

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writing on the wall can be understood in terms of three fundamental historical irruptions: the irruption of a theocratic sense of the political; the irruption of modern religion; and the irruption of media orthodoxy, that is, written media communication prescribed by class division (scribes, advisors, literates), by a technological sense of power, and for the purpose of a religious subjectivity determined by remote agency. The writing on the wall alludes, in the first instance, to the political announcement of Hebrew self-determination. To the extent that the writing on the wall appears, at least according to the account given in the Book of Daniel, during a feast in which Belshazzar intends to drink from the temple treasures of Jerusalem, the appearance of Aramaic writing spells the irruption of new Jewish identity in the form of the diasporic community. The fall of Babylon is of course a classic example of hubris, since Belshazzar has already been warned by Daniel that only his faith in Yahweh will enable his kingdom to survive an imminent Persian attack. Indeed, Belshazzar does not only ignore Daniel’s council, but more worryingly, perhaps, pays little heed to the tragic example of his own father. Nebuchadnezzar had engaged in several military campaigns designed to increase Babylonian influence, leading to the famous capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of the city, and the deportation of many prominent Jewish noblemen (Daniel among them) from Judea to Babylon. According to the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar had been struck by god with insanity, and had to live in the wilderness like a wild animal for seven years. This episode represents a loss not only of sovereignty, but also of “human” subjectivity, in the Hebraic traditional sense. The Babylonian king is thus portrayed in the Hebrew tradition as a subhuman brute. Daniel, on the other hand, represents the noble and sophisticated political mind-set of diasporic Jews, and a sense of political unity that hearkens back to King David, and the first modern theocratic State installed by the kings of Judea several centuries earlier. While Babylon is ruled by brute kings and beastly men, the Jewish diaspora, exemplified by the stately Daniel, shows a modern sense of politics grounded on ethical, moral, and religious order. The second important innovation that irrupts with this writing on the wall concerns religion, and the binding agency of a single god. Since neither Nebuchadnezzar nor Belshazzar fully accepts the Jewish god, tragedies befall



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them. Daniel’s god is not an elemental force, like the nature deities, demiurges, and animistic spirits of the Babylonians, even though the Jewish god does preserve vestiges of a tribal deity that can manifest itself in storms and other natural phenomena. Daniel’s god is a refined version of the god of Moses, the lawgiver and stately father who dictates a divine order and a written law for Jewish society to abide by. It is a god of urban and nation-building credentials, rather than a spiritual deity of zoomorphic and material terrestrial powers. Daniel’s god is a transcendental projection of a human society, which unifies the chosen people under a common monotheistic ideology, and a common land, which has been promised to them, for settlement and urban progress, by god himself. The third and final irruption exemplified by the writing on the wall is, of course, writing itself. Alphabetic writing is thus simultaneously the breakthrough of a technology (writing), a telematic media (a means of remote communication), and a metaphysical agency (in this case god). God and Word, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, are de facto coincident. Writing and god need one another to justify a political and cultural system grounded on remote forms of control. What is god without sacred scripture, holy writ, the Word, divine law, commandments, final judgment? This famous story represents the imposition of a writing on the wall, rather than from the wall. Thus, alphabetic writing is a media technology defined by rules. I do not only mean technical rules of writing (orthographic and syntactical) but also rules of a religious and political apparatus dependent upon written communication. As soon as writing is invented, not only does the technology enable farmers and pastoralists to count the fruit of their land, it also allows the leading political class to immortalize their laws, their commandments, their indictments, the written account of their god-given rule. At the more technical level, the appearance of writing on the wall establishes an orthography, an orthodox way of delivering the writing onto the wall. Orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, and so on. Unlike Paleolithic cave images, which do not subscribe to a rule of graphic expression (only a set of loosely observed conventions), writing is a fundamentally normative way of delivering communication. With writing, there is always a right and

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wrong way of spelling and pronouncing—a right and wrong way of delivering calligraphic symbols, a right and wrong interpretation. With writing, graphic marks have to be arranged into lines, unidirectional and univocal. The radial and nonlinear possibilities of subterranean landscape media, where graphic markings have no starting point or endpoint, are buried under the weight of media orthodoxy. The story of Belshazzar’s feast also exemplifies the emergence of a social class empowered by literacy. Daniel’s political power depends on his capacity to manipulate the power of writing. Writing, in a sense, is a system of exclusion. Only those who know the rules of writing will be empowered to rule. Since only Daniel can read god’s message, and not Belshazzar or his advisors, the legend exemplifies a shift of power from a primitive Babylonian code that goes back to Hammurabi, to Hebraic law, which is progressive. The alphabetized individual is believed to triumph over the analphabet, the “human” becomes master of the “animal,” the “civilized” conquers the “barbarian,” the “believer” vanquishes the “infidel,” the “educated” dominates the “brute.” A world of social divisionism and class systematization is also irrupting with this media orthodoxy. Like Plato’s cavemen, who are deemed inferior to the inhabitants of the polis by virtue of the fact that the troglodyte cannot communicate rationally (i.e., they cannot read or write), the irruption of media orthodoxy in the Hebrew tradition implies much more than the production of tools and machines to communicate through remote means. Media orthodoxy, tied as it is to a political and religious apparatus, historicizes communication technology, such that mediacy is no longer affirmed as the power to establish connections among earthly subjectivities. Instead, media orthodoxy functions as an anthropocentric system of sociopolitical exclusion and domination. What irrupts is not only the power of technology, but the power of technicity. In the Heideggerian sense, technicity is the subjectivity assigned to humans in their role as makers of machines, or as holders of a technological sense of posterity and transcendence. The control of technicity, and the ongoing project to be masters of technicity, is an illusion and a cover-up for a historical enslavement to technologically prescribed metaphysics. If technicity amounts to producing beings themselves (producing nature and history) through



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calculable makeability; what empowers the technified self is machination and producibility via the transformation of natural resources into immortalized human things: cities, art, literature, and so on. Technicity is not the same as technology. It is the condition for the formation of subjectivities and power relations through technology and technological producibility. Technicity is also a metaphysical enslavement, since technology and technologically mediated communication provoke a remote agency, a power that cannot be seen, a subjectivity that can transcend, a media orthodoxy as close to religion as to make no difference. Finally, the irruption of this writing on the wall can be conceptualized in relation to a fundamental disembodiment. Written communication results in the incorporeal ghost or potentiality of a disembodied author, synonymous with god. Behind a written text is an invisible and bodiless “being.” Daniel’s god has no flesh. He is supposed to exist somewhere heavenly, where there is no material or physical reality. As such, the divine agent becomes synonymous with a metaphysical and metabodily being that makes the writing appear, while he himself is nowhere to be seen. This power to communicate remotely in a way elicits the invention, if not of a remote author, then of a miraculating absence. The miracle is not the appearance of script, or the truth it casts, but the fact that a group of people are left standing there in awe, spellbound and convinced that this god really exists. Metaphysical enslavement caused by media orthodoxy results in the machination of subjectivities that achieve immortality, fame, celebrity, divine status, apotheosis, all via the agency of media technology, and as a result of the domination of those who believe in— and who are duped by—the religious power of technological mediation. Media technology starts a whole new history of superstitions and amnesias. This is not a question of rescuing subjectivity from disembodiment. It is not the human body that concerns me, but the earthling body, an expanded flesh that includes the wall itself. Why does the writing happen on the wall, and not from the wall? Not only does the god of Daniel forget his body when he leaves a writing of doom on the walls of Belshazzar’s palace, he also forgets the wall. Yahweh makes his writing on the wall, and the wall means absolutely nothing to Yahweh. The wall is just an inert surface, onto which human technicity is applied. With the irruption of writing, the power to express and communicate

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is no longer given to limestones or clays. The mineral surface no longer speaks. The mind-set of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer who follows the rocks and listens to it, touches it, moves with it, and senses its power to mediate is buried under a history of technological media communication and self-empowering technicity that silences matter itself.

Beast of Lascaux The technology of writing tends to undermine at least two features of raw transmission: first, the possibility that relaying signs and portents can be performed by physical and material entities rather than pure symbols; and second, that the act of reading may involve an act of full physical immersion, body, and all. Writing is an act that absents the author. Writing involves flattening the world. I can dive into a book, in the metaphorical sense of the word, but not literally. To read a book involves disconnection from the physical environment around the reader. You read these pages now, perhaps immersed on the flat surface of the page or screen, but without engaging your full body. The possibility of an encounter is flattened by the technology I (the author) and you (the reader) are now engaged in. You and I will probably never meet. In this act of distance communication, technicity does not only exile the body, but also omits the material encounter itself. With writing, I do not bump into anyone. Finally, writing is fundamentally intersubjective. By narrowing down the possibilities of interaction to an intersubjective communication—from human to human—the kind of writing I am engaged in prevents me from encountering or communicating with something nonhuman like a limestone wall. It is important to recognize that it is not only humans and technologies that write. Natural elements are also capable of writing, or at the very least, they are able to leave marks, even if the writings of winds on dune and waters, or the writings of water on limestone, are not quite as legible as the words I write now. Or maybe they are. Maybe the signs on the walls of Lascaux are as legible to prehistoric image-hunters as these words are to you. From a parietist point of view, this is a question of learning how to read nonhuman



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surfaces. To acknowledge the inhuman elements (air, water, fire, and earth) as material conveyors of a living substance amounts to a critical move away from the anthropocentric understanding that media communication and media technology are for humans only. In arguing that communication happens at the elemental level, that is, through the signatures of water, air, fire, and earth, not only am I trying to send the human subject into the background, but I am also arguing that alphabetic writing needs to be recast, so that it is no longer an orthodoxy, a historical ruse inextricably linked to religion and to a metaphysical enslavement. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued in his book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman that stone’s endurance as a medium of cultural communication is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other-than-human terms. Since a stone is never truly inert, it poses a profound challenge to a humanistic sense of communication, undermining the human desire to be separate from the environment and preventing the bifurcation that renders nature “out there”—a mere resource for symbolic and technologically mediated communication. Cohen has a knack for describing the paleo-communicational force of stone and the manner in which stone conveys life—indeed, how it can serve as go-between and medium. Cohen is right in saying that what moves inside brute matter cannot be suitably worded. Brute forms of mediation are “plural vectors,”3 propensities of matter that have not been intervened by human hands and which have not been processed industrially. This propensity for materiality to resist discourse suggests that even when brute matter appears inanimate, inert, dead, it is in forceful motion. Brute matter transports and transmits; it transduces, transfers, transfigures, transforms, and transfuses— clearly, elemental media act across (hence the etymon “trans”). It has become necessary to make a distinction between “grafting” and “graphicating.” For instance, it is important to differentiate between the marks created by the forces of earth on the walls of a cave and the lines marked on the walls by humans (sapiens and neanderthals alike). At times, the two lines may overlap, or one line may seamlessly feed the other, but there is a difference. Grafting involves the making of marks and imprints on a material surface by nonhuman forces. In the case of cave “art” more specifically, grafting refers to the volumes and shapes carved by water on limestone, or the

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cracks caused by geophysical pressure, or the changes in coloring caused by chemical processes and bacterial life. The world of the graphic, on the other hand, involves a universe of marks derived from a human technique and/or technology of communication, such as alphabetic writing (calligraphy), spray painting (aerography), painting and drawing (the so-called graphic arts), the making of coded movement (choreography), the capture of images through light-exposure (photography), the artistic capture of moving images via a film technological medium (cinematography), and so on. Painting does not have to be purely graphic. Cave paintings, as I have shown in previous chapters, are a case in point. The imagery found in caves like Lascaux and Chauvet do not emerge as purely graphic images, but first and foremost as grafts, that is, as naturally occurring lines and shapes found on the limestone walls. The same applies to poetic writing. Poetry is not merely a collection of graphic words and a demonstration of orthographic and calligraphic skills by the author. On the contrary, perhaps one of the defining aspects of poetry is that it frees the word from its purely symbolic status, from a metaphysical enslavement, in order to function as sound, as rhythm, as cadence, as something more material and sensual, and as something more connected to an elemental graft. Under the surface of material poetry lies the image as grafted by elemental forces, an underwriting expressed by nonhuman means. Thus, poetic writing can emerge from patterns of air, water, earth, fire. In Bachelard’s words: “It is the graft which can truly provide the material imagination with an exuberance of forms, which can transmit the richness and density of matter to formal imagination .  .  . and for the creation of a poetic work.”4 I am in Maurice Blanchot territory here. In Blanchot’s understanding, there are two ways of reading. One is a rational way of reading, which involves the deciphering of symbols and signs whose semiotic value is given a priori. Then there is a prophetic and sibylline way of reading based on the capacity to interpret flows of air, flights of birds, animal entrails, patterns of parched earth, or more pertinently, a limestone wall inside a cave. As Blanchot puts it, this type of reading emerges from movement, and it is epitomized by “the beast of Lascaux”—the invisible animal suggested or muttered by material surfaces of rocks, trees, clouds, rippled waters, and which excites



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the imagination, causing the graphic image to appear. Blanchot knew that the kinesthetic utterance comes not from deductive or inductive reasoning, but from oracular intuition. Movement, in the case of the volumes of a limestone wall, is a brute fact: it cannot be explained. In the essay “The Beast of Lascaux”, Blanchot proposed that the oracular utterance starts, like the unnamable beast, from the “sweetest and most secret movement”—“a place that is already before everything.”5 Where is this place? Blanchot provides some clues. To be able to access this oracular way of reading, it is necessary to incubate what Blanchot calls a “dark contemplation.” “Dark contemplation” is the possibility of seeing things without reasoning, and without a blanket of orthographic, orthodoxic, or ortho-optical vision. It is only then, Blanchot argues, when there is no rule left to tame the senses, that the poet can write. The poet must access a “first writing,” written in a darkness without origin. Graphic writing (the writing you are reading right now) is for Blanchot a “second writing,”6 clarified and arrested by reason. Writing is nothing if it does not involve a writer diving into brute matter, from where the poet recovers the movements and flows of the material graft. It is interesting that the idea of a dark contemplation for Blanchot should involve an act of blinding and a capacity to see through veils of obscure and irrational vision. Blanchot is suggesting that what blinds us, in a reverse of Socratic philosophy, is logocentrism, while the poetic vision allows us to peek into life in itself. Like the dogs of reason in Lacan’s parable, which Freud must avoid to reach the cave, dark contemplation hinges on a paleo condition of communication where there is no meaning, no rationally explained fact, no divine force. Only brute facts and brute forces—unexplained. The “Beast of Lascaux” does not refer to the graphic image of the giant bulls found inside this famous cave. The beast is not the ochre paint, so vividly applied on the limestone rock. It is not the charcoal outline of the massive aurochs. The “beast” does not refer to the rounded walls of the cupola-like cavity. The beast is the energy that connects the two, the matter and the memory. The beast of Lascaux has no taxonomy. It is neither an auroch, nor indeed any of the other animal species depicted in the Lascaux cave. The “beast” is a mediating energy that dwells wherever there is life. It inhabits the implied movements of rock felt by the sentient body, which can evoke in the human mind the affective

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power of animal motion. To encounter the beast of Lascaux is not a matter of pinning down the movement to a graphic image or to a choreographed movement. The beast of Lascaux is always becoming something other; it is always eluding a finalized and definitive being. This is why the graphic images depicted on the walls of the cave by prehistoric peoples could be interpreted as approximations, tendentious at best, of that unnamable beast. That is why the paintings are left incomplete. They cannot be completed. To paint the walls does not involve, in my perverted use of Blanchot’s idea, a representation of the Beast of Lascaux, but its expression as unrepeatable, unexplainable, and incomplete event. If the prehistoric painters of Lascaux deliberately and persistently exploited graphic conventions such as anamorphism, overlapping, and incompleteness, it is surely because they were accessing a felt presence that could not be completely known or revealed graphically, despite being felt. By contrast, the content of Yahweh’s writing is the message. It has to be deciphered as a remote and unfelt emission of a judgment in heaven relayed to Daniel in terms of what the words mean, and what the words spell out orthographically and orthodoxically: doom. The oracular portent of the beast of Lascaux, quite the contrary, is devoid of meaning and message, and yet it is hugely significant, as it transmits an energy of some kind. The significance lies in the capacity for transmission media to involve the body. Transmission, according to my understanding, involves the relaying of energy (signal), as opposed to the relaying of language (sign). The significance lies in the ecological and ethical implications of this transmission, since the wall, at least in Blanchot’s understanding, is not blanked over by the imposition of written language. On the contrary, unlike the universe that is instituted as a result of Yahweh’s writing on the wall, this act of transmission from the walls establishes a media ecology between body and land that sustains culture from rocky walls— from raw nature.

Speaking of walls Wordplay can be fun, even more so when words are strange and their meaning is unknown. Take the words “parietalism,” “parietism,” and “pareidolia.” How



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many of my readers will be familiar with them? Not many, I suspect. No matter: I would like to propose a game with my reader. Although the words sound similar, they come from different roots (Greek and Latin), and from completely different etymons. Not all three are existing words. One of them is a neologism, a word that I have come up with. Can my reader guess which one it is? The study of prehistoric wall paintings, engravings, and flutings is known as “parietalism” (from the Latin paries, or wall). Parietalism, a term synonymous with “cave art,” is more commonly used in French scholarly circles. Parietalism is a modern-day professional activity. “Parietalist” is just a fancier way of saying “cave art historian.” Although cave art historians like Jean Clottes or Michel Lorblanchet, to mention two well-known parietalists, have made significant contributions to the popular dissemination of knowledge about prehistoric cave sites, it is not the expert’s perspective, nor indeed the evidence-based perspective, that concerns me here. There are many questions that a parietalist tends to omit in their work. For a start, the parietalist often goes straight to the panels inside a cave containing man-made imagery, or at the very least, deems the man-made image the principal object of the scientific study. What is ignored quite often is not only the landscape itself, but also the possibility that the images contained inside prehistoric caves are not objects of human subjectivity, and that they cannot be reified as objects of art and science without imposing a historical perspective that is effectively alien to paleo ways of communication. By dealing with the artwork and the cave as separate categories, the art historian assumes that the images were made by human subjects. The power of the rock to transmit seems to bear no significance. Psychologists and neuroscientists have gone down the prehistoric cave in order to advance a cognitive approach, which is likewise problematic, in my view. Among the well-known advocators of this approach is the South African parietalist David Lewis-Williams. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) and shamanism are the explanations given by Lewis Williams for the appearance of prehistoric images on caves at the global scale. Thus, Lewis Williams believes that the reason why images appear on walls, and the reason why they appear in nonrealistic and often abstract manner, is given the hallucinogenic effects

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of cave immersion (drug induced trance). The induced visions are said to be neuro-psychologically wired in the human brain. What the neuroscientific perspective omits is the possibility that not everything that happens in the cave is the work of the human brain or mind, and that not only the human mind is responsible for the phenomenon of image-making. In other words, the neuroscientific approach championed by Lewis Williams is largely anthropocentric, as it locates the whole phenomenon of transmission and communication typified by cave “art” in the modern human brain, rather than an ecological entanglement of landscape and mindscape. Another cognitivist thesis that has been put forward as a possible explanation for the appearance of images on prehistoric cave walls is “pareidolia.” From Greek para (beyond or over)  +  eidolon (appearance of form), pareidolia typically involves a stimulus wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern (a face, a body shape), where none actually exists. Pareidolia is a scientific notion that is used to explain why people see a face on the moon, or faces on the rock surface of Mars, or bodies in cloud formations and other atmospheric phenomena. That the people who painted the polychromes of Altamira and the bulls of Lascaux saw animals in motion on the walls does not mean that the entire process is locked in their anatomical brains. Despite attempts to expand the notion of mind within recent cognitive prehistory and cognitive archaeology, the narrow prescription of the cave to a human subjectivity and to the cultural function of “art” remains a point of contention. My intention is not to reject the scientific literature offhand, but to forge a very different path to the cave that does not seek objective solutions and anthropogenic explanations. Some readers may raise eyebrows and imagine that what I have in mind is a strictly philosophical gambit. However, as I have pointed out in numerous occasions throughout this book, although I have consulted materialist and new materialist literature, this book is a campaign for brute thinking—not armchair philosophy. The cave is a site that encourages brute experience and brute facts, rather than overarching and heavy-lifting scientific explanations. A universal theory of cave art seems to entirely sweep the specificity and the heterogeneity of real-world experience under the carpet. If I am having to reject parietalism and pareidolia as terms of reference, it is because I must offer the term “parietism” instead, which is vaguer and more open-ended.



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Parietism is an invented term (did you guess?). The term could be defined (or not) as a cultural belief in the power of walls to “speak.” As a purely speculative spiritual belief system, parietism could be said to be grounded on the idea that a natural wall is a permeable medium that seamlessly connects body and wall within a material form of mediation. As French parietalist Jean Clottes explains, “a wall can talk to us. A wall can [either] accept or reject us.”7 The wall is a permeable medium that responds, positively or negatively, to earthling provocations and invocations. For Clottes, the makers of cave paintings in Ice Age Europe did not randomly apply their image-making technologies on whichever wall they happen to chance upon. The choice of walls is of great significance. The common utilization of smooth surfaces and walls that could be scraped to produce a whitening of the limestone rock, coupled with the predilection for undulating and voluminous walls, implies, at least according to Clottes, that common material features were conventionalized in the practice of indigenous European parietism. We are reminded by Clottes that from the perspective of an Upper Paleolithic individual, “there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of the spirits,” and the French parietalist adds: a person can “send his or her spirit to [a wall] or can receive the visit, inside him or her.”8 As I intimated in Chapter 3, Clottes has put forward a speculative framework for the understanding of what I call a paleo ontology. Paleo ontology (not to be confused with the science of paleontology) refers to a vision of life and a worldview defined by an appreciation of raw nature, which is grounded on indigenous culture. The four principles which, based on Clottes’s analysis, define an indigenous European paleo ontology, are interconnection, fluidity, complexity, and permeability.9 In Clottes’s framework, interconnection refers to an ancestry and descendance that is common to human and nonhuman animals. Thus, a bear could be an ancestor, or a recently deceased member of the clan. A bison could be a prospective grandchild. Fluidity, on the other hand, is a term Clottes uses to identify a particular condition of Upper Paleolithic thought, determined by a very unique use of language. Clottes has suggested that in Upper Paleolithic times, it is possible that conceptual categories, and perhaps even words, were not fixed to semantic meaning, but to material contexts. Thus, Clottes draws on a comparative analysis of the

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language of the Sami of northern Norway and Lapland to argue that Upper Paleolithic peoples may have used spoken language in a fluid and fast-changing way (not least given the absence of writing technology). Indeed, words could have been made up or modified in context to account for the heterogeneity of material contingency. This way of using language as a concrete tool embedded in the material world supports, according to Clottes’s speculative analysis, a worldview where all things are liable to change, and where “the categories we have: man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift”; he adds: “A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way round, given certain circumstances.”10 Language itself may have been deliberately fluid in Upper Paleolithic times to facilitate an understanding of reality that was also, as is clear from the conventions of parietal art previously discussed, ambivalent, ambiguous, and ever-changing. The concept of complexity, in Clottes’s framework, echoes a notion I have repeatedly mentioned in this book. Life does not present itself in clear scientific facts, but in brute phenomena and brute facts, often unexplainable even by science. The world of indigenous European peoples, I would argue, was a world of unknown, unexplained, and unfathomable powers and energies. Locked as I am in a rationalist history defined by scientific knowledge, it is impossible for me to fully comprehend a paleo ontology. Knowledge, at least in an Upper Paleolithic context, may have not been explained or rationally communicated. In the case of Upper Paleolithic cultures, it is conceivable that traditional knowledge was transmitted and revealed. If so, knowledge would have been assumed to be complex. It could not be abstracted and synthesized to form high-level discourse. It would have had to be experienced, and the experience would have had to be transmitted as directly as possible to sustain a system of environmentally conditioned knowledge. Finally, Clottes’s framework posits that indigenous European worldviews may be speculatively defined in relation to the concept of permeability. Permeability, in Clottes’s analysis, means that matter is porous, at least in a speculative Upper Paleolithic worldview. Raw matter is always exuding or emitting energy. Clottes’s conceptualization resonates with my understanding of cave “art” as transmission media. Permeability likewise hinges on an appreciation of the passage of energy through matter (perceived as movement, sound, color, shape, texture, and so on). It is not only limestone



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that is permeable and can let the energy—the spirit— of a wall through. An animal’s body is also permeable, as is a bone, a hand, a tree. If cave walls could speak, they would say extraordinary things about Ice Age life. My point is, they do speak. The energy passing from stone to bone and back should not be understood as a metaphysical being: an angel, a messenger, a holy ghost, an apparition, a miraculous Virgin in the cave. Cave painting is not a mediumistic activity, in my opinion. Subterranean landscape media is not necessarily a means of communication with individual spirits, or dead people, certainly not in the modern sense proposed by spiritualist practitioners. I have no way of knowing what Upper Paleolithic peoples did when they spent time caved up in those dark underground galleries. I speak for myself, not for them. Their views and ideas are lost forever. In my experience, too many human lives are implicated there, too many individual stories and memories have accumulated on those walls filled with paintings and engravings. What is passing from stone to bone and back is not necessarily the ghost of an ancestor, but a collection of ancestral energies that brings back the memory of living earth itself in the calling.

Colors of Altamira The persistence of the color red in Upper Paleolithic caves has given archaeologists a handle of the significance of ochre in prehistoric forms of cultural transmission. Perhaps Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers established a cultural consanguinity between wall and body, between ochre and blood. According to Leroi-Gourhan, “the use of ochre is particularly intensive [in Upper Paleolithic Europe]: it is not unusual to find a layer of the cave floor impregnated with a purplish red to a depth of eight inches.” And he adds: The coloring is so intense that in some cases all the loose ground seems to consist of ochre [which is why] one can imagine that the Aurignacians regularly painted their bodies red, dyed their animal skins, coated their weapons, and sprinkled the ground of their dwellings, and that a paste of ochre was used for decorative purposes in every phase of their domestic life.

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Leroi-Gourhan concludes: “We must assume no less, if we are to account for the veritable mines of ochre on which some of them lived.”11 Based on Leroi-Gourhan’s observation, ochre paint can be considered a lifegiving and somatic function to the extent that the pigment can be placed in the mouth in order to be applied as an aerographic medium; it can be applied on the skin and hair; or it can be associated symbolically with blood. A process of mediation, from one wall or mineral surface to another, is taking place inside the prehistoric cave. Mediation is not limited to an effort to connect one human and another via a social activity, but also to a process of connecting different material surfaces, different walls, and different mineral lives across a journey of producibility and creativity. Nor was the mineral ochre reserved for wall painting alone. Rather, ochre served as a multifunctional medium, a coating that filled the space of separation between wall and bodily skin, wall and clothing, wall and floor. Ochre paint acquires, if we adopt Leroi-Gourhan’s speculative interpretation, a vital function as all-mediating substance. Paint itself is a super-medium that fills the otherwise dead space between bone and stone, human and humus. If this speculative reading of the power of ochre as medium is anything to go by, then the process of mediation is not confined to the activity of painting, but also to the ritual process of making ochre pigments out of hematite minerals, the process of mixing it with spit or human blood, or applying it onto the skin, or onto clothing and tools, etc. Since the power of mediacy is not the sole preserve of the human painter, but is also found in the power of ochre paint itself, the paintings created by Upper Paleolithic image-makers are powerful not only because the walls speak through them, but also because the sacred paint, full of mineral life, spit, and blood, is also speaking. The walls of prehistoric paintings speak vividly because the paint is understood to be a living agent as much as the rock or the human vessel through which that agency expresses itself. On January 30, 2015, as part of the framework of the Research Program for Preventive Conservation and Accessibility led by the board of the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, I was granted special access to one of the most well-known sites of Upper Paleolithic Europe. The cave of Altamira is located on a south-facing and gentle slope overlooking hilly fields only a few miles from the small town of Santillana del Mar, in the northeastern



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Spanish region of Cantabria. Outside the cave it was pouring with rain and the temperature was a mere 6 degrees Celsius. Inside, the cave was a balmy 14 degrees. The air was saturated—very atmospheric. The darkness inside hit me like a wave of movement without sound or water, without air. A wave of rock. The Hall of Polychromes, perhaps the most famous cache of prehistoric images contained in this cave, is located not far from the entrance. In prehistoric times, before the natural entrance collapsed and sealed the cavity’s interior, this great hall would have been situated close to the so-called twilight zone, which is the threshold beyond which the cave is engulfed in pitch blackness, meaning some light may have made its way (albeit not enough to serve as natural illumination for the painters). The chamber in question looks like a man-made room with low ceilings and rectangular cornices, caused by the unique geomorphology of this cave. There is a rock jutting out from the floor in the middle of the hall, knee-high and rectangular, like a bench. We are told that this is in fact the original floor level of the cave, which has been dug up and removed as part of centuries of archaeological excavation. Diggers have not only thrashed the gallery for hidden treasures. They have also lowered the floor level, so that people no longer have to crouch and squeeze their way into this tight gallery to observe the prehistoric paintings. The painted ceiling now hangs comfortably above the visitor’s head. I am able to adopt the position of an art gallery visitor. I stand there, with the swellings of rock bulging above my head, itching for touch. There are many images in this famous hall, concentrated in the middle of the ensemble. You can see a single large deer drawn in black and ochre colored at the far end, and two horses, also at the far end, toward the right as you come in. The ceiling is otherwise full of vibrantly colored bison. The alleged organization of the animals is, according to Leroi-Gourhan’s now discredited interpretation, a deliberate attempt to represent a division between the female, symbolized as centrally located bison, and the male, symbolized as the peripheral animals (deer and horse). It is easy for anyone to see that the ceiling is not consistent in style, technique, or subject matter. Also near the far end of the vault, and near the center, one finds abstract symbols painted in red ochre, nonfigurative in style, which archaeologists have dated to the Aurignacian period (more or less 35,000  years ago). The symbols look like

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adjoining arches and arrow heads. Meanwhile, the painted bison are usually dated to the Magdalenian era (circa 15,000 years ago). With a hiatus of around 20,000 years, and an intermittent visitation to the site, the idea that this ceiling forms a unified work seems highly improbable. As with Chauvet, however, the figures found suspended on the ceiling of the Great Hall reveal a noticeable connection with the cave’s morphology. The ceiling is characterized by a series of fairly rounded bulges of yellowish limestone rock that hang like giant egg yolk. The bison group was drawn and painted onto the rock in a surface area that fits tightly within the central area of the ceiling. The individual animals, meanwhile, are drawn so as to fit within these bulges, which provide a natural shape for the delineation of bison bodies in different position. Thus, the bulging of the rock offers itself for the delineation of the characteristic hump of the bison, the curvature of the hind legs, or the tail. Insofar as the natural shape of these bulges is oblong, at least four of the bison were drawn and painted in crouching position—legs flexed under the torso. These animals are depicted resting or sleeping. The so-called Crouching Bison of Altamira is one of the most well-known and most reproduced images of the whole complex. The person or people who made this figure was/were able to fit the figure of the bison onto the rocky protuberance, folding its legs and forcing the position of the head down, leaving only tail and horns outside the oblong volume of the natural rock. Although the image-makers only had two colors at their disposal, that is, ochre and charcoal, they used the natural yellow of the back wall to highlight certain areas, as you can see from the drawing in Figure 12. The dark areas in my illustration represent charcoal, the shaded areas represent ochre, and the white areas are the yellowish limestone rock, which are imaginatively exploited to emphasize the volume and depth of the image. The Altamira polychromes owe their many-colored dynamism to a creative interaction between man-made colors and naturally occurring colors on the limestone. The images are known as polychromes, meaning many colored, precisely because they fuse colors applied to the walls by painters and colors that emerges naturally from the creamy limestones. This capacity to extract multicolored images from the wall suggests a detailed observation of the rock in a kind of chromatic haptics, or chromatic touch. Music can be described as chromatic, in the sense that a chromatic scale



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Figure 12  The Crouching Bison of Altamira. Drawing by the author

is spatialized in relation to twelve equidistant semitones or twelve pitches that are musical equivalents of the twelve colors in the color wheel. The ceiling of Altamira is chromatic not in this rationalized, abstract, and Newtonian sense, but in the sense that color is a felt property of material distinctions. When observing the Ceiling of the Polychromes, and caught up in a dark kind of contemplation, I could imagine my right index finger running along the limestones. Of course, I was not allowed to place a hand on the Altamira limestones. Nonetheless, I suspect that the prehistoric painters also imagined touch, and haptically explored the rock before they actually started painting. They must have worked their way through the rock using this haptic imagination, not least because the graphic imagery is so neat, so crisp, so free of mistakes, it shows that the image-makers were painting over an image they had already crystallized quite clearly in their imagination. Their haptic imagination was colorful. Before the color was applied in graphic terms onto the walls, they haptically sensed and touched these colors. While I stood there, I imagined other bulls in other bulges of the rock which had not been painted,

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and I could imagine running my fingers dabbed in charcoal, gently delineating the form of a new bull. The way you touch the rock the first time, after haptically imagining it, is soft, like a very fine gray. You do not want to touch too firmly, for fear of making a bold line that will destroy the image that is being evoked by the walls. The first layer of touch is more tentative, full of small and light flicks. But as the graft starts to acquire a graphic visual, and as the graphic image of the bison starts to appear optically, so the color of my touch starts to change, and the charcoal-dabbed fingers (or brushes, in the case of the prehistoric imagemakers of Altamira) start to rub along the walls more firmly, more vigorously, with bolder colors. The hump rises along the bulging rock and drops again, the hind legs curve along the rock, as does the curving ribcage. This haptic imagination that enables me to imagine how it would feel like to touch the walls is nuanced by a varying sense of texture on the walls. Thus, I can haptically sense the difference between touching the rough and grainy surface of limestone, and the sensation of a crack, or a vein of tiny white crystals. I feel, as I touch haptically these walls, that these differences of texture and tactile quality are also differences in color. In fact, the natural colors of the Altamira walls in this particular section of the cave are creamy yellow (the limestone), white (the small veins of crystallization), and black (the cracks), all of which feel very differently to the touch. Even if I were blind, or if I were sensing the ceiling in complete darkness, I would be able to detect these colors as I run my fingers through the walls in the act of real touch. Even with my eyes closed, I would be able to touch these colors, and identify them, through a tactile-kinesthetic sense of the difference in rock texture. The Altamira ceiling does not only reveal a vivid imagination, but also a refined sense of haptic and tactile chromaticism. Hapticity covers the gap between vision and touch. The haptic encounter also elicits the opening of an imagination out of matter, in the sense that visualizing touch stimulates the imagination, the softer landscape. In other words, hapticity enables the image-hunter to extract imaginary figures out of the contours and lines of rock. Hapticity also enables the sensitive imagehunter to locate spaces between what he sees in the mind’s eye and what he sees with the optical eye, opening up a mediating zone where the Beast of



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Lascaux (or the Beast of Altamira, in this case) dwells. The Beast of Altamira refers to the Crouching Bison, imagined before it is graphically imaged. It is the graftic (bulges or cracks insinuating a shape) before the graphic. Before the graphic drawing lies the haptic vision. Altamira is thus not only polychromatic and multilayered, but also made of many layers of sensation and color, starting with the material rock, the haptic sensation, the optical sensation, and the material imagination that spreads itself over every one of these layers. As I stand there, I am enraptured by that haptic color that hangs from the ceiling. The hands of my eyes catch this beast peeling off the ceiling before it falls into the pervading darkness. Altamira also encapsulates a pre-synthetic sense of pigmentation. In a world of pre-synthetic color, a given pigment is not removed from its thingness. Color is not something that the painter can take for granted in his/ her wheel, as though color existed in twelve tones. These are abstract colors, rationalized colors. You find them in color wheels, or in colored pencil sets, or oil painting and acrylic painting sets. You find them in the abstract color theories of Newton and Goethe. But in wild nature, you do not find color as an independent entity, like the colors in a chart, wheel, or scale. Wild color is not something independent of matter. In a pre-synthetic sense, rose is the color of a flower, amber is the color of a rock, turquoise is the color of a stone, charcoal is the color of a burned wood, and ochre is the color of hematite minerals. There is no separation of color from material things that yield a particular coloration. Thus, color emerges not as an art material, but as a thing that has a character, a property, and a life of its own. Color is an event. To judge from the finesse in the use of charcoal, hematite ochre, and limestone yellows in Altamira cave, the image-makers of prehistoric Cantabria perhaps understood only too well that the event that is the material appearance of color on a rock, a flower, an animal’s fur, a human eye, is a signal of life. As such, the word “color” does not have to mean something literal, as in the color red, the color blue, or the color yellow. The word can suggest something far vaguer, something harder to pin down, as in “the color of magic,” “the color of spring,” or “the color of music.” In this case, the color of a crouching bison refers to an energy that is differentiated by the senses and is inseparable from a human capacity to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the world in a

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rich array of tones, shades, and hues. It is this richness of tone that reveals the energy permeating matter, or the energy that passes through permeable matter, going back to Clottes’s framework. In sum, color is the means through which the energy of matter is transmitted. Color is not a choice that the artist can make, but a revelation. Raw nature reveals color in the vibrant tones of limestone rock, in the blood-like intensity of hematite ochre, in the virtuous blackness of charcoal. Because color is revealed by matter, and to the extent that color is the sign of the energy that inhabits matter, color is not necessarily perceived optically, at least in my conceptualization. Like Blanchot’s Beast of Lascaux, the colors of Altamira are also invisible. Color refers to an energy that can be transmitted, but which is not confined to its appearance in graphic media. Color, in the sense I have used here, comes before painting—color is the imagination before the image, the haptic sensation before the optical sense. Color is the spirit before the body, the life of an animal before its material appearance on the bulging rocks.

Hill against hillside Gary Hill is considered a foundational figure in experimental art media, particularly after his pioneering use of video in the context of installationbased art. Hill’s exploration of the physicality of video, the interactions between linguistic and visual languages, and the problems of synesthesia are relevant to some of the core themes of Upper Paleolithic parietism and my preceding examination of the crouching bison of Altamira. In 2010, as part of the DreamTime II (Fantasmagoria) exhibition,12 Hill presented his work at the Patrimonial Cave of Mas d’Azil. The projection of Hill’s video work on the limestone walls of Mas d’Azil offer an interesting contrast between screenbased and parietal media. The specific work chosen for this exhibition was a piece by Hill entitled Up Against Down, which had seen its US premiere at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia in March 2009. Up Against Down consists of six projections showing discrete parts of the artist’s body forcibly pressing or pushing against an invisible surface. The video image is complemented by amplification of



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low-frequency sine waves that are modulated by the body’s pressure. Although the original piece was staged in a gallery space, and so revealed no definite context, no sense of what that physical opposition on the walls actually refers to, the piece has subsequently been presented in situ in a number of significant locations. In addition to the prehistoric cave of Mas d’Azil, the piece has been shown at the Chiesa di San Francesco, in Cuneo, where the connotations are of course very different. Up Against Down stands in Hill’s repertoire along another similar work entitled Wall Piece, in which the artist likewise explored the medium of the wall as a force of creative resistance. Wall Piece is a video installation that shows the artist hitting the material surface of an invisible wall in very short snippets, revealing different body shapes that are captured in an almost saccadic manner given the deliberately jerky editing of the video. The images are accompanied by vocalizations performed every time the artist’s body hits the wall. This confrontation between body and wall opens a number of questions concerning the aleatory and serendipitous nature of shape formation. Likewise, the piece reveals that the activity of bumping or hitting against a hard surface is a potent reminder of what the video image in fact lacks. Reality is that which we bump into in the Lacanian sense (more on this to come). This provocation to bump into solid matter opens up the question: What kind of reality does video media afford, if the brute body cannot actually hit upon, grab, or break into the flatscreen? Trying to establish contact through video, as Hill shows, is like a Sisyphus myth for the electronic age. In the case of Up Against Down, the video image shows the artist engaged in the activity of bumping against something unknown, or not yet determined. In the artist’s own words, Up Against Down is about “bumping up against one’s own Other”; he adds: “Basically, Up Against Down might as well be Up against death, Up against time, Up against other, Up against the unknown, Up against the ambiguity. The list goes on and on.”13 The medium of video is therefore used to express a critical sense of separation between the body and a sense of Other that cannot be broken into, and against which the body always bounces back. Hill’s work only exposes the lack of materiality and lack of physical resistance of video as medium and the fundamental gap that the screen creates between the body and a materiality the body cannot hit upon. To the extent that the

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work is intended to be presented in situ, and the site-specific exhibition of the work happens to be a prehistoric limestone cave, the piece also commits itself to a transmedia exploration of the similarities and differences of video and wall media. The image of Hill’s body parts pressing against the walls of Mas d’Azil directs the attention to another body, which are the bones of the hillside. Hill against hillside. The work takes on its own valence in this particular cave, not least since Mas d’Azil contains a number of prehistoric wall engravings, including a rare figure of a human head in profile, called the “mask,” which is situated in a subterranean gallery currently closed to the general public. As with other Upper Paleolithic “masks” (for instance those found in the cave of Altamira), the Mas d’Azil mask is drawn from the natural volumes, fissures, and shapes of the cave wall, in this case through the addition of a few incisions made by the Ice Age image-maker on the wall surface suggesting a cheek and a bearded chin. Charcoal was also applied to highlight the eye and nose. Although Hill’s video installation was not projected directly onto the prehistoric mask, but onto a wall located in a man-made tunnel carved within this cave network, it is nonetheless interesting that Hill’s head in the video image is seen pressing against the wall in a rightward direction, whereas the Mas d’Azil mask is depicted in a profile left-facing direction. For DreamTime II curator Pascal Pique, Up Against Down evokes two heads that are hitting upon each other, even though the video is not directly projected onto the prehistoric mask. As Pique points out, “after nearly fifteen thousand years, the meeting of these two heads is rather deafening.” He adds: “It is as if, through time, space, and matter, the two artists who realized these works understood each other—as if both of them, beyond their specific languages and technologies, had been able to define an intermediate space, an interval enabling them to communicate.”14 Like the hand to hand connection established when a contemporary cave visitor places a hand on a hand-stencil or mark left by a prehistoric visitor tens of thousands of years ago, wall media has the power to communicate over vast expanses of earthly time. It is not a common subjectivity, a shared “we” that affirms the transhistorical connection between Gary Hill and the Mas d’Azil mask, between Hill and hillside. The common denominators are materiality and physicality.



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The confrontation between Hill and hillside also evokes a complete miscommunication, or at least, an irresolvable tension between the two heads. Whereas the Mas d’Azil mask is coming out of the wall, Gary Hill’s giant projected head is bumping and pushing against the rock in order to seek an entry point back into the rock. You can see the effort in Hill’s body. His extremities are quivering under the strain, and the veins on his neck are protruding. It is hard to tell why Hill wants to enter the rock. However much he tries, he remains there, always on this side, forever forced to the Sisyphuslike task of pushing the rock that does not yield. The piece also evokes a clash of two media. The projection of a video image onto the cave wall brings us back to the shadows in Plato’s cave. That Plato’s parable of the cave should often be referenced in media theory, especially in relation to screen-based media, is not surprising. Many scholars have referenced Plato to illustrate the idea of a prehistoric form of media communication, often referred to as proto-cinema. Plato’s description of a pseudo-reality through the projective means of fire in a dark enclosure anticipates, according to this theory, modern technologies of screen-based media, not least cinema, video, and Virtual Reality. Parietism, on the other hand, does not have to do with the projection of images onto walls and a communicational power whose source is external to the material surface. Rather, parietism is a cultural practice that affirms the emanation of the image from the material wall. Parietism is not a rubric that I have used to characterize a religious belief, a superstition, or media religion. By parietism, I mean the belief in rock’s energy, and the power of rock to transmit. I also mean the facilitation of a material way of thinking through the porosity of limestone rock, which channels the permeability and fluidity of an Upper Paleolithic worldview, going back to Clottes’s framework. Parietism is a way of thinking that pays attention to what walls reveal. It is a way of thinking that does not take the wall for granted. Parietism does not assume that the wall is an inert surface upon which to write. Parietism understands that the wall would like to live, or rather come alive with palpitations whose living movement and color must be grasped now, even today, despite the disembodied mediation of video technology.

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Prehistories of Media I: Immersion I walked to prehistory Mas d’Azil is a massive cave system located in the Ariège region of the French mid-Pyrenees, the typesite for the so-called Azilian culture. The copious river Arize cuts through the Plantaurel limestone massif, forming a natural tunnel more than fifty meters in height. The cave is so big, not only does it let in the rolling waters of the river, but the D119 motorway also runs through the cavern, along a bending section. Wedged between river and motorway is a pedestrian path, which leads the visitor from the cave’s southern entrance to the Centre d’Interpretation du Mas d’Azil, located mid-tunnel. The interpretation center leads visitors to a vast network of deeper limestone galleries carved by the river, featuring subterranean sites turned into theatre spaces for hologram performance and galleries reserved for contemporary and digital art. The path is known as the Walk of Prehistory, and it features a 500-meter-long timeline recounting major events from the emergence of anatomically modern humans to the domestication of fire or the appearance of the first known European cave paintings. It takes around six minutes to do the walk at leisurely pace. The Mas d’Azil walk demonstrates how vast the period known as prehistory is when compared to the historical age. The distance between the beginning of modern anatomical humanity (nearly 200,000 years ago) and the emergence of modern cultural behavior at the outset of the Upper Paleolithic adds up to roughly two-thirds of the walk, more or less a four-minute stroll. The distance between the beginning of modern cultural behavior in the Upper Paleolithic and the beginning of recorded history takes another two minutes. The distance between year zero and the present is two steps. The historical age amounts to a mere two steps in a six-minute walk. Experiencing prehistory in this way reveals

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something quite profound. Our human species has been on this planet for a limited expanse of time, the vast majority of which has been spent in so-called prehistoric living conditions. This prehistoric state is characterized by little material change, at least when compared to the vertiginous changes occurring since the development of industrialization and the advent of the digital age. Perhaps the most effective aspect of this didactic walk is its immersive nature. It is one thing to describe in words the depth of prehistory. It is another thing to walk it. Over the course of the Walk of Prehistory, you leave the open air behind. As you make your way into the Mas d’Azil cave, the space gets darker and darker, the river’s resonance grows in intensity, the sound of passing cars reverberates, and the air becomes saturated and humid. The Walk of Prehistory is a sensory experience. Prehistory is not just an abstract timeline. To the extent that prehistoric time is physicalized, a sense of duration and physical distance can be felt as you enter Mas d’Azil. Prehistory is a temporality without line, without chronologies or chronometers. It is a vast and profoundly immersive duration measured in steps. Elapsing physically, temporality becomes a material rhythm unfolding in the natural environment, as light exterior turns to dark interior, day to night, and summer to winter. Prehistory is contemporaneous to that physical and landesque sense of all things passing. The experience also reveals that the cave has served as a prime medium for an immersive transmission of culture for at least forty thousand years, and that written history is but a tiny dip in that vast human journey. In other words, human culture has been transmitted in nature-immersive ways for tens of thousands of years. It is only in the last few hundred years, during that tiny dip we call history, that human culture has been communicated via the technology of recorded symbols and language. It is only in the last two steps of that walk that technology gains an independence, an agency of its own. Italian architect and essayist Maurizio Corrado renders the idea in a graphic manner, thus: ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _._ The broken line represents prehistory, the basis of which is what Corrado calls our “mobile years.”1 The lowered section on the right-hand side of the line represents recorded history, initiated by the outbreak of writing technologies. To think that prehistory has been completely left behind is problematic, to



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say the least. Prehistory is not what comes before history, or what history left behind, but what remains latent inside a world defined by abstract forms of communication such as alphabetic or alphanumerical writing. Although the outbreak of history, which is marked by the invention of these linear systems of recorded and remote communication, is characterized by purely mental immersion, the bodily and sensory sense of immersion felt in the cave has not been left behind or forgotten. Prehistory resurfaces again and again in historical eras through various forms of media immersion that are nonlinear and nonalphabetic. Marshall McLuhan argued that between preliterate and postliterature societies lies a transhistorical condition of media communication, which he called “acoustic space.”2 Unlike written media, acoustic space media is characterized, at least in McLuhan’s account, by forms of communication that do not privilege linear reasoning, but multisensory and multidirectional communication in surround space. This “acoustic” mode of communication is immersive not only in the mental sense, as writing and reading are, but in a physical and spatial sense. Between pre- and posthistory lies a long arc of material cultural continuity defined by forms of transmission that are embedded in landesque space, and not in the rationalized and linear spatiality of alphabetic communication. To communicate through acoustic space opens up the possibilities of communication to stereo-immersive media ecologies. Similarly, Jonathan Crary has proposed that the archaeology of media is “synonymous with the prehistory of our own present and its technoinstitutional worlds.”3 In other words, the prehistory of media is always present, inasmuch as so-called prehistoric conditions are internal to a technoinstitutional world. Prehistory, as I pointed out in my introduction, refers to the imagination before the technologically recorded image, the memory before the technologically produced recording, the landesque immersion underlying new immersive technologies. In the sense proposed by Crary, which I have embraced in this book, prehistory is a situation defined by a “hovering out of time” or a “suspension.” To understand the recent enthusiasm for new immersive forms of technological mediation, it is important to comprehend its contemporary prehistory. A geological cave establishes a natural division. Past a certain point (usually referred to by cavers as the twilight zone), no vision is possible given zero light

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conditions. Past this twilight zone, daylight abruptly diminishes to zero, hence the natural split between vision and no-vision. Division literally means that you have no more optical perception left at your disposal, unless you carry artificial light with you. What happens as you cross a cave’s threshold is that light levels drop to nil and optical vision is canceled out. Strangely enough, one can still see. It is an odd experience, alas, to be sat in a cave in complete darkness, not least because having one’s eyes open or having them closed, by rule of thumb, amounts to the same thing. Optically, one sees nothing. But as Gaston Bachelard evocatively put it: “In the cave, it seems blackness shines.”4 The cave then functions as a medium for more-than-optical vision, for instance for the opening of the mnemonic vision, the imaginational vision, noetic vision, and hallucination. Natural caves are differentiated environments not only at the visual level. A cave is characterized by its own unique levels of humidity, temperature, and air saturation, as well as echoic resonance, smell, and spatial restriction. Caves are defined by the zonal differentiation of chambers, passageways, and vent holes. Every cave has a “door.” Every cave has a threshold where the outside world is shut behind you, and where physical reality can merge with a psychic sense of the real or the surreal, which the visitor brings to the cave and which the cave teases out of the visitor. The senses can be so geared up and so overstimulated inside a cave that the mind starts to run amuck. Inside caves you find strange things. Walls oscillate, spaces echo, rocks ring, crystals shine, solid rock looks as though it were melting, rock formations look like perfect pearls. Oddly shaped snottites, moonmilks, dripstones, flowstones, and other flights of karstic fancy decorate an outlandish morphology, and alongside them, images created sometimes as far back as forty thousand years ago—images of moving bison, horses, deer, sometimes images of people and therianthropes, sometimes a symbol or two. A differentiation of reality happens as you enter a cave network, which can be utilized in many different cultural ways, such that the unique properties of a cave ecology can be mobilized for the activation of different versions of what McLuhan calls the acoustic space. The cave is ultimately an open-ended canvas for different forms of physical and mental immersion. The cave is an inherently immersive medium, but as I will explain shortly, the kind of immersion that subterranean landscapes



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generate can raise profoundly critical questions about contemporary media culture and the trending development of new immersive technologies. On the subject of shamanic initiation rituals, Mircea Eliade considered that the cave in Paleolithic religions appears to have been decidedly important insofar as the geophysical and sensory demarcation between entrance and deeper cave zones provided the template for a temporal threshold.5 The transition into an immersive cavernous environment was exploited in a great number of traditional cultures, according to Eliade, as a form of initiation ritual, to mark the boundary between a time devoted to secular life and a time for spiritual enterprise. Indeed, the Ancient Greek mytheme of the katabasis or descent journey, popularized by the myth of Orpheus and his epic visit to the underworld, is explored by Eliade as a remnant of archaic belief systems within historical Greek religious thinking. The crossing of the limen and the return of the hero back to the open-air world does not, however, function as a process of separation and division, but on the contrary, as a process of mediation and reintegration. In other words, the cave serves as a vessel, a portal, a medium through which the living connect with the dead (in the Orphic myth at least), where the waking consciousness connects with dream (as in the case of Don Quixote’s fabled visit to the Cueva de Montesinos), where the instrumental sense of the material world meets the essentialized or spiritualized. The discrimination of deeper chambers for the practice of painting and engraving was a cultural convention that was observed throughout the Ice Age, from Aurignacian to Magdalenian eras. During this vast period of almost thirty thousand years, indigenous European communities gave plenty of importance and assigned plenty of cultural value to the experience of cave immersion. Living space was typically confined to the overhangs outside a cave, or else rocky shelters in valleys and gorges. The zones dedicated to immersive cultural expression, and possibly cultural practices of a ritual kind, were found past the threshold zone of the subterranean cave, and quite often in deep recesses. In other words, the practice of immersive media communication and transmission was always conducted near the place where these people dwelled, but not in the dwelling place itself, so as to make a distinction between everyday life and the specialized expression of cultural memory

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and the collective imagination. In Creswell Crags, which is a mile-long gorge located between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (England), and which was visited by prehistoric nomads during the ice-free summer months, engravings are found exclusively in north-facing cavities, while dwelling sites were set up in the sunnier south-facing side of the gorge. Why is this differentiation so significant, if not because of the cultivation of an immersive form of mediated experience inside the darker and cooler crags? In Clayton Eshleman’s words, the fuse of the material imagination is also an imaginative fusion derived from the merging of wilderness and culture. He adds: “Stone walls become a kind of image range containing the application of animal outline on stones as emergence of animals from stone. The facilitator of such two-way traffic must have been the fusion of person and cave, stuff moving out of each [other] in the lamplit or total dark.”6 The impact that immersive experience has on the entanglement of human and nonhuman cannot be stressed enough. In the same way that the energy that interconnects and permeates all things is conceptualized as immanence in Clottes’s paleo ontological framework (see Chapters 3 and 4), so the practicalities of human/nonhuman mediation requires full immersion, and the complete surrendering of the body to the sensory conditions of raw acoustic space. My critical point is this: Upper Paleolithic peoples cultivated an ecological sense of media culture that did not grant technology the supreme power to facilitate mediation. The opposite is true in an age of digital media communication. Unlike technologically dependent communication, which is by definition the making of an artificial world for human-only communication and transmission, the landesque immersion does not, in principle at least, encourage divisions between nature and culture, but embeds media culture within raw nature. Landscape and mediascape are thus the same in this prehistoric ecology. There is no prior differentiation. And to the extent that the digital age is facing the predicament of a critical earth alienation, that is, a radical separation of human life from landesque living and nature-in-theraw due to the primacy of mass-produced technology, mediation once again must be considered in regard to a prehistoric ecology that connected body and land.



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The grotesque immersion Early theories of performance popularized a debatable notion, first put forward by anthropologists like Weston La Barre, that the origins of religion can be found in Paleolithic ritual dance. La Barre drew on the highly controversial image of the Sorcerer of the cave of Trois Frères, an image created by the Abbé Breuil that hardly resembles the original image contained in the cave carved by the river Volp (Ariège). Breuil’s drawing owes much more to images of horned gods in Celtic mythology than the prehistoric charcoal drawing and engraving found in the prehistoric cave site. Not without a degree of romanticism and bias, Richard Schechner latched onto La Barre’s fabricated notion of the Dancing Sorcerer of Trois Frères and wrote, at the height of the paleocybernetic wave of the 1970s, of “dancer-shamans” in “Paleolithic temple-theatres” conducting “prehistoric ritual performance” using “scripts.” By “scripts,” Schechner did not mean written texts. Schechner imagined that the rituals performed in Upper Paleolithic “temple theatres” involved production of speech and sound in patterns of breath and sonority, and he added: “Ordinary speech everywhere is immersed in a sea of exclamatory sounds, stutterings, repetitions, ohs, ahs, and uhs; as well as variations in rhythm, pitch, and volume—a whole language of metaverbal communication giving each utterance its unique and unrepeatable shape and significance.”7 This is perhaps a nod to Antonin Artaud’s notion of “concrete language,” which is independent of speech and which involves the vocalization of onomatopoeias, grunts, animal noises, and other sonorities that communicate in an incantational and purely sensory fashion. Thus, Schechner envisaged Paleolithic phatic rituals as prehistoric antecedents to contemporary immersive physical theatre, Jerzy Grotowski or Antonin Artaud in style. Schechner himself acknowledged his complete ignorance of the Upper Paleolithic world. He argued that one can only speculate what went on in prehistoric caves in the spirit of sixteenth-century cartographers who drew hilarious maps of the New World. It is hilarious, indeed, to think that theatre,

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a historical medium of text-based communication originating in a distinctly urban culture, could be genealogically traced back to Upper Paleolithic times. Schechner struggles to find words to explain what might have occurred in these caves, since he is having to extrapolate historical notions such as “text,” “costume,” “theatre space,” and “performance.” Schechner identified in the “temple theatre” of Lascaux a performance model that is not archaic, but modern. From a performance theory point of view, the cave is conducive to an immersive “theatre” of the senses, like the modern revolutions in theatre art proposed under the banner of theatre of cruelty, total theatre, and poor theatre. In other words, Schechner found a distinctly modern praxis in the prehistoric cave. In the same way that artists like Pablo Picasso found a primitive modernity in the Lascaux paintings, Schechner found in the cave space a theatrical modernity, which parallels developments in theatre history occurring during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when a decisive step away from text-based performance to immersive and site-specific performance characterized the work of a number of avantgarde theatres, not only the abovementioned. The trouble with Schechner’s interpretation is the presupposition that Upper Paleolithic peoples performed phatic rituals inside the caves, in the narrow theatrical sense. Even if, as is customary in many modern-day shamanic practices around the world, Ice Age peoples were not unaware of the power of human physical transformation through ritualized action, this does not necessarily mean that a shaman “performs” a theatrical representation or mimesis in the narrow sense. Schechner interpreted Lascaux and Trois Frères as sites reserved for ritual performance, based on a fundamentally modern distinction between staged and real-world space, between theatrical and landesque immersion. Not all forms of multisensory and multimodal experience, however, betoken the same form of immersion. More recently, Yann-Pierre Montelle has argued that the emergence of theatricality as social practice can be traced to what this author calls “paleoperformance,” that is, theatrical activities supposedly conducted in prehistoric caves. Montelle believes that Ice Age initiates could experience separation from everyday life inside a cave, and that they could be given entry into a secret and liminal realm for specialized cultic knowledge.



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A reintegration into the larger social structure was subsequently performed, at least according to this well-known tripartite theory of ritual praxis (largely due to the work of Arnold van Gennep). The theatre anthropological perspective, both in the case of Schechner and Montelle, ignores the possibility that Ice Age cave visitors may have cultivated a completely different sense of immersion, one that did not feature “acting,” “representing,” or “performing,” nor a sense of “theatricality,” “scenography,” or “stage” in the sense proposed by these authors. In the theatrical sense, performance typically involves (albeit not always) a splitting of the actor’s psychophysical self from the portrayed character. Whereas the agency of theatrical transformation typically hinges upon the human capacity to represent someone else, in the case of subterranean landscape media, the change is not representational. The cave changes how you move, how you breathe, how you touch. In other words, cave immersion is caused not by representation in a theatrical set-up, but by a somatic integration of body and landscape. Ultimately, the difference between a theatrical and a landesque form of immersion rests on the fundamental difference between communication and transmission. In a theatre context, generally speaking, actors tend to communicate ideas, emotions, and impressions via text and action primarily. The cave, by contrast, is not a medium of communication, but of transmission. The cave transmits a physical, sensory, and somatic effect, which has transformational effects in the body and mind of the visitor. I will return to this fundamental distinction between communication and transmission media anon. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has argued that prehistoric caves in Europe can be better understood in regard to a phenomenological understanding of stereoimmersive experience. Appreciation of cave sites involves, according to this author, an embodied experience of physical space. Upper Paleolithic caves are not the origins of theatre or dance, but the origins of a physical way of thinking. This intelligence is grounded, in Sheets-Johnstone’s interpretation, in the tactile-kinaesthetic body coupled to its correlative world, and she adds: “It is this fully-immersed coupling which makes integration possible.”8 The question is: What kind of immersion can a cave induce, if it is not communicational and representational? What kind of integration occurs therein? I would suggest

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that, as opposed to a theatrical modality of immersion, the cave induces what I call the grotesque immersion. The grotesque immersion is best understood in conjunction with Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known idea of the grotesque realism. Whereas the physicalization of a theatrical role involves a divided sense of the self, for instance in terms of a division of the real I (the actor) versus a dramatic I (the role the actor plays), the bodily element in grotesque realism is not severed from other spheres of life. The grotesque is embedded in a oneand-only reality, which cannot be split from itself. The grotesque reality, in Bakhtin’s own words, “is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body.” (In other words, not only is the grotesque nonrepresentational, it is also non-transcendental). And Bakhtin insists: “The body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body in the modern sense .  .  . because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, but in bodily life [expressed in images of] fertility, growth, and a brimming over-abundance.” Bakhtin concludes: “Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated individual, not to the private, egotistic economic man, but to the collective ancestral body.”9 The grotesque immersion cannot be representational, not least because it does not understand social divisionism, theatricalism, and other mechanisms for the splitting of identity from a base material life. The grotesque is, in the language of Gilles Deleuze, a plane of immanence, where material life exists in itself, undivided and inure to the split planes of representation and transcendence. Bearing in mind how physical and intimate the grotesque immersion is, and also how averse to a private and individualistic sense of the body the cave is, it is not surprising that the grotesque immersion should be characterized by images of ambivalence, deformity, monstrosity, distortion, and malformation. Cave walls are freakish. They reveal bodies contorted by the forces of nature, evoking grimaces and incongruous mouths; body parts impossibly strung together in deviant anatomies; or aberrant interspecies couplings. The cave can be like a subterranean carnival of sensations that intensifies the felt



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perception of life and death in all their exuberance. The grotesque immersion is defined by degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, transcendent, noble, or ideal. The importance of the body in the grotesque immersion is clear from the number of human images found in Upper Paleolithic sites, none of which depicts a well-defined and well-formed human body. With the exception of the caricatures found in the prehistoric cave of La Marche (Vienne), which contains, among other peculiarities, one realistic engraving of an old man’s face, practically the entire Upper Paleolithic era is characterized, in the European context at least, by the nonfigurative, schematic, or grotesque depiction of the human anatomy. Whereas animals were often depicted more figuratively, more realistically even, the human figure was often deformed or hybridized, which reveals the “about-to-be-human” subjectivity that performance theorist Clayton Eshleman, for one, detects in the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne.10 The same could be said of so-called “cave masks,” as seen in Mas d’Azil and Altamira. As I intimated in Chapter 3, and going back to a point raised by artist and scholar Ewa Kuryluk in her analysis of the “cave of sex,” it is important to understand that the transmission of jism (the energy of earth as it is perceived by the body, often channeled as sexual potency), cannot be extricated from the energy of the underground space and its immersive properties. In other words, it is only through immersion in the dark, humid, dense atmosphere of the cave that the energy of the land can be internalized and channeled as sexual and sensual energy. To be immersed in cave space involves surrendering one’s body to the cave’s own erotic geophysicality. The deformed faces depicted on the limestones of Altamira and Mas d’Azil evoke the strange coming together of body and land, of human face and rock face. Facial deformation, for instance in the case of the cave masks of Altamira, does not constitute a theatrical function. The prehistoric mask does not conceal the face of an individual actor; rather, it blurs the humanity of all those who enter the cave in order to open up a space of mediation between human and humus, so that you can find yourself, your own humanity, in the rock, and the rock’s inhumanity can be incorporated into your own inhuman body. Life itself, in its immanence, is mediated across human and landesque flesh.

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Figure 13  The Masks of Altamira. Drawing by the author

VR media goes back to the cave Media performance theorists and practitioners have also claimed the prehistoric caves. Like performance theorists, immersive technology developers have also asserted the modernity of cave spaces in regard to a new generation of immersive media technologies, not least immersive Virtual Reality. Somehow, the famous caves of Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet are not only the alleged “origins” of modern theatre and performance, but are also the “origin” of digital media performance as well. Indeed, a number of aptly named Virtual Reality technologies could be mentioned here, including Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), which is a surround screen, surround sound,



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and projection-based theatre; or CAVE Research Network (CAVERN), which is an alliance of industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVEs.11 The assumption, at least in relation to these two technologies, is that Virtual Reality can somehow hark back to a premodern sense of virtual theatre, and that immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) is a current technological condition of possibilities whose prehistory, in the sense used by media historian Jonathan Crary, can be found in immersive landscapes such as caves. The assumption made by the makers of CAVE and CAVERN is that Plato’s cave came to age in the world of Virtual Reality. According to team members of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Chicago at Illinois, where CAVE technology was first developed and implemented in 1991, the name of this virtual reality theatre is both a recursive acronym and a reference to the analogy of the cave found in Plato’s Republic.12 As Michael Heim puts it in an early critique of CAVE technology, the technological CAVE and the entire cyberworld it instantiates are a “Platonism as working product.”13 The danger of this technologized Platonism is that it forgets the body, the bodily senses, and the material bodily grotesque—key tropes for an undivided and nonrepresentational form of virtual reality. Like Plato’s cave, immersive technology can be a prison. The cave dwellers in Plato’s cave are chained; they are immobilized. Only one of them manages to escape, according to Plato’ parable. Once free, the caveman discovers that the projections he has witnessed all his life are but shadows cast by the fire, mere representations of a reality found outside the cave, where an even brighter light is cast by the sun. If you are chained to an understanding of reality mediated by screens, you may want to pay attention to the caveat of the cave. Like the freed troglodyte in the classic story, it might be necessary to escape the immobilizing clutches of new immersive technology in order to question what is real from a brute materialist point of view. And so, as opposed to the Platonic sense of the real (which refers to unchanging forms and ideas), the brute materialist affirms the reality of raw materiality, and raw encounters with living matter. As Heim has pointed out, there is a fundamental difference between primary body versus cyberself. To escape “tunnel VR experience,” argues Heim, “one must rediscover the primary world, so that the prime world vitalizes the body that already exists outside electronic systems.”14 My point is not as banal as that,

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however. Rather, I am arguing that immersive media is not the sole preserve of new media technologies, and that a prehistory of immersion exists in the form of the landesque immersion. The landesque is also a medium, and it should be celebrated and cultivated to provide critical distance from dominant technologies. Landesque immersion is a nature-in-the-raw medium, and it is quite unlike any technologically induced immersion. Despite the link made between iVR and prehistoric caves, it is important to stress just how different iVR forms of immersion are, when compared to the experience of the grotesque immersion. More importantly, it is necessary to ask, particularly given the recent commercialization and popularization of VR technology, what technologically designed immersion can learn from landesque forms of mediation. For Marshall McLuhan, preliterate and postliterate conditions of media communication are characterized by a common cultural prioritizing of immersive modes of mediation. In other words, as digital culture has become less prone to alphabetic forms of communication, so the kind of conditions prevalent in preliterate societies, which McLuhan conceptualizes in terms of immersive space (or what this author calls “acoustic space”), have become dominant once more. McLuhan and Powers argued as early as 1989 that acoustic space is the “natural space of nature-in-the-raw inhabited by non-literate people,” and they added: “acoustic space is like the mind’s ear that dominates the thinking of pre-literature and post-literate humans alike.”15 In addition to these similarities highlighted by McLuhan, there are stark differences between nature-in-the raw and nature-as-technology. Only three key differences will be highlighted here, to support a critique of “tunnel” VR experience. First, the landesque immersion is defined by immediacy. In other words, the capacity for the body to become engrossed within a particular site or environment, and in relation to a stereo-immersive material environment, is immediate in the case of landesque worlds. The process of technologically induced immersion is, by comparison, instantaneous. Virtual Reality appears in an instant, ready to be consumed. That instantaneous reality presented to the VR gamer or VR user more broadly is not immediate. You cannot feel a sense of proximity at the bodily level. The avatars and digital world assets typically depicted on the VR screen are not immediately next to the body of the VR



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user. Because there is no immediacy to hold onto, but only instantaneousness, there is no continuity between matter and the representation of matter found in Virtual Reality. In other words, technologically mediated immersion, for instance as experienced in iVR worlds, could not possibly facilitate a way of thinking akin to Clottes’ paleo ontology. iVR technology could be characterized by a lack of continuity between raw matter and industrially produced matter (or between matter and digitally rendered representations of material worlds). This fatal leap, going back to an idea explored in Chapter 2, disconnects the raw material world from technologically generated worlds. A raw material world that is otherwise interconnected becomes disconnected. A raw material world that is otherwise fluid becomes at the mercy of immersive new technology, an isolating condition of experience. A raw material world that is otherwise permeable becomes impermeable in iVR media conditions. In sum, iVR media constitutes the total technological synthesis (and simplification) of raw nature’s material complexity. My second point is that technologically induced immersion tends to privilege the spectacle, which is a gaze-prioritizing phenomenon characterized by en masse production. As I intimated earlier, the prioritization of vision and sound in new immersive media reveals a lack of proprioceptive, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile experience within new immersive worlds. Since both vision and sound are distal media, the spectacle yields no contact. When faced with screens only, bodies do not bump into a tangible reality. A reality that does not hit you, that does not cause you pain when you bump into it, is not a matter reality, but a virtual reality, an almost-there but not-quite-reality that, in its safe and programmed environment, furnishes the body with no threats, no accidents, no dangers, no transformational power, no vital (and deathly) sense of life, but only simulation, simulacrum, entertainment, spectacle. When compared to the multimodal experience of landesque immersion, CAVEs and other iVR environments typically produce a sensory decompensation. This means, quite simply, that the world of technological immersion is unavailable to touch (not to mention taste and smell), which results in an alienating gulf between overstimulated audiovisuals and understimulated tactile-kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory inputs. Decompensation

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is a medical term that denotes the failure of an organ (for instance, the heart) to compensate for the functional overload resulting from disease. In psychiatry, decompensation is the failure to generate effective psychological coping mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance. In the case of iVR technology, sensory decompensation is caused by the overload of visual and sonic stimuli in surround screen and surround sound interfaces, and a lack of full-bodily and raw material sensation, which causes an imbalanced perception of reality at the sensory level, quite often prone to feelings of uncanny disconnection and alienation. The third and final distinction I make between landesque and technological forms of immersion has to do with the critical distinction I made earlier between communication and transmission. The land transmits. It does not communicate. Landscape does not relay symbols, signs, and codes, or messages that could be said to be communicated as such. Land does not have at its disposal a language or a technological medium of communicational delivery. Caves are mediating nonetheless, at the purely transmissive level. Unlike communication, which is a paradigm of mediation that relies on the ruses of symbol and code, that is, on language and media technology, transmission is the relaying of physical energy between entities that share common or compatible materialities. Digital representations of materiality are incompatible, at the level of transmitted energy, from raw matter. You cannot transmit thermal, kinetic, or frictional energy through digital media technology. In a contemporary context, transmission media refers to the physical relay of electricity, microwave, satellite, and other forms of signal transmission that support electronic, microwave, and satellite communication. A hierarchy is established in the sense that communication media subordinate transmission. Interconnection, in a media world dominated by communication, is confined to language-based, symbol-based, object-based mediation between humans, via man-made technologies. This media orthodoxy empowers, as I explained in Chapter 4, the alleged transcendence of human nature, affirming an unecological disconnection of human society from the raw natural world. Transmission is a physical and material mode of mediation, to be found in a number of different acceptations—for instance in mechanics, where transmission involves the controlled application of power by a machine, or



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telecommunications, where transmission refers to the process of sending and propagating an analogue or digital information signal. Other acceptations do not involve technology at all. Thus, transmission also refers to the passage of a disease, or the transfer of genetic information. From a mediological and cultural point of view, which is what matters to me here, transmission refers to the capacity to convey lived-in memory and imagination from one body to another, or from one generation of lives to another, in a way that is immediately physical and material. That is what the cave landscape/ mediascape can ultimately reveal: a contemporary and critical paradigm of cultural media transmission. Without resorting to communication, the cave nonetheless manages to transmit memory and imagination. The critical point I would like to stress to sum up is that if technological immersion favors instantaneousness, audiovisual decompensation, and abstract communication without physical transmission, it is because the world of technologically a priori connectivity, across remote and spectacular conditions of communication, ultimately endorses a culture of mass production, mass mediation, and mass consumption. Instantaneousness, decompensation and lack of transmissivity are the marks of mass culture, where experience is accessed remotely and at the push of a button. Transmission between one body and one cave is far too authentic and far too unique an experience to be available to mass-produced media culture, where experience needs to be standardized, programmed, and commodified for mass consumption. To seek landesque immersion is, I believe, a critical and countercultural decision to access a medianature that is not designed for the masses, and which can offer a nature-mediated experience that is immersive and immanent, and which sustains both an ethical and ecological connection between body and land. As I intimated earlier, the critique of immersive media technology goes back to the seminal writings of Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan. In the co-edited book (with Edmund Carpenter) entitled Explorations in Communication, traditional non-Western forms of media communication, including Eskimo drawing, Native American languages, and European cave art, serve as critical counterpoints to modern-day mass media communication. One of the central ideas of Carpenter and Marshall’s critique is that Western media history has been dominated by written media, from the

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outset of alphabetic communication, to the invention of print, to electronic text communication. According to Sigfried Giedion, whose chapter on cave art in Carpenter and McLuhan’s edition makes a useful companion to Carpenter’s study of Eskimo ivory carvings, the nonlinear and decentered way of understanding media communication inside the immersive cave is distinct from any other medium, especially electronic media. “It is not disorder but a different form of order that is being followed in cave art,” writes Giedion. The cave reveals a brute kind of order “to which we, in our sophistication, have lost the key.”16 The key was lost the moment writing was invented, when a fictitious god agent was allowed to write on the walls rather than from the walls. As McLuhan points out in his contributions to Explorations in Communication, contemporary conditions of media communication are opening up a cybernetic connection between immersive media in a preliterate world and emergent immersive technologies in the postliterate world. This leap from cave to CAVE, from Plato to cyber-Platonism, should be addressed with a pinch or two of salt. Encountering the landesque immersion is a critical praxis, a means of finding intimacy and immediacy in a world where mass media technology, and new immersive experience, have simplified the experience of the material world, in order to cater for mass media consumption. The cave is therefore a place of refuge again, not from glacial weathers but from a mass culture that no longer acknowledges the essential importance of raw material transmission. What is needed at this point is not an exploration into communication, as McLuhan and Carpenter proposed in the 1960s, but an exploration into brute transmission, that is, an exploration into a mode of mediation that bypasses the anthropocentricism of language and the message and prioritizes the immersive physical relaying of memorialized and imagined life, essentialized (or even spiritualized) in nature-in-the-raw. The cave is a shelter from mass-produced and mass-consumed worlds of instantaneous, remote, homogenous, and noisy media communication. The cave reveals its caveat, which is not at all Platonic. I am not running away from the cave, like Plato’s trog; on the contrary, I am running toward it. I want to find in it the dynamics of raw transmission, filling a contemporary prehistory with brute relationality between body and landscape.



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Readers who wish I had engaged in a deeper discussion of immersive performance or immersive technology, especially VR, will no doubt be disappointed by a passing reference to these items. I am not claiming a contribution to immersive performance or immersive technology theory, nor am I adding to the critical literature on these subjects. As I will reveal shortly, one often finds in media studies a passing reference to the cave, the prehistoric cave or Plato’s. You will not find in the literature a lengthy affirmation of landscape as a raw form of immersive media. The reason why I only made a passing reference to immersive performance and immersive technology in this chapter is because this book is essentially the other side of that discourse. I am not really concerned by advancing knowledge of immersion in a theatrical or VR technological context. I am, however, very interested in the role landesque and grotesque immersion play in a countercultural and ecocritical framework. At a time when both performance- and technology-based models of immersion have gained currency and commercial relevance given the ubiquitous application of VR technology in the digital humanities, in the digital industries, and the digital arts, I am perhaps swimming against a tide or barking up a different tree. There is another immersion, which designers of performance and VR can ignore at their own risk. It is found in caves, in forest canopies, under water, in desert landscapes, and in sheltered valleys. August 2017. The temperature soars to 42 degrees Celsius, which is five degrees below the summer average, as we descend to Canada do Inferno or Hell’s Creek, suitably named. The river Côa carves its way along the vineprone and plump hills, always northbound, until the Côa joins the meandering Douro river, one of Portugal’s most treasured natural heritages. Later on that day, my son and I would swim along the clean and nurturing waters, up toward the prehistoric campsite of Penascosa, located a few miles from the confluence of the Côa and the Douro. We were followed by a curious freshwater turtle and a furtive deer that spied on us from the riverbank. Earlier, we took part in a guided tour of one of three open-air rock art sites in the Côa Valley that are accessible to the public. All in all, over 8,000 prehistoric rock engravings have been found in a twenty-mile stretch of the Côa river. Like the paintings and engravings in the renowned caves of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet, the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of this valley affirmed a deep bond

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with the landscape, and with Côa’s graceful microclimate, through the practice of engraving, and possibly painting, too. The peoples who sojourned in the Penascosa ford tens of thousands of years ago observed the same conventions of cultural transmission as contemporary communities elsewhere in prehistoric Europe. Like the images in the caves of France and Spain, the engravings of the Côa Valley in Portugal reveal that prehistoric peoples chose specific rock surfaces over others, and that the same surfaces were engraved generation after generation for tens of thousands of years. This perhaps suggests that the choice of rock and material used for cultural and memorial transmission was not random, but that communities established a deliberate sense of cultural and mnemonic continuity by always engraving the same slabs, and by grouping their images, layering them, overlapping them, in order to create a cultural sedimentation of sorts, a woven relation between land, community, and memory. This entanglement is also typified by a form of cultural transmission that is immersive in more ways than one: the Côa experience is an example of the potency of a landesque immersion where memory, experience, and sensation are threaded into a medianatural landscape. While the tour guide hastily delivered his pack of information, pointing out a few of the carvings found along this pristine riparian site, I was in my mind swimming in the cool and emerald waters. I was far from the pointless and easily forgotten data. The tour guide was rambling on about contending theories of Upper Paleolithic art. He was arguing that the reason why Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of this valley made images can be explained according to theories of sympathetic magic and shamanism, but that he prefers the more current communication theory. The markings are signs on the land, like road signs in the motorway, the tour guide argued. The prehistoric inhabitants of Portugal wanted to indicate, at least according to this local tour guide, propitious dwelling areas, hunting sites, and so on. The guide turned to me and asked: “Which theory would you put your money on?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Which theory do you support?” he insisted. “I don’t know . . . sympathetic magic maybe?” I replied, like a school boy caught daydreaming during a math class. The tour guide smiled wryly, and retorted: “That is what experts used to think, but tell me: why did prehistoric peoples depict insects, otters, jellyfish, owls, and other animals that they did



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not hunt or eat? No, it wasn’t sympathetic magic,” he finished off categorically, “they weren’t drawing animals because they wanted to return to nature what they were consuming, in order to ensure a better hunt. No . . .” The rehearsed speech trailed off. I am not sure I care for a good definition of sympathetic magic. I am not interested to know why the engravings are there, or what they supposedly mean. It is not communication theory that brought me to Côa, but transmission. From a brute materialist point of view, the tour guide all but misses the point. Côa Valley, in its own unique way, exemplifies just how inadequate the rationalization of communication is when coming to grips with the naturecultural phenomenon of material, bodily, and sensory transmission. Later that day, while swimming with my eldest son, and as we stroked our way slowly up toward the Penascosa ford, the entire prehistoric valley seemed to be a revelry of sensation. A hot stream of air blew from the Douro, sending the temperature up to the higher 40s. The people who sojourned in this heatpipe of a valley thirty thousand years ago were following waters, streams of warm air, game, land forms, and slabs of rock. They did not follow rational explanations and rationalized geographies, ridden with trajectories prescribed by motorways and pedestrian pathways. The fish were jumping, as in the song, or as in one of the engravings found on the granite rock, bankside. My son and I followed jumping fish, heat, the contours of the land, the flows of water. They all transmit something in their own unique and multinatural way. Transmission is a phenomenon in itself, quite unlike communication. Transmission is a physical, sensory, and immersive form of relationality that does not require rational and language-based mediation. There is a reason why for tens of thousands of years, in this site graced by nature-in-the-raw, people observed transmissive forms of memorialization and imagination. What is revealed in Côa is not delivered in the tour-guide reasoning. As Gregory Bateson would have it: “For the attainment of primitive grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason.”17 Côa is an immersive place. It is not immersive in the same way a karst cave is. The landesque immersion comes, as I intimated above, in many forms. Landesque immersion is not confined to a single mode of landesque experience, such as the subterranean experience. And so, whereas the landesque immersion of Chauvet and Lascaux is largely defined by air saturation and

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darkness in cavernous environments, the immersive experience felt in Côa Valley is characterized by soaring temperatures and cooling waters. In the extreme heat and heavy air of Côa, the calculating brain does not function too well. The reasons of the brain slow down and the somatic body gains priority. The rational mind melts in the heat and it is hard to calculate given the pronunciation of the senses. You can better understand the river when you swim it, and you can better understand the land when you walk it. In this brute sort of way, transmission makes sense. Only then does the somatic relationality between body and landscape fully materialize. The tour guide had to stop himself. He was halfway into his explanation of what sympathetic magic means when he realized that a brandeiro, a Portuguese mountain shepherd, had joined us under the shade of our sheltering tree. Behind him trailed a flock of sheep, rummaging through dry grass in the river bank, answerable to a cloud of dust that seemed to have hung forever over the flock. The man was leaning on his knobby staff with both hands, and he seemed to be paying some attention to what the tour guide was saying, although he did not seem to understand what was being said. “Sorry, we have taken over your spot,” apologized one of the other four tourists. The shepherd shrugged his shoulders. He mumbled in an almost impenetrable Portuguese accent: “The tree is not mine.” There was a rather uncomfortable pause. The tour guide resumed his spiel. “Where do you live?” I insisted. The brandeiro did not look at me. “Over there.” He signaled with an arm, as if swatting a fly. Directions are given thus when you are in the monte: there is no road, no line on the land to determine one’s orientation. A gesture is enough. Like children, who count days in sleep, the brandeiro knows the hills in a physical way, that is, in terms of the number of slopes crossed. And over a lifetime, how many slopes has that body climbed? So many, I would guess, the body has turned into a knobby and contorted shape, like the staff that now supports the shepherd’s ailing body. The brandeiro has large arthritic hands, and a large protuberance growing under his right ear. His face is ridden with deep wrinkles, like miniature valleys and furrows. His skin is copper, his eyes are Scandinavian blue, his hair white like fibers of linen. The landesque immersion is injected into this body. This ancestral body has been marked and plied by the land, just like the granite rocks bearing marks of Upper Paleolithic animal followers.



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As  Bakhtin has pointed out, there is something unfinished and formless about the grotesque body. Whereas Grecian and Renaissance bodies are, in Bakhtin’s critique, rationally divided from their surroundings, sculpted and geometrized according to the independence of bodily training, discipline, coding, and technique, the grotesque body is defined by its permeability and continuity, being thus inseparable from the physical surroundings upon which it is immersed. In a Classical condition of possibilities, the body is divided from its surroundings for its further individuation. In this Classical context, argues Bakhtin, “corporeal acts were shown only when borderlines dividing the body from the outside world were sharply defined; where the processes of absorbing and ejecting [the outside world] were not revealed.”18 This separation between what Bakhtin calls the “individual body” and the “ancestral body” could be felt clearly as I stood before the brandeiro. It dawned on me just how attuned to the land those rheumatic limbs are, and just how alien to landesque immersion my individualized body has become. The grotesque body, adds Bakhtin, “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world.”19 To the extent that the brandeiro’s body is a seamless continuation of the material world that surrounds him, it is immersed in the land and it has become itself a landesque and grotesque force. The brandeiro’s physical presence, his silence and his gesturing, brought forth the ever-present actuality of the ancestral body, becoming (with) the landscape. Well adapted to the immersive conditions of that dry and blistering hot valley, the brandeiro’s body does not become immersed in the land in order to clash with it, as bodies typically do in the case of VR tunnel experience. Immersion in a landesque life can transform the body in a more profound way, in a process of real material becoming. For the brandeiro of Côa Valley, affirmation of the body is the sole means of material transmission. To understand transmission as a Paleolithic or even a paleocyber phenomenon, the landesque body must come forth and reveal itself as a transhistorical vessel for the porous exchange between human and humus. Like the brandeiro standing before me, the ancestral bodies that inhabited Côa Valley thirty thousand years ago would have also ingested the land and swallowed its hills. The land would have deformed the hunter-gatherer’s limbs. Landesque forces would have marked their skins and lamed their extremities, plying their legs and arms much like the mountain shepherd’s. The process

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of full-bodily immersion and grotesque transformation in and through the land is a process in which, as Bakhtin concludes, “the [ancestral] body is the last and best word, its force.” And Bakhtin adds: “[The ancestral body] has nothing to fear. Death holds no terror for it.”20 In Bakhtin’s account, since the ancestral body is always in a state of material becoming, it is a body that belongs to no individual but to the land itself, and to a collective process of ceaseless transformation. Ancestral corporeality belongs to other bodies, to the people, to conglomerations, to an orgiastic flesh that is anonymous and lacks all individuality. While swimming in the cool waters of the Côa, my body was at home, to the extent that I managed to internalize the slow rhythms of the graceful valley. I swallowed the temperatures and the flows of water. I slowed down and relaxed. My body became, for a moment at least, a calm property of the calm land. I let go of my individual body and allowed myself to be in thrall to the senses. “I feel welcome,” shouted my ten-year-old son. This was his first experience in wild swimming. The sensations are welcoming, it is true, as father and son try to learn to be ancestral. As we seek a timeless transmission of material energy between body and land. No tour guide explanation needed. No independent technological mediation. Just full immersion in brute experience. Naked in the baking heat.

6

Prehistories of Media II: The Screen Despite the passing reference Edward Shanken writes in his book Art and Electronic Media that “ever since the Paleolithic cave paintings of deer hunts at Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE), artists have used static media to suggest and represent the vitality of entities in motion.”1 There are, quite the contrary, no scenes of deer hunts inside Lascaux. Perhaps Shanken is referring to the famous image of Bird Man and Bison, in a section of the cave known as The Shaft, where you will find an ambiguous beaked figure standing before a bison that appears to be speared, although it is not clear whether the line that cuts through the bull is a spear for sure, or a symbol that stands for something else. There are no paintings of realistic hunting scenes in Lascaux or in any other cave in Europe that we know of. So why make this reference? What does the passing (and often inaccurate) reference to cave “art” add to a broad compendium of electronic media art? In addition to the clichéd idea that cave painting is “art,” and that cave paintings depict scenes of hunting, or that they represent life, Shanken’s comment is fairly typical, as it exemplifies a tendency among media scholarship to throw in passing references to prehistoric caves in genealogical studies of contemporary art and media. Despite the many passing references, there have not been lengthy works devoted to the re-appraisal of prehistoric caves from an electronic media point of view, which is one of the reasons I embarked on this project in the first place. This is surprising, given the major culture industry reanimation of heritage caves, and the number of interpretation centers that have opened in the last decade that use cutting-edge technology and new media to reappraise European prehistoric “art.” The “from/to” or “ever since” sentence construction

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turns the entire forty thousand years of cave intervention into a lineal sequence, a narrative leading up to cinema, animation, photography, modern art. However, this logic is highly problematic, not least because, as I intimated earlier, the cave remains always present at the level of an embodied encounter. Like the label “art,” the label “media” in the narrow sense can be easily misunderstood. If “media” is a word that refers to how communication or transmission is established by an agent that serves as go-between, then at least two meanings of the word are being pulled apart here: one concerns the technologization and industrialization of mediation, the other concerns a vitalization of mediation through landscape-based transmission. “Media,” I must insist, is up for grabs. To think that a history of industrialized media communication can be imposed on a prehistory of media as matter is the point that is being contested here. In an attempt to dig out old media artifacts, the field of media archaeology has also referenced the cave in passing. Pouncing on the hackneyed idea that prehistoric caves are a form of proto-cinema, Erkki Huhtamo points out the obvious: “Ancient cave paintings depicting animals with more than four legs have been proposed as the earliest representations of living beings in motion.”2 This is echoed by Siegfried Zielinski in his book Deep Time of the Media, who writes: “Cinema archaeology (from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the immersive IMAX) is refined and expanded as the idea of inexorable, quasi-natural, technical progress,” adding “even prehistoric hunter-gatherers needed to learn much in order to decode, read, and classify signs.”3 Why does Zielinski throw in the adverb “even” before “prehistoric hunter-gatherers” if not to show surprise? Zielinski seems to be taken aback by the sophistication of prehistoric image-making. Are the cave paintings of Lascaux less than the IMAX, from the point of view of technical progress? And how can progress stretch continuously from Lascaux to the IMAX? Does Zielinski not pause to consider that maybe the cave is not to be found in the same trajectory, the same historical plane, the same line of progress, as the IMAX? What exactly does technical progress mean? Why do media archaeologists, judging from Zielinski’s comments at least, seem so awkward about media transmission established by a means of a karst cave? Can the landscape be a form of naturein-the-raw mediation, and if so, how can a landscape be said to progress, or to



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exist within historical conditions of technological development? What if the caves of prehistory that Huhtamo, Zielinski, and other media archaeologists mention only in passing references were to be re-conceptualized as a contemporary form of landscape media, and not a historical antecedent of film and animation? Instead of saying that cave paintings were produced in the prehistoric past, one could say that caves are as contemporary as the IMAX, VR, or 3D cinema. Media archaeology scholars make wild leaps when they reference the caves of the Upper Paleolithic, especially when arguing that cave paintings are evidence of a representation of motion, or a continuous history of technical development. These claims are incorrect, in my interpretation, since Upper Paleolithic caves were not re-presenting movement, nor are they, I insist, in the same historical plane. The limestone, the fire, the body, and even the color and materiality of charcoal and ochre could be considered to be living and moving in a continuous present. If the limestone wall is living and moving to this day, how can paleomedia be re-presentational? The assumption made by Shanken is that a sense of motion emerges from the static image. Is this not an imposition of a historical mind-set informed by the technology of cinema and its reconstitution of motion via static frames? Two points will sum up my argument. First, the image-filled caves of the European Upper Paleolithic are not buried in the past–past. The prehistory of media is not to be found in a time before the present. Prehistory of media is found in uncoded physical movement, in the material imagination, in collective memory, in mediation established via sensation. The prehistory I have in mind is present in each deep encounter between body and cave. Second, the Paleolithic cave landscapes touched in this book are not the historical startingpoint of media technological progress. Some of the conventions found in Upper Paleolithic “art” can be compared to common “techniques” in graphic communication, for instance in the case of motion blur or figural overlap, as discussed in Chapter 3. But to consider that these are “techniques” and that the activity of painting caves is technical, rather than intuitive, would suggest that landscape media progressed as time went on; that the techniques were refined and improved; and that painting somehow got better. And yet, one of the most “refined” examples of motion blur in prehistoric painting is found in the Panel

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of the Rhinos, in the Salle du Fond (Chauvet Cave). As I pointed out earlier, this work counts as one of the oldest in the entire European Paleolithic matrix. If techniques develop and improve in a progressive way, how could the most sophisticated expression of graphic technique have developed at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic prehistory? Archaeologists are often keen to find signs of material progress, which will enable them to historicize, or at the very least, analyze in layers or phases, the protracted duration of prehistory. However, there is a reason why paleo culture spans forty thousand years of relatively little change. Entire material cultures were lost during this period. Entire ways of life were wiped out, and the human enterprise survived (or not) in a much more vulnerable and threatened condition. This is perhaps why survival was liable to both cultural loss and rejection of ideas of material progress, an Idea I will return to later when I deal with the notion of the paleolithic State. The idea that the landesque immersion became a culturally conventional phenomenon in the Aurignacian period, and that the invention of cave painting led to a steady and ongoing progress in the techniques of expression and mastery, seems hopelessly anachronistic. Although many conventions were preserved for over thousands of years, including the convention of painting animals, of depicting motion, of printing hands, and of depicting specific symbols, these conventions were not techniques in the narrow sense, to be taught within the conditions of historical technicity, to be refined and improved for the sake of progress, and to be understood as independent agencies within a developmental history (in the same way that ballet, for instance, may be deemed an independent tradition, technique, and history in the context of the movement arts and dance). Caves were painted for a period of more or less thirty thousand years, using roughly the same technological means. Changes and adaptations did occur, but they do not necessarily subscribe to a developmental change, based on a culture of material improvement and betterment. This, it seems to me, is evidence enough to suggest that prehistoric peoples were keen not to give their technologies (ochre-based brush painting, aerography, hand painting, and so on) a sense of independent agency, as though technicity had a power—a mediacy—to transmit of its own accord.



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Modern art claims the cave The authentication of Upper Paleolithic works was a long and fiercely contested process in which European mainstream culture gradually came to terms with the existence of a period of great cultural sophistication before recorded history, before classical Greece. It is only in the beginning of the twentieth century, a decade or so after the controversial authentication of the cave of Altamira, that the notion of “prehistoric art” finally became acceptable. But while art historians managed to incorporate prehistoric works into the canon of Western culture, they also imposed a historical understanding of Paleolithic cultures, not least by labeling the contents of Upper Paleolithic cave sites “art.” According to David Lewis-Williams, theories concerning the “origin of art” are justified in the case of cave paintings, since “the medium is grounded firmly in the visual system.”4 This thesis is extremely problematic for reasons that I have already made clear. The cave must be described as a multisensory space that is quite often not grounded on the visual system at all, since the underground cave is in fact pitch black. The use of cave walls for the purpose of image-making is in no way comparable to the experience evoked by modern-day gallery art, even though the restructuring of heritage cave spaces for tourists often involves, going back to a point raised in Chapter 2, a cultural reanimation of cave imagery for gallery-style visual consumption. To argue that so-called cave “art” is grounded firmly in the visual system not only ignores the obvious auditory and tactile-kinesthetic aspects of the medium, not to mention the possibility of synesthetic crossovers, but also ignores that in the darkness of the cave, the medium may open to the softer vistas of memory and the imagination, which is a nonoptical, or if you prefer, noetic, form of vision (more on this to come). Inside the prehistoric cave, images take on a multisensory character. To say that a cave is filled with images is like saying that it is filled with movements, sounds, visions, smells, and tastes, all of which evoke “image” in the Bergsonian sense. The prehistoric cave is not filled with purely optical and graphic images, but also echoic sounds and movement spaces, to which the body can give depth of physical experience, and which also elicit the “image.” In a Bergsonian sense, the image is as close to ideation as it is to representation. Crucially, it is neither.

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The conventional term used in France to refer to prehistoric caves containing images made by homo sapiens is grotte ornée, or “decorated cave.” My point is that the task of filling a prehistoric cave with images has nothing to do with decoration. This is not a question of making the cave look more beautiful, or producing works of decorative value to somehow demarcate these spaces as ornamental sites—hence my displeasure with hackneyed analogies between prehistoric caves and medieval cathedrals and chapels.5 This is not to say that so-called ornamental caves do not possess beauty. Sigfried Giedion points out in his media theoretical critique of cave “art” that prehistoric humans did not consider the caverns as an edifice to be decorated: secret signs and figurations are placed in positions that are extremely difficult of access and at the uttermost end of the caves, where the walls narrow to a mere crack. In these cases, it is clear that prehistoric peoples were more anxious to hide their creations than to expose them.6

My argument is that the appearance of man-made images deep inside karst caves cannot be decorative, not necessarily because the images are supposedly hidden, as Giedion points out, but because they are recondite and deep. The images are not merely intended to beautify a surface. They express a process of deep penetration and transformation, rather than superficial. My intention is not to convince my reader that what lies inside the cave is most definitely not art, but rather, that the image-filled cave should be approached from a less historiographic perspective.7 To argue that the contents of an image-filled cave are not art does not imply that the images in question lack craft, skill, or mastery of form. Nor am I implying that the image-filled cave cannot be appreciated aesthetically, or that these works cannot be consumed as “art” in modern-day contexts (for instance, in museums, cave replicas, interpretation centers, art galleries, and exhibitions). On the contrary, the subsuming of image-filled caves within a modernday culture industry is unquestionable. That is not, however, my point. My quibble does not concern the commoditization or franchising of imagefilled caves—that is a point I already touched upon in Chapter 2. My point is that “art,” however hard to define, broadly functions as the division of two assumed realities (i.e., life vs. art, or art as life). Working my way against this



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hackneyed understanding, my intention is to consider the image-filled cave as something that exists prior to any division between artistic representation and life. In other words, landscape media is like a quantum condition, where no such separation of life and art is possible. The hunter-gatherers of prehistory may not have practiced image-making as something separate from life. There is no expression of individualism behind cave “art,” either, which can justify calling the creators of the Lascaux bulls or the Chauvet lions “artists.” Craftsmen, perhaps. Image-makers—that is a possibility, too. But artists? Is that a suitable way of describing an activity in a world before social divisionism and professionalization of work? These images result from the material imagination of a group and a collective expression, which accumulate on the walls like sediment on the ground. There is hardly any expression of a human subjectivity, either, I claim, given the Upper Paleolithic penchant for the depiction of animals in motion and half-human, half-animal chimeras. At least in the European context, the Upper Paleolithic convention was to depict human beings in highly schematic form: as a penis, a vulva, a stickman. Although this differentiation says quite a lot about the ways in which Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe may (may not) have distinguished human animal from nonhuman animal, it is important to note that nonhuman animals were also depicted schematically, and that human hybrids were also depicted figuratively. In other words, there is no overall rule that can explain the kind of subjectivity Upper Paleolithic peoples assigned to the human animal, and whether the human category was understood to be something separate from the animal category or not. If no such divisionism existed, and the practice of painting lions, bison, horse, deer, humans, and many other animals was intended as a multiperspectival celebration of a variety of earthling life, can the images still be described as art if they are not intended to mark a modern sense of differentiation at the social, cultural, and speciated levels? Whatever the most agreeable definition of “art” may be—that is way beyond my capability to ascertain—my point is that by recognizing the mediacy of limestone and granite walls, the makers of prehistoric images inherently recognized expression and creativity emerging from a geomorphological and other-than-human basis. As I intimated earlier, I prefer to think that the makers of landesque imagery were not humans,

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certainly not in the historical sense of an abstract humanism. The imagemakers of prehistory were earthlings. Why is it necessary to call cave paintings and engravings “art,” and why are the makers of these images “artists”? Is it because “art” is an easy option, one that most people can make sense of, however subjectively? Art is typically devoted to the production of works or objects of art. The intention behind a work of art is for the object to be finished, to be completed, and to be marketed and consumed as a finished work. The result is the independence of the art object (painting, sculpture, mobile, installation, readymade, found object, etc.). In other words, the art object is independent of the material(s) used for its creation, or the artist(s) responsible for its making. Even when the artist is the work of art, as in the case of performance or body art, the social distinction of the artist is implicit. No such divisions, I argue, are found in the case of hunter-gatherers making images inside caves. The images are not independent of the nature-in-the raw from where they emerge, the landscape in which they are embedded, and the elements that mingle therein. The cave is a transhistorical imperative: it is an always present and material encounter that ultimately rejects not only a historical notion such as art, in the narrow sense, but also a professional and social differentiation. I would go as far as to say that “art” is like a wall beyond which modern day mindsets cannot see. “Art” prevents the modern-day viewer, locked in history, from understanding cave images in their own terms. Landesque media is a phenomenon that does not belong to the domain of an independent human culture and civilization, as art does, but to a multiperspectival life in which earthlings participate within a multinatural environment. If “art” is a barrier beyond which it is hard to see, by the same token, image-filled caves are radical alterities that can question and critique the very foundations of historical art. In a narrow sense, “art” is like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall—it is the irruption of a differentiated and socially defined historical activity, largely predetermined by urban professionalization of work. To argue that cave painting is a prehistoric form of art is like saying, along with media paleontologists, that cave painting is a prehistoric form of media communication, in the narrow sense of the word “media.” It is not. Cave painting is something autonomous. When speaking of landscape media, I have not meant “media” in the narrow



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sense, but in the expanded sense (media as matter). I do not subscribe to the anachronistic use of the words “media” or “art,” narrowly defined. Unless the meaning of these words is expanded, and media is understood in relation to material mediacy, and unless “art” means something much vaguer (as in the “art of war” or the “art of life”), then the term “prehistoric art” remains a misnomer. Finally, the practice of filling caves with images is not about making objects. Art typically reifies—it turns materials into things that can be culturally consumed as art things. In my interpretation, landscape media does not adhere to the makeability of objects or things. Subterranean landscape media is, in my speculative reading, a celebration of the event of life transmitted by rock, by water, via ochre, through the senses and the imagination, in motion and in color. Landscape cannot be turned into a scenery, a backdrop, a work of art that you can exhibit at the Tate Modern or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or which you can hang on your wall. Landscape eludes that function. It completely bypasses the condition of the object, and remains always in a condition I have often referred to in my work as “trajectivity,” which is neither object nor subject, but pure movement and change.

Cinema claims the cave Werner Herzog released The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his 2010 documentary film about Chauvet Cave, in 3D format. The intention was to emphasize the depth and volume of the charcoal drawings contained in the Pont d’Arc cave. As I will explain shortly, the filmic experience reveals a number of shortcomings. Before I point these out, it is worth noting that this film popularized the notion—not Herzog’s original—that painted caves are a prehistoric form of cinema, an idea that is now commonly known as proto-cinema. In this section, I will address these two claims, contentious in equal measure. First, I will challenge the main idea championed in this film, namely that cinema originates in cave paintings; and second, I will question whether cinema can effectively remediate in 3D format the “art” of Chauvet Cave.

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According to Herzog, the way the animals are depicted in Chauvet suggests frame succession. Although depicting animals in group succession is very common in Upper Paleolithic image-making, as I have already explained, the phenomenon is not necessarily akin to frame succession in the cinematographic sense. The decision made by Upper Paleolithic image-makers to depict animals in sequences or in blurry outlines should not be looked at through such a narrow and historically biased lens. As I showed in a previous chapter, the graphic conventions used in Upper Paleolithic caves are part of a collective effort to express a way of life and a perceived sense of movement on the walls themselves. These conventions are not pseudo-cinematographic techniques. Rather, they are quite intuitive ways of expressing the agency of movement and animic life which, for a nomad, constituted the life-stream of a sustainable existence. The movement and energy that are graphically celebrated on the walls of Chauvet are linked to rhythmic trajectories and itineraries found in landscape itself, and are not rationalized under the conventions of linear alphabetic writing or cinematographic technology. The conventional way of drawing figures in Upper Paleolithic times, which was to wrap the image around the wall in all directions, and to follow the natural trajectories of wall contours, may have been adopted independently by various groups of imagemakers throughout the Upper Paleolithic. It is possible that in some cases the sequencing and juxtaposition of images may have not been intentional at all, but a natural consequence of producing images over several layers or drafts, or indeed, as a result of less skillful or child image-makers more inclined to produce sketchy or indeterminate shapes. We will never know. What is certain is that the Upper Paleolithic covers a vast expanse of time, and image-making in caves occurred intermittently and itinerantly, which suggests that cave painting, drawing, fluting, engraving, hand-printing, and cupule-making do not occur in a single cultural matrix or geographic focus, but that this wide array of graphic practices spurt and grow in a very eclectic and distributed cultural geography. Besides animal succession and motion blur, which are prehistoric graphic conventions applicable to drawing and painting, and which are often mentioned in theories of proto-cinema, there are other conventions commonly found in Upper Paleolithic caves. As I have intimated above, cave paintings are



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also characterized by the depiction of incomplete figures, independent body parts, and suspended images without backdrop or horizon. Most importantly, perhaps, the images found in European prehistoric caves are all characterized by the multidirectional wrapping of the image around the natural volume and movement of the rock, through a combination of man-made lines and natural surfaces, fissures and cracks. Why does “frame succession” seem more relevant than these other common conventions? Rather than presenting a schematic analysis of the various “techniques” that supposedly indicate action, dynamics, and movement, it will suffice to say that a “frame succession” theory, and the proto-cinematographic interpretation of cave “art,” imposes a biased interpretation. Rather than focusing on the graphic re-composition of motion through automatic means, which yields a purely external understanding of movement and a purely aestheticizing vision of cave imagery, Herzog would do well to consider how unlike cinema the painted cave is. According to Henri Bergson, there are two fundamentally polarized ways of understanding time. One concerns the process of becoming, which unfolds within the duration, that is, within a physical sense of lived-in time. The other concerns a calculated and rational sense of time, for instance, in terms of the recomposition of temporality via technological means. A polarization ensues: duration and time-lapse are polar opposites, much in the same way that the sense of movement experienced in subterranean landscape media is quite unlike, and perhaps diametrically opposed, to a sense of movement automated by the cinematic trick of frame succession. A motion picture will be defined by its limited length of time, which is usually measured in minutes. The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, for instance, is a 95-minute-long documentary film. A cave visit is not time-constricted or timed-out unless, as in my experience of the Hall of the Polychromes in Altamira, you happen to be part of a scientific team measuring the impact of CO2 levels on the prehistoric paintings. Against a mechanized and automated sense of chronization, Bergson sides with a sense of life in the duration, arguing against the ruses of representation and mechanization of the movement image due to what this author calls the “cinematographic method.” The Bergsonian alternative to cinematographic thinking is intuition, which bypasses method and the independence of technique. Intuition is a way of doing things informed by a knack for life,

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or what this philosopher calls élan vital. Translated as the “vital impulse,” élan vital refers to self-organization and spontaneous morphogenesis in an increasingly complex manner. The cave paintings we find today on the walls of Chauvet Cave did not appear all at once on the chosen panels. The sense of motion conveyed by the paintings is not the effort of a single person who wished to evoke a movement trick in order to represent movement. The work is, in my appreciation of it, an intuitive effort of many generations of nomadic peoples who passed, perhaps briefly, through the cave. While there, these people were driven to express and materialize memories and imaginational expressions of animal life. The result is the self-organization of graphic images, the spontaneous morphogenesis of composition and the consolidation of a sense of space which is itinerant and radial. As French paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan pointed out, “a mode of expression in which the graphic representation of thought is radial is today practically inconceivable”;8 this is because modern brains are wired to think in linear ways due to historical media technology such as writing and time-based media like video or cinema. For Leroi-Gourhan, the characteristics of an itinerant space and a radial space, which define Upper Paleolithic cave “art,” are suggestive of an animal behavior, and a physical and bodily perspective, which the huntergatherers of prehistory embodied. For Leroi-Gourhan, the itinerant mode of being is particularly characteristic of land species and the radial mode of birds, and he adds: “It could also be said that the former is connected with predominant muscular and olfactory perception, while the latter principally concerns species with a developed sense of vision.”9 The classification is only a very rough one, but it is useful to create a picture of Upper Paleolithic paintings in relation to a way of being that is animalistic and multiperspectival, what I call the earthling condition. The production of graphic transmission and communication stems from a bodily perspective that integrates, according to Leroi-Gourhan, both radial and itinerant modes. In Leroi-Gourhan’s theory, technics stem from a biological source, from gesture: hence the relationship between gesture and speech, movement and graphic trace. The relationship is seamless, however, and there is no independent agency in the technical elaboration of gesture as a graphic convention, no separate agency in the domain of technology.



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The painted cave conveys something that is not the by-product of an independent technique or technological system that exists in its own historical or developmental pathway, like the technology of film or the technique of the camera shot and camera angle. Rather, cave imaging is the offshoot of a bio-technics that is seamlessly teased from, and dependent upon, a specific physical and geophysical materiality. In other words, there is no independent history or domain of knowledge in the case of landscape media. There is no cinema, no film technology, no film techniques, upon which to draw, and in relation to which the maker of cave images refers. Herzog can quote other films in his documentary about Chauvet Cave (for instance, George Stevens’s Swing Time, from 1936), not least because his chosen medium has an independent history. How can you quote another landscape or another historical era of a landscape? There is only the specific body, in a specific cave space, immediately interacting to produce a painting or engraving. There is no history, and no independence of technology, in the experience of landesque immersion. Finally, there is no image-object inside the cave: no painting you can take home, frame, and hang on a gallery wall, no shot you can include in a film that you can distribute in the cinema, no photo you can print or upload online. The images are seamless and cannot be removed from the cave unless they are remediated and transformed into independent media objects. As such, the idea that the movement image inside the cave is the same as the movement image in a cinematographic sense, which is objectified in frames, can be utterly misleading. Because the wall conveys a physical and geophysical sense of continuous movement, the movement image in the case of subterranean landscape media typically extracts animal motion from the volumes and lines of rock, which are not framed, certainly not in the sense that cinematic frames or stills are. The images on the walls do not start at a specific point in time, like the beginning of a film. In the case of parietal “art,” the images emerge from the walls themselves, and bleed back into the walls. And while motion is delivered by the technological medium of film through the trick of fast frame succession, the movement of the animals in the cave is not a trick or a mere technical ruse—it is a layer of expression that highlights the real (i.e., material) movement of the rock.

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Going back to Bergson, it is important to make a difference between the automated recomposition of movement due to the technology of film projection and the physical effort to move, which is not automated, but is performed by bodies and landscapes. In other words, the position from which the cinema viewer senses movement is static and effortless. What generates movement is a technological apparatus. In the case of the cave painting, there is no central position from which to look at the painting. There is no sense of “I,” the viewer, placed at a certain distance from the paintings, which are deliberately oriented in such a way that they appeal to my gaze. As Edmund Carpenter showed in his study of Eskimo drawings, there are ways of understanding the practice of image-making that bypass the objectivity of the spectator’s gaze, and the central position of the viewer, by allowance of a more multiperspectival and radial condition of possibilities. Likewise, the movement celebrated in the walls of the Salle du Fond, which I explored in Chapter 3, occurs because of a physical effort, not because of an automated trick. The walls have a geokinetic energy—the painters have climbed or squeezed against those walls in an effort to wrap images around them; the viewer has to move around in order to grasp the image. As Bergson puts it: “It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film.” Bergson concludes: “The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph.”10 The cinematographic method is not only a technological procedure to mediate movement automatically, and generalize it under the custody of frame succession. It is also, in Bergson’s critique, a way of thinking, and a condition for the making of technologically construed subjectivities. What is defining about the cinematographic self is that life is perceived, as I intimated earlier, from a fixed position and at a distance. In the cinema, the audience needs to stand away from the screen and take their individual seats. The screen is always



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straight—the film projection is always made to fit the screen. Cave images are not positioned straight, nor is there a fixed position from which to look at them. In many caves galleries, image-makers squeezed into very tight spots, which would have made it impossible to stand back and gaze at the movement image. In the case of subterranean landscape media, there is no right way up or down as far as the movement image is concerned, nor indeed is there a fixed sense of subjectivity or distance from which to launch a sense of spectating “I.” Without a touchable sense of living movement, the medium of film creates a sphere of subject formation where the subject does not participate in a tactile reality, a reality with depth, but rather understands the world in relation to representations of life, which are consumed at a distance. Summing up, what the image-filled cave achieves is not a frontal and projective representation of movement. Nor is the painted cave characterized by a saccadic re-composition of movement frames. In my understanding, the images created inside Upper Paleolithic caves elicit a nomadic and intuitive sense of mediation, involving all our senses, all our body, in a multidimensional and multiperspectival way. To argue that the depiction of successive animals and motion blur are clear proto-cinematic techniques is to side with a technicity, a subjectivity defined by technology, akin to what Bergson called the “cinematograph inside us.”11 I am not making a judgmental statement here. There is nothing wrong with seeing the world through a camera lens. Herzog carries a cinematograph inside him, which is why he sees Chauvet Cave as a filmic experience. However, my experience inside prehistoric caves is very different. My intention is not to critique a technologized form of subjectivity, as in Bergson’s case, but to critique media archaeologies that explain cave paintings as though they were proto-cinema. The people who entered Chauvet Cave tens of thousands of years ago did not, like Herzog, carry a cinematograph inside them. They carried a nomadic vision of life, characterized by a material way of thinking and by the interconnection, fluidity, permeability, and complexity of the material world, at least according to Clottes’s conceptual framework (see Chapter 4). It has become necessary to reveal just how unlike cinema Chauvet Cave actually is. That the similarity can be established at the level of graphic

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conventions suggests that the theory of proto-animation can be quite superficial. I would like to add that if Herzog entered Chauvet Cave only to see what he wanted to see, then the effect of his film was to popularize a theory that imposes a technologically a priori vision. Given the fact that Chauvet Cave is closed to the public, and it is not possible for unauthorized visitors to access the cave, the popular perception of this cave is heavily mediated, not only given Herzog’s well-known and globally distributed film, but also given the highly mediated experience felt in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc replica cave, in the Chauvet Cave virtual visit site, and as a result of the vast amounts of photographic and video material available online. How can anyone test the non-cinematic experience of a cave if the most popular way to see the cave is via screen media? What is interesting about Herzog’s film is not what it allows us to see, but what it does not allow us to see. It is not the dreams of prehistoric people that have been forgotten, in my view, but the cave itself, the living mediacy of the limestone mountain. By popularizing the idea that image-filled caves are consumed optically, or audiovisually at best, Herzog discards the possibility that inside the cave the visitor may actuate a completely different type of vision. To this effect, Bernard Stiegler has written about Chauvet Cave in relation to the notion of “archicinema.” The walls of Chauvet Cave are seeable only to the extent that someone knew how to bring the invisible or pitch-black interior into sight. Quoting Lascaux and Chauvet as examples of archi-cinema, Stiegler argues that the technical form of life (i.e., via the medium of cinematographic technology) is underpinned by a noetic and oneiric form of life, that is, a desiring form of life. The noetic act, which is an idea Stiegler develops from his reading of Aristotle’s tripartite theory of the soul, concerns the projection of an endogenous image— the “soul” of an image, if you like. This soul of the image lives inside the hard and graphic object called film or photographic image, but it is nonetheless substantially independent, since the noetic image lives freely in the form of thought, or else in the form of the subconscious. The noetic act does not necessarily yield hard images, or imagistic objects (film, photo, or CGI). The noetic act involves a softer vision, where image is still substantially coalesced with ideas. In other words, cinema contains its own noema, if I may corrupt Husserl’s apt term, which is thought. A film image is a



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hard layer imposed over the image-filled thought. A motion picture can either stifle that imagination and make a purely graphic and explicit representation that leaves no room for noema, or else it can achieve what subterranean landscape media does, which is to leave gaps, open up holes, leave incomplete figures, and pry open enough room for thought. Going back to the Little Prince’s lesson: the point of making images is to release the vivid imagination. The fundamental difference between a cave and the medium of cinema is that the soul of the image, in the case of cinema, is not embodied thinking, but intellectual thought. The “soul” of the painted cave, on the other hand, is not an intellectual form of thinking. The prehistory of the image, in the case of the cave, is not rational thought, but physical sensation and memory. Henri Bergson famously defined memory as “just the intersection of mind and matter.”12 Ever critical of technologically recorded mnemonics, Bergson’s vitalism sees memory as an outgrowth out of physical life, and a continuation of movement especially. Memory grows, according to Bergson, in concentric circles of recollection that establish increasingly essentialized forms of matter, further and further away from the material present, thus stretching the confines of memory from physical movement all the way to fantasy and dream, but always in such a way that recollection remains attached to an immediate sense of life. In other words, whereas movement is the memory closest to the present and lived-in moment, fantasy and dream are furthest away from that present. Bergson argued that because psychological theory has failed to consider the motor element in memory, and memory is usually defined in psychological theory as a pure intellectual and mental engine, “we have sometimes overlooked and sometimes exaggerated what is automatic in the evocation of remembrances.” And he added: “According to our view, an appeal is made to activity at the precise moment when perception gives rise to imitative movements which scan it, as it were, automatically. A sketch is thereby furnished to us, into which we put the right details and the right coloring by projecting into it memories more or less remote.”13 Bergson’s critique of the automation and mechanization of memory, predates the era of silicon memory and computer-assisted mnemotechnics, but it nonetheless anticipates the effects of technologically determined recollection. Because automated memory cannot be integrated with a sensorimotor experience,

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nor with the immediacy of a tactile-kinesthetic perception, the memory that technology can afford is, to use Bergson’s term, remote. Literally, it is motional or motile, but at a distance, from the independent reality of a technologically generated memory. Archi-cinema, in Stiegler’s account, refers to a cinema of ideas. However many ideas archi-cinema relays, it remains a medium without actual physical movement, without physical effort. The distance between archi-cinema and image-filled caves exposes yet another tension, reminiscent of Bergson’s perceived tension between physical memory and automated memory. Cinema turns that substance or anima within the image into rational thought, into pure mind, thus ignoring the materiality and physicality of soul. Essentialized matter, which is synonymous with memory in Bergson’s philosophy, lies between matter and mind, between representation and image. Cinema, on the other hand, has no access to that material reality, and can only reach out to pure ideas, to purely intellectual thinking, and to automated memories. From a vitalist perspective such as Bergson’s, not even a cinema of ideas or archicinema counts as a medium for the transmission of life itself, since ideas are not material enough to count as élan vital. Ideas are but a mere intellectual and rationalized projection of physical life. In his attempt to overcome Bergson’s critique, Stiegler argues that the noetic form of life “rests on processes of the projection through montages of primary, secondary and tertiary retention and protension.” This process, Stiegler continues, “was concretized in the form of spatializing movement in prehistoric caves (on the walls of these caves).”14 Stiegler conceptualizes this prehistoric montage after Husserl, in the sense that the images contained in Chauvet Cave are, for this author at least, poised between retention and protension. In the Husserlian sense, retention is the capacity to understand, in the present moment, a past movement or action that has a present effect. Retention is the capacity to understand the past at a physical and experiential level, that is, in terms of past actions whose effects are perceived in the present time. Conversely, protension is the capacity to anticipate a movement or action, once again from the standpoint of an immediate present. Protension is an experiential and present-tense understanding of an imminent future. But because it is physical movement that strings these processes together



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into a seamless continuum, and not technology, retention and protension are inseparable from a sense of physical time (duration). Stiegler tries to fit Husserl’s phenomenology into a theory of archi-cinema that conceptualizes the thought within the cinematic image, its soul if you like, in terms of the movement of cinema-ideas. In other words, Stiegler tries to conceptualize cinema-ideas as movements, which alternate in the present moment, that is, while the viewer watches a film. The movement of cinema-ideas is caught between retention (the point in a film when an idea has started to “move” up to the present) and a sense of protension (an anticipation of what will happen next—of how the idea will move on). Movement, according to this interpretation, is a process involving a montage of retention and protension, capture and anticipation. But if movement starts with rational thought, and then becomes graphically expressed in the form of paintings or films, what agency does matter itself have, if any? In Stiegler’s Aristotelian thesis, it is only the rational mind that is responsible for prime movement: only the human idea can generate movement and causation. Idea acquires the role of a Prime Mover. The idea is an original cause that makes all things move. This imposition of Aristotelian rationalism on the understanding of cave “art” founders, not least because the image-filled cave is not communicating an idea at all, and its intellectual movement, but an energy, and its physical movement. As I have already pointed out, the need to impose a rationalistic philosophical understanding, and a Classical Greek conceptual framework, only exposes the inability of some contemporary commentators of cave “art” to think outside the frameworks of Classical Western thought, and to embrace indigenous European ways of thinking. It is not Aristotle or Plato that should be consulted to gain an understanding of how cave art delivers movement, but a paleo ontology, and an indigenous form of material thinking. Ultimately, Stiegler manages to do what Deleuze already achieved in his books on cinema, namely to overcome Bergson’s vital materialist critique of the movement image by arguing that there is a deep movement within film in the form of thought. In other words, the Bergsonian critique of the cinematographic method can be exposed if we consider that, although the movement of the image itself is artificial in the case of cinema, the movement of thought, or the succession of retentions and protensions at

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the heart of cinema, is not artificial. This, then, is the soul of cinema, which supposedly crystallizes in the form of the cinematographic image. Stiegler only manages, like Deleuze, to find philosophical thought moving inside archi-cinematic film. If archi-cinema and image-filled caves lie in the same plane of consistency, to borrow the much-used Deleuzian turn of phrase, and if one can be said to have evolved into the other, then one ought to be able to ask: What is the thought, the idea, the rational meaning of a limestone wall? What does a wall full of images of animals “mean”? The question is, of course, nothing. Western rationalism all but ignores that it is possible to make sense of the world in relation to how bodies receive and emit energy, and that there are ways of engaging with the world, of knowing it, that simply cannot be reduced to reason. There are facts that will always remain brute, that is, inaccessible to language and logos. To break from that stubborn historical legacy of Western rationalism it is imperative, I insist, that an indigenous way of thinking is teased from the material thinking embedded in imagefilled caves. Stiegler’s account of Chauvet Cave is problematic for one other reason. This author favors the primacy of technics, and a kind of transhistorical artificiality, ignoring the non-artificial surface of the cave itself. Take this section, for instance: When we see the Chauvet cave paintings, we are aware that we are accessing a new empathic possibility that did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic era, even though it is also true that those tertiary retentions that every object constitutes already allow us to access the artificial memory of a form of life itself artificial, and of which we are the inheritors.15

Stiegler is ignoring the possibility that image-filled caves do not necessarily require the use of independent techniques and technologies, and that going inside caves can involve imagining or remembering animals, or picturing the movement in one’s mind. He argues that filling the cave with images did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic era. However, as I pointed out earlier, there is a prehistory to prehistory, in the form of neanderthal cave occupation. Who is to say whether or not neanderthals also imagined movement on the walls, or extracted memories from these movements, without layering them



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with material graphic imagery? In other words, the people who visited the caves tens of thousands of years ago did not necessarily descend to watch the paintings and consume these images as though they were pictures on a gallery wall, or as though they were motion pictures. People may have gone into the caves to look at the bare walls, not just the paintings and engravings. Perhaps the purpose was to sense the motion there, and to unravel the way in which raw matter transmits energy. Whether The Cave of Forgotten Dreams allows the viewer to see this anemography, this soul of the image, in the form of a material essence and substance, rather than an intellectual idea, is debatable. For some viewers, Herzog’s film may lack depth for this reason. For others, it may inspire a wealth of thought. To ascertain whether or not Herzog’s film is a form of archicinema, and whether it reaches out to the soul of film (i.e., to thought) is not the point in contention. My point is that the theories of proto-cinema and archi-cinema fail to identify the most simple differences between watching a film and visiting a cave. Finally, there is a self-referential tone to Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is inimical, in my opinion, to the actual experience of the geophysical cave. Paleo hunters entered the cave in order to sense something other than their own selves. In a complete reversal of Herzog’s self-referential gaze, the paleo hunters saw nonhuman animals on the walls. Going inside the cave involved not seeing oneself, or rather, seeing oneself as other: as bison, as deer, as cave, as death. To enter the cave in the case of Herzog amounts to seeing oneself and one’s own medium, hence the reference to Fred Astaire’s shadow dance sequence “Bojangles in Harlem,” from the film Swing Time (1936). What Chauvet provokes in Herzog is self-reflection. The images that are reflected back to Herzog are all filmic. Herzog sees himself on the walls of the cave. Past that egotistic mirror, Herzog cannot see very well. Werner Herzog finishes his documentary film of Chauvet Cave with a coda. The German film director opts for leaving the underground environment to explore a nuclear power station located some twenty miles from the site of the prehistoric cave of Pont d’Arc. Herzog learns that a surplus of water has been used to cool the nuclear reactors, and that the warm waters produced by the power plant have been diverted to create a tropical biosphere located half a

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mile downstream. The film finishes with a brief tour of the warm and steamy greenhouses created with these reused waters. Herzog is particularly attracted by the animals that have been introduced into the artificial biosphere, and which thrive in the artificial jungles near the Cruas Power Station. He is captivated by albino crocs floating in glass tanks, which he captures staring blankly at their own ghost-like reflections. Such is the uncanny similarity of the mutant croc and its mirror-image, the two appear to be indistinguishable in Herzog’s final shot, which spawns the closing remarks of the film: “A new climate is steaming and spreading. Very soon these albinos may reach Chauvet cave. Looking at the paintings, what will [the crocodiles] make of them?” and Herzog adds: “Nothing is real, nothing is certain. It is hard to decide whether or not these creatures here are dividing into their own doppelgängers. And do they really meet or is it just their imaginary mirror reflection? Are we today possibly the crocodiles who look back into an abyss of time when we see the paintings of Chauvet cave?”16 Herzog is perhaps trying to condense the film into a series of ideas that open his film to an archi-cinematic horizon. Herzog wants us to leave the cinema thinking. It is as if Herzog was conceding that the graphic images shown earlier in the film had to be plied into thought provocations. Although the film fails to make this crucial point during the entire time spent inside the cave, opting for an aestheticized gaze over the original cave paintings, it is in Herzog’s closing remarks that the film gets down to discussing a real-world dilemma. Are we who visit the cave in historical times incapable of seeing past the mirror, which throws our own image, our own doppelgängers, back at us? Herzog could have perhaps shown more humility when posing this question. He should have perhaps questioned his own vision, his entire theory that caves are cinema, and his vision in frames and intellectual discourse. Instead, the moment Herzog can get past the purely aesthetic gaze, and he no longer encounters the paintings as works of beauty and artistic craft, the crystallization of the idea is very simplistic, and it is almost forced upon the film in the form of a postscript. This idea that Herzog plants in our heads, which concerns fears of global warming and over-industrialization, are not enough to connect the “soul” of this film to the “soul” of the cave. The cave also speaks of climate change and



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animal extinction, albeit during an age of global freezing. Like a good tourist guide, Herzog points out these links to show his audience just how relevant and contemporary this cave is. However, what Chauvet  Cave transmits is not an idea, planted by an author, artist, or director. The “soul” of this cave is anonymous and collective. It is a memory acquired by many peoples over thousands of years, and it is not expressed in terms of a rationalized idea, which can be articulated as clearly and as authoritatively as Herzog’s postscript. If the soul of the cave could speak, the sounds that would come from the halls and chambers would be incomprehensible, akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin famously called an “heteroglossia.”17 In Bakhtin’s proposed sense, heteroglossia is a dialogue of languages, or a concert of languages. The multiplicity of languages ultimately blurs the distinction claimed by a monolingual or monologic agent, which in turn cancels out any possibilities of an authorial or authoritative voice. Heteroglossia are the voices of carnival simultaneously sounding out. Its emission is polyphonic (composed of many sounds). A cave will typically trap sound within a chamber’s walls and magnify it, while mixing separate soundwaves in a common echoic resonance. The cave does not emit, either in sound or optical image, a clear-cut message that can be incorporated into discourse by an author, or in this case, a film director. Unlike Herzog’s reading of Chauvet, the actual halls of this famous cave may resemble  Bakhtin’s heteroglot and polyphonic carnival, a cave animated by a multitude of reverberating echoes or a concerted and vibrant silence. The cave is a more-than-human carnival of intensified and jismic sensation. The cave soundscape is not communicable—it is only transmissible.With such a multitudinous stream of voices and lives sounding out in the echoic chambers, the substance of the cave is prevented from acquiring rational speech or language. The sounds of souls return to a very material and dark sonority that can be heard, and can be listened to, but cannot be understood.

Film animation, ditto Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic method can be now extended to a critique of film animation. Bergson wrote: “However much we might look at

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cinematographic images, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement.” And he adds: “In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere.”18 Movement, in Bergson’s account, is synonymous with duration, life, élan vital. Movement, accordingly, is the polar opposite of a technologically recomposed motion (e.g., film animation). The next question I will raise thus concerns this critical contestation of the term “animation.” Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning soul, movement, or energy, which can be translated into the Greek psychē, from where we get the English word psychology. The Ancient Greek concept of the psychē is baked inside a philosophical belief in the ontological connection between movement (kinesis) and being (ousia). In Plato’s theory, the soul is defined as that which moves being, but which is not moved by anything else— Aristotle presented his version of exactly the same idea by way of the Unmoved Mover, the soul and maker of creation as a whole. The Socratic perspective is not at odds with more primitive Greek philosophies, for instance Eleatic and Pythagorean thinking, except that it inserts a clearly analytical and rationalist framework. This rationalization of the notion of the soul as thought, or as mind, is a fundamental breakthrough of the Socratic tradition, which largely historicized the pre-Socratic notion of the irrational soul. Socratic theories of soul as a movement of ideas prepared this historical understanding of the soul for its technologization, that is, for the production of anima via technologically mediated forms of makeability. Plato’s parable of the cave is often mentioned in theories of animation as a proto form of animation technology, or else as a description of animation technological thinking before a technology such as hand-drawn animation was ever invented. As I intimated in Chapter 4, the Socratic parable of the cave is highly problematic, as is the imposition of a rationalist philosophy on the understanding of animacy. Going back to a point I raised in the preceding section, the softer layer of the cave (or what I call the material soul) does not have to be rational thought, in the sense proposed by Stiegler’s archi-cinema. The substance of the cave can be something more sensual, more grotesque. I will now refer to a few examples of how media archaeology appropriates the prehistoric cave to justify the theory of protoanimation, drawing on a rationalized sense of animated movement.



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In 1906, a book entitled La caverne d’Altamira à Santillana, près de Santander (Espagne), which contains the first color reproductions of the paintings of Altamira Cave, was published. The authors were Henri Breuil, the famous French prehistorian who authenticated a number of other major sites including Lascaux, and Émile Cartailhac, initially a vocal skeptic of the authenticity of prehistoric “art.” The book contains detailed colored drawings of the cave paintings, including the image of an eight-legged wild boar, supposedly found in the famous Hall of the Polychromes, right next to the famous deer found in this gallery. In 1933, the British film collector and historian Wilfred E. Day wrote a monograph entitled 25,000 Years to Trap a Shadow: A History of the Birth of Moving Pictures, in which he set out to trace the origins of cinematography. Day’s history commences with the depiction of the running boar in the cave of Altamira, as depicted by Cartailhac and Breuil. Drawing the reader’s attention to the depiction of the boar in running position, and to the eight legs, Day speculates that the “boar” of Altamira is the first evidence of film animation. Day even includes a picture of that eight-legged boar in his book, which is now widely available online. The fact is, there is no eight-legged boar in Altamira. The figure in question, as I can vouchsafe from firsthand examination, and also given my correspondence with the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, is a faded-out bison. It does not have eight legs. It is just too blurry to make out, and impossible to distinguish from the natural lines of the limestone rock. As with a number of other figures drawn by Breuil, not least the dubious Sorcerer of the cave of Trois Frères, the eight-legged wild boar of Altamira represents an attempt by early prehistorians to impose their own interpretations on the prehistoric cave. The boar of Altamira may have more to do with a cultural imaginary influenced by the growth of motion picture technology in the early decades of the twentieth century than an actual cinematographic technique found on the walls of this famous cave. In other words, Breuil may have brought with him a “cinematograph inside him,” which led him to believe the “boar” in question was depicted like a cartoon animation. Although many figures found in Upper Paleolithic caves were indeed depicted with many legs, for instance in the case of the eight-legged Running Bison of Chauvet Cave (found in the north side of the Hillaire Chamber), there are a number of

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inconsistencies about the Altamira “boar.” Breuil himself acknowledged that the wild boar in fact had horns, which suggests a rather odd taxonomy. Images of the so-called eight-legged wild boar of Altamira are now widely distributed, even though it is plain for anyone who has been to the cave, as I have, that the boar at a gallop is nowhere to be found. The famous boar of Altamira is a modern myth that exemplifies the need for so-called prehistoric art to be fitted within narrow historical interpretations, which are technologically a priori. And because the cave continues to function as a means of transmission and communication of soft media (cultural imaginaries and collective memories), it is hardly surprising that, instead of a bison, Breuil would have seen a cartoonish boar. I am not arguing, like the scientists at Altamira, that Breuil’s vision is fake. The story of the eight-legged boar neatly encapsulates my point. The power of the cave to convey culturally programmed images, and to deliver these images into a cultural imaginary, remain ever-present. Breuil saw animated figures coming from the cave walls in 1905. It is not mere coincidence that only five years earlier, J. Stuart Blackton produced The Enchanted Drawing (1900), a work that is sometimes stated to be the first film recorded on standard picture film that included animated sequences. Blackton applied the stop-action effect popularized by Georges Méliès, such that the camera was stopped and some change was made to the scene, to a succession of drawings replaced by a similar drawing with a different facial expression (or a drawn bottle and glass that were replaced by other objects). Is it a mere coincidence that, at the same time that the new technology of film animation was being invented and popularized throughout Europe, the first prehistorians represented the paintings contained in Altamira Cave as static animations? In other words, is the gaze of the early prehistorians not influenced by the burgeoning art of animated film? It is conceivable that Breuil and Cartailhac carried a filmic way of thinking or “cinematograph inside” into the cave, going back to Bergson’s critique. And he was not the only one, as I will explain shortly. Indeed, although the depiction of movement in parietal art is unquestionable, and the graphic means to do so are evidently modern (motion blur, sequencing, overlap), I must insist that the people who entered Altamira did not, unlike Breuil, carry a cinematograph or an animation picture with them, but a nomadic sense of animic life.



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According to Marc Azéma’s calculations, 41.1 percent of the animals found in French parietal “art,” or nearly one animal out of two, are represented in movement.19 Based on this figure, Azéma argues that it is reasonable to believe that “animation” of whole animals or body parts formed a major aspect of cave “art.” Azéma seems to forget that the caves of prehistoric Europe were painted by many image-makers over an extensive period of time, indeed over whole millennia, and that the overlaying of images, the superimposition of graphic figures, the inclusion of children who had undeveloped manual skills and who may have blurred or deformed images unintentionally, are fortuitous aspects of this medium. Azéma, however, wants a rational and scientific explanation. With this aim in mind, the second volume of his systematic analysis of cave art, entitled L’Art des Cavernes en Action: Animation et Mouvement, is devoted to the breakdown of images into positions defined by the dynamic parts of the animal body (head, limbs, and tail), and a systematic categorization of these positions within contextual sequences found in the cave walls. Azéma argues that it is possible to re-format Upper Paleolithic images in cinematic tables (similar to stop-motion animation), which uncovers the cinematic conventions of cave “art.” For several decades now, Azéma has supported the idea that cave art is a medium for the communication of moving image akin to animation technology. The theory seems to find some degree of support in the fact that the titillating effects of the glowing lamps used to illuminate the cave’s dark interior in Upper Paleolithic times would have made the images move. Azéma’s documentary film When Sapiens Made Films (2015), and the accompanying book La préhistoire du cinema, endeavor to convince viewers and readers, like Herzog does in his film, that the birth of film animation lies underground. Whether or not these works are convincing in their committed advocacy depends on your willingness to accept the working assumption that movement in film, and movement in cave paintings, are substantially the same. My argument, drawing on Bergson’s critique, is that mechanophysical and vital physical movement are poles apart. Not all movement betokens life. For Azéma, and rather uncritically, graphically depicted movement is all qualitatively the same, whether in a prehistoric or contemporary media context. It all boils down to the same cinematographic method of motion re-composition, the same saccadic capture of graphic movements into static

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units or frames. However, if the depiction of motion in the prehistoric cave walls stems from a sense of movement that is not rationalized, but which stems from an intuition of lived-in movement and an expression of an élan vital imagined and sensed within the rock, then the theory of proto-animation comes under fire. As I intimated earlier, the use of certain graphic conventions like anamorphism, superimposition, motion blur, and figure succession may well evoke, from a purely technical point of view, a desire to further emphasize in graphic ways the movement that is being conveyed by the medium of limestone. However, rather than focusing on the way certain formal gestures look at the superficial optical level, it is necessary to understand how substantially different the materiality of movement expressed on a limestone wall is when compared to an animated film, given the fact that the movement in question does not start with the graphic image, but with the imaginational image, the noema. What comes under fire, subsequently, is the structuralist way of thinking that underpins Azéma’s thesis, which hearkens back to André Leroi-Gourhan’s work. Leroi-Gourhan described the pictorial works found in Upper Paleolithic caves as “technical gestures,” by which he meant extensions of a biological gesture within the conventions of a graphic technology. As I intimated earlier, Leroi-Gourhan did not see the technical gestures materialized in cave painting as independent techniques, part of an independent technology that has an agency of its own, a history of its own, a sense of life of its own. Rather, he saw the emergence of technics (the invention of tools, the invention of graphic conventions, the appearance of symbols) as continuous extensions of a biological gesture. Thus, according to Leroi-Gourhan’s definition, animation is the result of a biophysical movement morphing into a technical gesture. The problem with Leroi-Gourhan’s theorization is that a structuralist system of technical gestures is put forward, which allows this author to derive a sense of prehistoric animation techniques from an inert and quasi-linguistic structural basis. In this well-known structuralist analysis, cave graphisms convey a technical recomposition of movement, where the physical gesture comes to rest in some inert state, preparing the figure for graphic animation. In other words, as the biological or geophysical sensation of movement comes to rest in a static image, and as the static image is then gazed upon



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under the effects of lighting, a new sense of movement, mediated by an inert medium, is generated. The ultimate aim of Leroi-Gourhan is to prove that the underlying reason for cave painting was a dualistic cultural belief system, and that the entire Upper Paleolithic production of images can be interpreted as an expression of a male/female spiritual dualism. The interpretation is highly problematic, and it has been heavily criticized by many art historians and paleontologists, who detect a philosophical bias characteristic of the period in which Leroi-Gourhan conducted his work, namely the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Structuralist thinking and semiotic analysis seduce Leroi-Gourhan into thinking that there is a structure and an organization to the figure contained in Upper Paleolithic cave panels, and that the intention to produce structural formations and inert “graphemes,” as this author calls the images, justifies a structuralist approach. However, the theory of animation proposed by LeroiGourhan rests on the dubious assumption that the images are “graphemes,” that is, graphic units of a structured composition, and that these graphemes are inert. As I have already pointed out, this theory forgets the possibility that the images grow organically, that the structure Leroi-Gourhan found on the walls of prehistoric caves is an arbitrary and serendipitous frame imposed by a structurally minded scientist on a conglomeration of images that have emerged in self-organizing and spontaneous fashion, like life itself. LeroiGourhan also ignores that the images may not be inert, and that the depiction of incomplete and suspended images is of course deliberate, so as to create a vivid, living sense of the image, where the holes are filled by living memory and the imagination. Ignoring these key features of Upper Paleolithic imagery, Leroi-Gourhan classified the techniques of motion representation in cave graphism in terms of “segmented animation,” which involves the depiction of only a single body part, usually the front legs; “symmetrical animation,” which involves all four legs depicted in motion, as in the case of the Black Horse depicted in full gallop in Lascaux mentioned earlier; “coordinated animation,” where the head and four legs of the animal are depicted in motion; and “no animation,” where no attempt to represent movement was intended.20 Leroi-Gourhan justified this classification and put together an extensive inventory of motion representation within Paleolithic cave “art,” featuring a number of different

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graphically animated species, including horses, bison, aurochs, deer, and other animals. A schematic analysis of the whole of cave “art” in relation to formal techniques of motion recomposition is a project taken up, as I have already mentioned, by Azéma, whose painstaking analysis of parietalism in action draws not only on Leroi-Gourhan’s classification, but also on the method of iconographic analysis proposed by Erwin Panofsky and later applied to cave “art” by Georges Sauvet. According to Azéma, the analysis of cave “art” reveals a saccadic way of depicting rapid motion within Upper Paleolithic sites, “which demonstrates the existence of a system firmly elaborated upon graphic conventions conditioned by retinal perception.”21 Azéma’s analytic sees animation gestures in a vast number of archaeological sites. By the same token, Leroi-Gourhan saw dualistic organizations everywhere in prehistoric paintings. The scientific ambition in this case is to find an overarching theory that explains the meaning of the work and the mechanisms for its production, thus ignoring that, from the nonscientific, non-analytical, and non-rationalist perspective of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the need to evoke movements on the walls, and to materialize them as the movements of nonhuman animals, may have been an intuitive spark of the imagination that became conventional, rather than a technical gesture intent on communicating a meaning or ideological framework. The latter strikes me as a fundamentally historical perspective. Along with artist and paleo-experimentalist Florent Rivère, Azéma has also interpreted prehistoric bone discs previously thought to be pendants as protocinematographic instruments, similar to the Victorian thaumatrope. The thaumatrope is a perforated disc with string or stick threaded through the holes, which when spun, creates a simple animation effect. To illustrate their theory, Azéma and Rivère cite the example of a bone disc found at Laugerie Basse, where two successive images of a falling chamois are engraved on either side of the disc, representing an optical effect that prefigures cinematic thaumatropes. Since there are no comparable objects of this type in the European Upper Paleolithic, these authors should be more careful not to extrapolate their theory of proto-animation to the whole of cave “art.” That one prehistoric object allegedly applied modern techniques of motion recomposition does



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not justify a general theory of Upper Paleolithic “animation.” As I said before, a formal analysis does not begin to consider the more critical question of whether the movement is understood to come from some place other than an inert basis, for instance from a vital basis, from the movement of the rock, and the memory of animals in motion. The theory of proto-animation is also based on the assumption that lowglaring lamps would have made the images move on the walls of the cave, a hypothesis that makes an enthralling companion for Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary and Azéma’s film. The proto-animation hypothesis rests on the assumption that the interaction of natural lighting and the rock surface, coupled with the graphic technique of anamorphism, are enough to convey the effect of movement. This superficial understanding of movement as an external XF is highly questionable. Vital movement is not external or re-compositional. It is not just an effect. It is an affect, internal to life as thought is to language. If the basis of animation is an inert object, or series of objects, then it makes sense that animation emerges from artificial lighting technology (fire lamps) and from a technical system of inert structures, that is, a quasi-linguistic formal organization of animal figures in cave panels. However, these are clearly modern rationalities imposing an anachronistic reading that all but ignores the chaotic, piecemeal, fragmentary, impulsive, and intuitive nature of subterranean landscape media. Rather than stemming from a unified and authorial sense of structure, the emergence of a culturally conventionalized medium for the transmission of movement stems, in my speculative interpretation, from an organic basis in nomadic life, which is typified by a vital impulse to depict pure material flow. Why are scholars so keen to ignore that the sensed movement in subterranean landscape media comes from the limestone wall, from the memory of the animal, from the vivid imagination, that is, from a dynamic basis, rather than an inert one? Why the need to emphasize the role of prehistoric lanterns, and why the reference to technology? The lamps invented by Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were certainly a major technological innovation. However, the technology does not exist within the conditions of modern technologies, which as I have already pointed out, acquire an agency and subjectivity of their own. The lamp, in the case of the

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Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, is not a technological agent that somehow miraculates the appearance of movement. The medium that is creating glow, warmth, and movement on the walls is not technological. What lights the prehistoric cave, let us not forget, is fire, an elemental medium. It is fire, not technology, that shines inside the cave, and it is fire that powers the cave with perceivable movements. Why ignore this? Why the need to deliberately undermine the elemental nature of fire by stressing the function of the lamp, which is only a vessel to carry the actual medium? What transmits an added sensation of movements onto the walls is not the bone lamp, but the flame. The medium is elemental, not technological. The domestication and instrumentalization of fire is, without a doubt, a technology. In this case, however, I am not discussing how fire was light, or how it was transported inside a cave. Technology did, in fact, mediate that particular problem. The issue at stake here is not the transportation of fire. The question is: What medium lights the cave in its prehistoric condition? Evidently, the medium is not electric light, but fire. Keen to force his theory of animation onto the cave, Azéma ignores elemental forms of mediation and the power of elements (in this case fire) to transmit and communicate. In other words, fire is effaced from the process of mediation in Azéma’s theory, and the agency of the lamp is highlighted instead, as if it was the bone lamp that was shining light against the walls, rather than the flame. Similarly, it is the rotating disc that is considered to be animated in the case of the Laugerie Basse find, rather than the memory of the chamois. Like Breuil, who sees cartoon animations on the walls of Altamira, no doubt induced by the emergence of animation technology at the time of his visitation, Azéma sees agency only in the inert artifacts (the disc, the lamp, the structural organization of drawings) because he takes into the cave a culturally programmed subjectivity, a technologically a priori way of thinking characteristic of present-day minds habituated to the idea that technology has an independent agency. Azéma can take fire for granted and assign all the agency of mediation to inert artifacts, not least because in our present-day cultural condition of possibilities, technological artifacts have great significance and value, whereas fire does not. But as Bergson pointed out, “intuition is the lamp that is almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most.” He adds:



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“[Intuition] glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us.”22 It is the intellect that leaves us in darkness. This statement has hit the perfect chord. Rational intellect cannot supplant intuition. Rational explanations provided by scientists cannot be a substitute for intuitive consciousness. Darkness is not something that happened thirty thousand years ago or so, and that nowadays has been surpassed by electrical lighting technology, or more symbolically, by the power of rational intellect. Dark contemplation, going back to Maurice Blanchot’s Beast of Lascaux, is the only way to get closer to the cave’s enigma. What shines movement and life onto the walls of the cave is not a technological agency, an animation technique independent and in itself, but fire, an elemental medium, carrying with it the flame of a nomadic intuition, so much more conscious, animic, and luminous than scientific rationalism given its full affirmation of life in itself.

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What Is Paleocybernetics? The reinvention of paleo living The Paleo Movement, also known as paleo lifestyle, is a contemporary cultural phenomenon that aspires to replicate conditions assumed to have existed during the time of European hunter-gatherers—albeit in urban and modernday settings. This movement is to a large extent critical of the negatively perceived effects of industrialization, commercialization, and capitalist production on basic aspects of everyday life, not least health, well-being, and nutrition. The paleo movement in fact started as a research initiative concerning the detrimental impact of industrialized foods, particularly wheat-derived products, on human dietetics. The paleo movement hearkens back to the work of critical nutritionists, who, as early as the mid-1970s, proposed diets that supposedly countered the negative clinical effects of industrialized foods. Walter Voegtlin, one of the founding figures of the paleo movement, blamed the “citification” of human life with the development of food production models that strained the human ecology. Voegtlin argued that the problem with modern foods is essentially as old as the Neolithic Revolution. What the invention of agriculture caused, according to Voegtlin, is a sedentary ecology, a world defined by living in fixed settlements. When compared to the world of Ice Age hunter-gatherers, and the kind of nomadic subjectivity that typified their world, the sedentary way of living rooted human subjectivity in a very different relationship with the land. Rather than a land in motion, fluctuating in relation to rhythms of availability and scarcity, the sedentary subject acquired a static sense of natural rhythms, particularly in relation to the conventional cycles of farming and agricultural

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living. The polarization of sedentary and nomadic subjectivities, which as I will show goes to the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist politics, and which has been reworked more recently in the writings of Rosi Braidotti, is given a very brute, very simple, and very practical implementation in the case of paleo living. To the extent that the main concern of the paleo movement, at least in its original inception, is the effects of industrial living on people’s individual lives, the critique at the heart of Voegtlin’s work not only points to a collective politics, but a politics of the self and an ethical praxis implemented at the level of one’s own life—what is now known as the SIMBY approach (Start In My Back Yard). The great clash between vital and industrial models of living, and the fight for a sustainable ecology, does not only involve global environmental issues (climate change, air pollution, ocean pollution), but also personal battles by peoples who suffer the consequences of industrialization at a physical and clinical level. The fight for biopolitics is an issue that not only involves governments, non-government organizations, corporations, activists, pressure groups, eco-warriors, critical workers, and artists, but also the fight of everyday people waged at home, at work, in the intimacy of one’s own body. Personal health is the battleground on which the war against the excesses of industrial and commercial modernity are waged. What the paleo movement largely popularized is the means of re-singularizing the political sphere. Politics does not have to be collective anymore, insofar as it is embodied in a kind of body politic that is not generic, standard, or universal, but which is unique to every single physiological body. Every single person finds their own unique strategies, in their own and unique lifestyles, to cope with the stress and strain of mass industrialization. The battle is not waged necessarily through conventional political means, democratic or otherwise, but through health-promoting strategies which, according to Voegtlin, can combat the effects of advanced citification. Many allergies, autoimmune deficiencies, mental problems, and bowel disturbances are all, according to Voegtlin, partly or largely due to the result of poor-quality foods, unhealthy eating habits, and the industrialization of agricultural production. Controversial as the scientific evidence to back this claim may be, Voegtlin’s iconoclastic argument has found plenty of ammunition in recent discussions concerning common digestive and



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autoimmune problems, prompting further cultural responses such as the raw food, slow food, and gluten-free trends. The Stone Age Diet is a book that ventures into a critical meditation concerning the future of food production. Setting down dire predictions for the arrival of the twenty-first century, the Stone Age Diet sets the tone of a paleo movement steeped in end-of-the-millennium fears of ecological disaster, post-millennialist doom, and conspiracy theories concerning multinational agrochemical and biotechnology corporations. Voegtlin’s ideas were intended to spread what this author calls a “mantle of iconoclasticism.”1 In other words, Voegtlin wanted a radical strategy to combat the conditions of living posed by commercial and industrial citification, and not only in terms of what is happening in the food industry. The idea that an old way of living can be reinterpreted to develop real strategies for a future society is an odd, almost paradoxical injunction. Voegtlin described this phenomenon as “old-new departure.”2 It can be described more academically as paleocybernetics, the merging in contemporary culture of old and new, of progress and regression, of prehistory and posthistory. In addition to the problem of how to eat in an age of mass industrialization, concerns over deprivation of people’s sleep due to industrial timeframes, depersonalization of communication due to industrialized network technology, and lack of physical transmission in human intermediation are all critical issues that could be raised in the name of a paleo lifestyle. Paleo living is not limited to the choice of foods we eat or to dietary strategies mobilized to combat the negative clinical effects of poor diet. The paleo revolution is a critical praxis that, grounded on one’s own life, has tried to implement some degree of change at the personal level, given the fact that political establishments worldwide do not seem to indicate the necessary disposition and will to make a change at a collective level, particularly when it comes to securing a sustainable ecology. Despite being described as a mantle of iconoclasm by Voegtlin, the paleo movement has not necessarily retained its antiestablishment and iconoclastic allegiances. The revolution has become commercialized and mainstream. Recently, the paleo fad has been prompted by more narcissistic motivations, hence the Paleo Diet’s latest association with a popular weight loss method. The Paleo Diet trademark is perhaps the most popular outcome of the paleo

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movement as a whole. What started as a critical debate within the field of nutrition has grown into a widespread commercial phenomenon, particularly due to the trademarked popularization of the Paleo or Caveman Diet. An odd tension arises. The cultural construction of a modern sense of the paleo, and the invention of a contemporaneity defined by a fabricated paleolithic subjectivity, is torn by polarized dynamics. This neo-paleo condition, characterized also by the promotion of a new nomadic subjectivity, is pulled apart from within, given the implicit tensions of industrial and capitalist dynamics. The paleo movement cannot be conceptualized as a unified and homogenous cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, there is a cultural understanding of the paleo movement that seeks the complete abolition of the material conditions of industrial capitalism through a return to primitive living. On the other hand, there is a sense of the paleo that seeks to generate capital from the popular interest in all things paleolithic, while supporting an ethical way of creating business. In other words, while some strands of paleo life inculcate a radical reaction against a technological and industrialized society, for instance in the form of paleo anarchism, future primitivism, or anarcho-primitivism, more moderate strands of the paleocyber turn have tried to induce an ethical perspective within capitalist forms of production. As a form of business ethics, the paleo turn has evolved into a wide array of practices, including: paleo exercise (strategies for outdoor fitness that avoid the industrial mediation of gyms and fitness studios); paleo sleeping (strategies for sleeping that are not regulated by industrial work timetables); paleo sex (tips and recipes that avoid commercial products, and which are associated with aphrodisiac paleo foods); paleo education (schooling without formal organizations and curricula); paleo jewelry; and paleoware. Even if detractors of the paleo trend have raised concerns over the romanticism, sentimentalism, and nostalgia of the paleofantasy narrative, what the phenomenon brings to the fore is a cultural contestation, a fracas, for the construction of new cultural hybridity. What is at stake is a future where an old/new subjectivity is up for grabs. It is in this context that mediation can be reassessed at the practical level. Mediation in the paleocyber age therefore presupposes a critical way of practicing mediated communication and transmission. The finality is



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to question the industrialization, commercialization, and technological domination of media communication. Mediation in the paleocyber age does not simply involve an appreciation of caves as forms of medianature transmission. Mediation in a paleocyber context also involves contesting the culturally dominant idea that communication and transmission are conditioned and dependent upon mass forms of production and technological development. The cave is an example of a broader paleocyber interest in the appreciation of landscapes and elemental forces as forms of medianature, where raw natural environments are understood to be modes of mediation. The provocation of a paleo media praxis must surely hinge upon the need to find immersion in raw landscape not only for the purpose of fun and recreation, nor for the sake of practicing sports and outdoor activities necessarily, but as a media cultural initiative. To the extent that landscapes are understood to be a means of transmission, the physical and somatic experience of a wood, a forest, a mountain, a cave, a meadow, or a lake can all be understood within a media-specific context. In the same way that a person seeks specific media art contents when they go to the cinema, to the theatre, to the ballet, to the opera, or to a concert, one can seek media contents in raw landscape. To affirm that awareness of the landscape as a force for mediacy, as a power that transmits, surely poses a critical angle. Transmission and communication are not confined to human-only activities, or human-only technologies, or indeed to human systems of representation. Mediation is also an earthling phenomenon, a process of brute transmission of memories, imaginaries, and sensations between body and landscape. The effects of landesque immersion can be understood, from a narrow “paleo” perspective, as health inducing. However, the need to enter into contact with raw landscape, the need to feel the landesque immersion, and the need to find transmissions between body and wild natural world are not only questions of well-being, quality living, and health. Going back to the original paleo movement championed by Walter Voegtlin, the impetus for a paleo media movement can also be understood as a means of contestation and the activation of a critical ecological consciousness. To affirm a sense of paleo media at the practical level implies reaching out to raw landscape as one reaches out to media art or media technology, that is, as a way of establishing

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a connection, a sense of relationality, and also as a way of being informed, educated, entertained, and perhaps most importantly, transformed. To seek that contact with raw landscape, and to affirm its mediacy, hinges on the body’s capacity to recognize that raw materiality is not inert, that rocks, waters, winds, fire, cave spaces, canopies, grasslands, moors, deserts— they are not just resources. Raw matter is alive and expressive, and to be able to perceive and imbibe that vibrancy, amounts to an affirmation of the mediacy of raw nature, and a participation of the earthling body in mattertransmission.

Paleocybernetics Gregory Bateson must be credited as one of the earliest proponents of a cybernetic theory that largely questioned the anthropocentric and humanist bias in communication studies. For Bateson, the idea of an ecology of mind presupposes the folding of social dynamics within biological processes, and the cybernetic looping of human mind within an extended sense of mind that recognizes the wild natural world as an intelligent system. In his essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” Bateson asks his readers to consider the case of the primitive man who goes to his blackboard—the cave wall— and draws, freehand, a perfect reindeer in its posture. This man, according to Bateson, “cannot tell you about the drawing of the reindeer (if he could, there would be no point in drawing it),” adding: “Did you know that his perfect way of seeing—and drawing—a reindeer exists as a human potentiality? The consummate skill of the draftsman validates his relationship to the animal—his empathy.”3 In the case of the Upper Paleolithic image-maker, the understanding of how to communicate hinges upon a sense of subjectivity that is potential (what I call earthling subjectivity). This man is only a potential human. In actual terms, he is an earthling, which means he is potentially also a reindeer. As a reindeer, this man can communicate with other reindeer in their own terms, which is one the basic tenets of shamanism as a system of multinaturalist communication. Bateson seems to be arguing that there is a mode of communication that is not confined to human-only meaning, to



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message, but to a potential subjectivity, a becoming. That is a fine way to define the earthling condition, as I have imagined it. Pure becoming. The man and the reindeer are both becoming. They share that common ontology. When the man stares into the eyes of a reindeer, a cross-species affect is triggered, an animal empathy. The reindeer recognizes an animal life in the man, the man recognizes an animal in the human. The two might even recognize emotions, familiar to each other. The reindeer might be able to note a sign of aggression in the man; the man can recognize fear in the animal. Insofar as both understand what it feels like to feel scared or aroused, emotions are not merely temporary states that have no bearing upon the world at large. Feelings are expressions of affect, a bodily, sentient, and emotional intelligence that tethers living beings across species. And this is no conceptualization. I spent hours watching a reindeer at the Parque Cuaternario in Santillana del Mar, near Altamira, where many of the animal species that roamed Cantabria during the last Ice Age are held and displayed.4 That reindeer at Parque Cuaternario was very conscious of my presence there, of my non-threatening intentions, my curiosity, and my desire to connect. The man who draws a deer does not need, like I do, to explain everything that is going on in this process of cross-species transmission. In itself, the drawing is enough to elicit a connection between man and rock, between man and deer anima. This ecological form of communication, at least in Bateson’s understanding, has a lot to do with the problem of grace, which is fundamentally understood to be a problem of integration. Christianity is a belief system that provides one interpretation of grace in regard to a belief in a particular god, which allows the Christ-follower a way of integrating transcendence within their non-transcendental lives. In other words, Christian grace is a favor granted by god to a human. The paleo perspective, however, proposes a very different sense of grace, which is very much anti-Christian: the paleo perspective does not seek transcendence from the body, but full immersion in bodily life, a corporeality without any need for metaphysics, without need for the god madness, but which demands the distribution of the body within a material flesh that is potential, hence the need for practices of material bodily grotesque that seek full material transformation. In Bateson’s account, what is to be integrated in a primitive sense of grace are the “diverse

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parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called consciousness and the other the unconscious,” and he adds: “For the attainment of primitive grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason.”5 As progress-driven industrialization and technologization impel more change and innovation under the auspices of reason only, certain aspects of daily living become contested by the reasons of the heart. When a culture of technological newness willy-nilly propels the total rationalization of life, an odd junction is formed as the primitive empathy and physical connection with the wild ecology continue to resurface within advanced technoculture like an atavism. This dynamic is what paleocybernetics is all about. Paleocybernetics is a critical and theoretical study of a wide array of cultural phenomena characterized by old-new departures. The term can be used as an umbrella term to characterize likeminded political ideas involving resistance to mainstream techno-capitalist culture, for instance future primitivism, anarcho-primitivism, neo-tribalism, to mention but a few. Likewise, paleocybernetics can be used as an umbrella term that brings together an eclectic array of cultural practices such as techno-shamanism, ethno-techno, neoprehistory, cyber-paganism. It is worth pointing out that Bateson believed that the direction in which a natural or cultural change occurs will necessarily be conditioned by what he called the status quo ante.6 In other words, every new pattern, being a reaction to the old, will be systematically related to the old. The more technology changes, the more it must confront old paradigms, accounting for old ways of life that are supposedly being left behind. The Batesonian argument does not concern the looping of old belief systems within new cultural trends necessarily, but the general inevitability of a feedback caused by technological innovation. Drawing quite substantially on Batesonian cybernetics, Gene Youngblood pointed out in his classic book Expanded Cinema that the new millennium would be characterized as the “paleocybernetic age,” which is in turn defined by a combination of regression and progress. Youngblood’s point takes Batesonian cybernetics a step further, inasmuch as this author argues that present-day culture has reached such a degree of technological singularity, we have become inevitably haunted by old worlds and old material conditions of living.



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The paleocybernetic age is thus typified by a delicate negotiation of technological and industrial growth, on the one hand, and nature-in-theraw on the other, particularly in terms of addressing the detrimental effects of industrialization on the environment. In Youngblood’s analysis, the paleocybernetic age can be defined as a cultural horizon where science and superstition coalesce. Youngblood’s idea is epitomized in the image of a “hairy, buckskinned, barefoot physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated holograms or krypton laser inferometry.”7 The paleocybernetic age, still according to Youngblood’s predictions, will change core categories such as intelligence, morality, creativity, and the family. These and other monolithic structures will succumb to a state of paradox, given the irresolvable coming-together of new and old. In other words, paleocybernetics is not only a cultural fad, a fashion, or a diet; it is not just a brand or a logo, but much more substantially, it is the process of construction of subjectivities that, given our posthistorical condition, elide with prehistoric cosmologies and traditional belief systems. As modern-day culture begins to emerge from that maddening prison that is history, and as we begin to realize that a linear and forward-moving abstract time is a mad human invention, a sense of material existence opens up like a wormhole, revealing a continuity between prehistory and posthistory. According to American author Erik Davis, paleocybernetics is a strictly cultural phenomenon. It was canonized in the 1970s, according to Davis, particularly in the context of Californian alter-culture, where the deployment of new visual technologies in the service of trance states and altered consciousness often paid lip service or vaguely consulted non-Western traditions involving shamanism, paganism, tribalism, and so on.8 According to Davis, the paleocybernetic vibe rose to prominence again in the early 1990s, when the incoming futurism of global rave culture fused with a San Francisco penchant for psychedelia, creating a new wave of paleo enthusiasm. Despite the association of paleocyber experimentation with US alter-culture, the phenomenon is by no means unique to the US, nor indeed is it a US original. After all, West Coast paleocybernetics have their precedents in European antiindustrialization and back-to-nature movements of the late nineteenth century (for instance, the Monte Verità movement, the Luddite movement, and so on).

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My point is that paleocybernetics is not confined to hippie, psychedelic, rave, and other forms of neo-tribal youth culture associated with the West Coast, and it would be a mistake to consider only the American countercultural scene. Nor is paleocybernetics a merely cultural phenomenon characterized by art practices and lifestyles. The paleocyber, I must insist, is a subjectivity that depends on a merger of old and new, not only in a generic sense, but also in terms of an integration, a grace, achieved in one’s own life. Before I address the construction of this paleocyber subjectivity, an issue that will soon send me in the orbit of Félix Guattari’s ecosophical writings, it is important to mention that the US-centric idea that paleocyber culture is a West Coast invention largely ignores a wide array of paleocyber movements in a global culture context. Parallel to the paleocyber experiments discussed by Youngblood and Davis in a strictly US context, one can find strong evidence for a paleocybernetic impetus brewing in a European setting, which is where I have carried out most of my paleo-experimental practice. The recent wave of paleocyber enthusiasm in Europe can be characterized by the cultural revalorization and technological reanimation of Upper Paleolithic European heritage, and a desire to reinterpret archaeological sites and prehistoric landscapes in particular. There are a number of ways in which the prehistoric cave has shown up in recent cultural reanimation projects. In Chapter 2, I discussed some aspects of that paleocybernetic vibe in relation to the recent cultural phenomenon of building major heritage cave replicas such as Lascaux II, III, and IV. Along with other major projects such as the Neocueva de Altamira and the Caverne de Pont d’Arc, these projects combine research into prehistoric painting techniques with latest technology in digital scanning, 3D mapping, modeling, and landscape architecture. To the extent that the engagement of an arts and research community around museums and replicas devoted to prehistory (particularly in Spain, France, and Germany)9 has galvanized interest in paleoculture more broadly, the paleocyber phenomenon has spawned a vast number of concrete spaces and opportunities (exhibitions, festivals, fairs, artistic residencies), often associated with prehistoric sites. A good example is the DreamTime exhibition, an annual arts exhibition and residence for artists, media makers, and experimentalists conducted at the prehistoric cave of Mas d’Azil (Ariège).



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Paleocybernetics does not only refer to specific cultural trends, however, but, more profoundly, to the emergence of an ecological subjectivity. In fact, I would argue that the cultural penchant for all things preindustrial and premodern is representative of that fundamental transformation of subjectivity at the heart of paleocybernetic thinking. This is the critical point made by Félix Guattari in his book The Three Ecologies, a hugely influential book on ecological thinking and ecosophy. Guattari encouraged the conceptualization of three interconnected networks existing in the registers of the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity. This author blames mass media consumption for driving subjectivity to the verge of extinction (like a threatened species). Guattari also argued that in a world of mass media communication, an independent and autonomous sense of “self ” is more often than not “mentally manipulated through the production of a collective massmedia subjectivity.”10 The call to combat a gangrene of mass media consumption is coupled with the project of attaining “consistency” through a process this author calls “becoming heterogeneous,” which involves re-singularizing the self. This means taking control over life, not life in general, but one’s own life accordingly. The objective of the new ecological practices outlined by Guattari is to “activate isolated singularities that are turning around on themselves.”11 This is not a question of trading one model or way of life for another, but of responding to mass media by not consuming it, by finding different ways of achieving transmission and communication more ecologically, that is, in tune with nature-in-the-raw. This new eco-self becomes, in Guattari’s own words, “the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference.”12 As Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton point out in their English translation of Guattari’s text: “This is a question of making a pragmatic intervention in one’s own life in order to escape from the dominant capitalistic subjectivity.”13 If Youngblood was the voice of paleocybernetics in the US intellectual context, then Félix Guattari is the European counterpart. Likewise inspired by Bateson’s ecology of mind, Guattari showed in his Three Ecologies a need to resist subjectivities that are no longer anchored solidly in the individual and collective past. Drawing on his background in psychoanalysis, Guattari considered that the unconscious remains bound to archaic fixations only as long as there is no investment directing archaic intelligence toward a

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future defined by technological and industrial singularity. In other words, the past is relevant as it stands in opposition to newness, through survival of unconscious and archaic desire within modern subjectivity. The earthling survives within the abstract human, somewhere deep inside. “This existential tension,” Guattari continues, “will proceed through the bias of human and even non-human temporalities such as the acceleration of the technological and data-processing revolutions, as prefigured in the phenomenal growth of a computer-aided subjectivity, which will lead to the opening up or, if you prefer, the unfolding of animal-, vegetable-, Cosmic-, and machinic-becomings.”14 In more plain terms, the archaic side of human subjectivity (desire, sensation, impulse, intuition) will continue to merge with technologically aided forms of subjectivity, and increasingly so, an existential tension, an aporia, and a crucible will give rise to a synthetic subjectivity, partly technological and partly not, partly new and partly old. Such was the impact of Guattari’s book, it caused a veritable turn in the posthumanities, not only through the establishment of a field of academic research that is now referred to as ecosophy (or ecological philosophy). Moreover, Guattari’s writings were instrumental in the provocation of what some scholars now refer to as the Paleolithic turn. Matteo Meschiari, Maurizio Corrado, Francesco Gori, and other Italian intellectuals have claimed this rubric in an attempt to provide a framework where the paleocybernetic subjectivity can be theorized, conceptualized, and critically unpacked. For instance, these authors ask: “Is there a link between the pre-human imagination, and the post-human panorama? What kind of utopian and dystopian scenarios are coming into place as a result of a neoprehistory that is cutting through contemporary society transversally?”15 The Paleolithic turn can be characterized as a speculative turn in the posthumanities that seeks to make a number of transversal connections between the Stone Age and present-day conditions of living. The adoption of Guattari’s method of transversality proves fruitful, in the case of this particular theoretical project, to establish speculative connections that connect the Ice Age panorama with the emergence of nomadic subjectivities, new forms of mobility, new ecologies, new vitalist schools of thought, and new materialisms, within a posthistorical and posthumanist panorama.



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In Guattari’s own definition, “transversality is a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasses of pure verticality and mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among the different levels, and above all, in the different directions.”16 “We must,” wrote Guattari in The Three Ecologies, “learn to think transversally or fix our mind’s eye on the interlacing of the mechanosphere, the social sphere, and the inwardness of subjectivity.”17 Guattari’s transversality finds all-directional relations between society, human subjectivity, and the environment, thus breaking away from lineal historical ways of thinking that are typically horizontal or vertical. By arguing that transversality is in fact synonymous with nomadic thinking, Guattari invited connections between modern and archaic forms of thinking, which is one of the basic tenets of the aforementioned Paleolithic turn. Meschiari et al. argue that the premise of this transversalism can be summed up in one “non-demonstrable idea,” namely: “We are who we once were, made for being on the move, we are genetic memory and the current incarnation of Paleolithic humans.”18 But what exactly does this “we” refer to? How can a subjective “we” be formulated here, if there is no way of knowing what Upper Paleolithic subjectivity means? It is this dubious “we” that calls the validity of the Paleolithic turn, as conceived by this Italian collective, into doubt. A critical understanding of paleocybernetics, going back to a point made by Gregory Bateson, should consider that “we”—whatever that means—is a potentiality, and that there is no fixed sense of “we,” or better still “I,” from  which to establish that transversality. I am my body. Beyond that material anchor, it is hard to tell what “I” am. But to the extent that Ice Age peoples also had bodies, and they too established a sense of their own worlds in this somatic way, there is an ecology of mediation in the cave, which instantiates the empathy, the sensation, the common earthling corporeality. According to Meschiari et al., the Paleolithic turn is a broadly conceived rubric that can allow critical geographers and critical architects to imagine the “spatial utopia of the cave” like a narrative of atemporal places and potential sites.19 The Paleolithic turn, according to these authors, advances a position that, starting from a space-oriented ontology (cultural geography, critical architecture, performance), strives for a utopian way of seeing

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cultural space. The Paleolithic turn puts forward an understanding of space that is not actual, but potential. There is more to paleo life than a utopian, conceptual, and theoretical turn. Going back to Guattari’s critique, the paleo turn has to do with the folding of the self within the body, the inwardness of subjectivity, and the construction of subjects that start from a heterogeneous and multiperspectival sense of the ecology. The critical point is to resist the fabrication of subjectivities in the age of mass media communication, where people’s sense of “I” is defined by mega-corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and mass media channels such as television, games, film, and so on. The aim is not to create a utopian society, or a never-never land, but to anchor one’s sense of social self in the only reality against which you can bump into: the material and corporeal reality. The industrial production of media communication for the masses is conspiring to form what Meschiari, echoing Guattari, calls, “a grotesque system of subjection.”20 This is but a minor, if not pedantic, point, but I find the use of the word “grotesque” rather problematic. The word “grotesque” comes from the Italian meaning “cave-like.” Why is the subjugation of life to the rationalization of industrial systems “grotesque”? This is where the academic version of a paleolithic turn fails to fully grasp what subjectivity, embedded in material life and the body, entails at the level of life praxis. The world of the earthling is grotesque. The grotesque immersion, as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, has to do with a material bodily life and an understanding of the body as a condition that is always changing and transforming at the somatic level. To acquire a paleo sense of subjectivity not only involves turning into one’s own body (rather than holding onto a sense of self that is an independent mind). It is necessary to turn the body on, to practice the material bodily grotesque, to affirm that my body is part of a living materiality that exceeds me and connects me to a larger ecology of bodies and flesh. To be grotesque does not mean to be vulgar and unrefined, in the same way that thinking in brute terms does not mean to be stupid or dull, but to allow the reasoning of the heart, the reasoning of the penis, the reasoning of the belly, to take command, and in so doing, to establish a sense of empathy and felt transmissions with a whole carnival of lives unfolding.



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Paleolithic State Anti-Oedipus, first published in 1972, marks the first of four literary partnerships between Deleuze and Guattari. The ambition of Anti-Oedipus was to create a crossover between Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism. In the process, Deleuze and Guattari drove a stake through the heart of structuralism, arguing that structures do not exist in the mind, but only in the most immediate reality, or in their own words, “in the shadow of a fantastic phallus distributing the lacunae, the passages, and the articulations.” They add, “[we] are fascinated by the grotesque and terrifying forms that surfaced in the sphere of the interhuman, destroying all that was held dear until [now].”21 Having almost singlehandedly brought about the birth of vital materialism, Deleuze and Guattari soon embarked in a sequel to their “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” project, which put forward a unique sort of geology. Geology, in their peculiar use of the term, does not refer to a material analytical science, but a conceptual and speculative joint. A Thousand Plateaus is also an exercise in what these authors call “conceptual re-territorialization,” which essentially involves appropriating conventional terms and giving them a new conceptual function. This Deleuzoguattarian trademark starts with the idiosyncratic use of the term “geology.” A “geology” is hereby turned into a philosophical notion, which in a way replaces the more conventional notion of history. A Deleuzoguattarian “geology” refers to the continuous process of matter becoming itself, applied to the nonlinearity of material culture, politics, and society. Thus, the term has been used to develop a number of philosophical arguments, not least a geology of morals, mentioned earlier, or a geology of media. Inasmuch as Thousand Plateaus is intended to resemble a stratigraphy, akin to the branch of geology that studies layers of rock, Deleuze and Guattari pile up a number of arguments and conceptualizations with no intention of giving the reader a linear narrative. You can start the book at any point, and drop it anywhere you like. The book does not have a fixed subject matter or sequential order, and it is certainly not grounded on a single area of study. The book does, however, gravitate toward a basic idea: the material past cannot be understood in historical terms. The material past is perpetuated through processes that these authors call, in their own personal glossary, sedimentation

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and stratification. In other words, undermining a classical idea of history, these authors see the past as a layer of contemporary material reality. The idea can be floated to a critique that challenges the established notion of mediation as a process that hinges on technological progress, and a progressive history of artifacts, materials, and systems. The painted caves of prehistory, from a Deleuzoguattarian point of view, are not prehistoric in the narrow sense. In a conceptually reterritorialized way, prehistory is contemporary. The painted caves illustrate what these authors refer to as the “contemporaneousness of the primitive.”22 Material essence does not age in a chronological or historical fashion. Thus, what these authors variously refer to as matter-movement, matter-flow, or matter-energy remain always the contemporary medium for transmission of vital life. It is worth pointing out that mediation, in the Deleuzoguattarian sense, refers not to the communication of textual, coded, symbolic meaning, but to the transmission, via sensation and physicality, of a material life. The mediation that is being proposed here is not the same as the McLuhan paradigm of “media as message.” In a media geology sense, the medium is the movement, or matter movement; it is the inhuman flow that matter carries with it in its process of mattering. For Deleuze and Guattari, this essence that is “intermediary” is also autonomous,23 initially stretching itself between material things and transmitted affect, establishing a whole new relation between things and thoughts, between matter and transmission, like a vague subjectivity between the two. The point made by Deleuze and Guattari is that generative matter cannot be abstracted in relation to dates, events, or watersheds, which are then strung together in the forward line of progress and developmental history. If matter itself transmits life in the form of matter-energy, as limestone caves do, then the communicability and transmissivity of unquarried rock cannot be historicized or analyzed archaeologically as an event that occurred in the past, and which is supposedly no longer happening. Rock is changing and becoming itself unstoppably. The cave paintings may have become historicized as objects of prehistoric “art,” yet they are held together by a prehistory of material sensations, of imaginations, and of memories. These soft media are inextricable from matter-energy, which continue to unfold in a process of mattering that is endless and always present. In other words, while the hard



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object of graphic communication can easily fall into an art historical genealogy, and the “artwork” can be claimed within theories of origin (as intimated in Chapter 6), the deeper medium, the medium of imagination and sensation carried within the material rock, stretches beyond the clutches of history. The generative and living process of mattering, and the imaginations and sensations exuded from matter, feed a cultural transmissivity that is transhistorical, to the extent that the earthling body (the body as material assemblage) always affirms a felt transmission of substantial forces within grotesque forms of immersion. Sensing the cave move is a contemporaneous form of mediation, as contemporary now as it was for hunter-gatherers forty thousand years ago. To illustrate this idea, Deleuze and Guattari put forward the concept of the “paleolithic State,” which has proven to be useful in the development of my own thinking. The paleolithic State is an idea that exemplifies one of the many underlying premises of A Thousand Plateaus, which is the nonlinear and rhythmic continuity of generative matter. For Deleuze and Guattari, the theoretical idea of the State can be reterritorialized and looked at afresh. Rather than assuming that the nation State emerged in Classical Greece in the form of the polis, and that political theory must therefore begin with Ancient Greek philosophy and history, Deleuze and Guattari argue that to understand the political, it is necessary to consider polarities that bring about the ongoing formation of the state apparatus. The State machine, to borrow the expression from Deleuze and Guattari, can be found in many different forms. The reason why the State is forever changing in its form is because it is caught up in an internal or quantum-like condition of self-differentiation. The two poles between which the state is forever caught up are called, in the Deleuzoguattarian parlance, the Paleolithic and Neolithic forms of the State apparatus, or rather, the nomadic and the sedentary. To put it differently, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the State is already functioning in huntergatherer groups. For a historian, this statement may seem utterly ridiculous. How could the State possibly have existed, as a political system, twenty to thirty thousand years ago? To understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the paleolithic State, it is important to remind my reader that the concept works only as a doublebind, in the sense that a paleolithic State is always offset by the neolithic State.

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The two states are like wave and particle in a quantum mechanical sense. The old is internalized by the new, in the same way that the new is internal to the old. I have come back, in a roundabout sort of way, to paleocybernetics. Indeed, the Deleuzoguattarian notion of the sedentary in the nomadic, and the nomadic in the sedentary, and the looping of these two poles within a continuous process of State formation, is very much a paleocybernetic idea. Accordingly, a new State does not leave the old behind, in the same way that the Neolithic era does not leave the Paleolithic era in the past. Quite simply, the Paleolithic must be internalized by the Neolithic, and vice versa. The appearance of cities, farms, permanent settlements, and technologies of recorded communication (writing) does not mean that sedentary living must leave nomadic life in the past. Nomadism is internalized and absorbed within sedentary living. Thus, within a contemporary sense of the nation State, dynamics such as forced displacement, social displacement, modernday nomadism, transhumance, and gypsydom are some examples of how a nomadic pole remains present within sedentary conditions of political organization. The cultural movement that is paleo living is an example of how a cybernetic looping of old diets, old sleeping habits, and old eating patterns resurface within the stratum of a new society, even if the sense of the old is merely a fabrication or cultural construction. The movement in question goes both ways. To understand the loop, it is necessary to conceptualize the coexistence of two inverse movements, of two directions. The primitive peoples before the State, and the State after the primitive peoples, are two waves that seem to succeed each other. According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, they unfold simultaneously. In the same way that the old resurfaces in the new, so the new appears in the old. In other words, some form of newness existed in Paleolithic times, and that is precisely what the notion of the paleolithic State tries to imagine. Like the crystal monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: Space Odyssey, an enigmatic slab of rock that appears before cave-dwelling proto-humans, and which fills a tribe of man-apes with an uncanny form of modern intelligence, Deleuze and Guattari’s paleolithic State is a sense of modernity found in prehistoric times. Gene Youngblood called Arthur C. Clarke “the H.G. Wells of



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the Paleocybernetic Age,”24 and by the same token, you could argue that Deleuze and Guattari are the cavemen philosophers of the Paleocybernetic Age. The idea that there is modernity within primitiveness, and vice versa, at least as advanced by Deleuze and Guattari, is of great consequence to the overall argument of this book. Back in Chapter 4, when I introduced the reader to Clottes’s four key concepts (interconnection, fluidity, permeability, and complexity), I mentioned that these notions elide with Deleuzian philosophy (and new materialism more generally). I also raised the possibility of embracing the kind of material thinking evoked by Upper Paleolithic heritage caves as a contemporary neomaterialist ethics, for the sake of a present-day critique of media communication. The construction of a paleo ontology, based on this conjunction of indigenous worldviews and posthistorical philosophies, is a fundamental aspect of paleocybernetics. The coming together of prehuman and posthuman materialisms under the auspices of paleocybernetics is not, however, confined to philosophy. Paleocybernetics also demands the recasting of many aspects of daily life. Going back to Youngblood’s analysis, the paleocybernetic age will transform the most basic aspects of contemporary living: family, work, leisure, and, of course, art. As Picasso proclaimed, after visiting the cave of Lascaux: “nothing new has been invented ever since” (rien n’a été inventé depuis), an idea echoed by Merleau-Ponty, who described Lascaux as “the future of painting.”25 The paleo State illustrates the idea that all the basic principles of Neolithic life already existed in a hunter-gatherer condition, except that their existence was not actual. It was potential. In other words, the paleo State exists in the form of potential destruction or anticipation. For the hunter-gatherer way of life to exist, as it did for tens of thousands of years, the nomad needs to fear and keep at bay whatever can destroy his/her lifeworld. This sense of potential destruction actuates a sense of the state even before the state manifests itself as a concrete historical apparatus. The paleo State is everything that could have potentially destroyed or neutralized the hunter-gatherer way of life; namely, rational urbanization, abstract social divisionism, accumulation of wealth, accounting and written forms of communication, media technological rationality, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari are not arguing that all these were invented in prehistoric times, but that their invention was postponed or prevented from happening during the Upper Paleolithic era, given the

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need to preserve a way of life that required the very opposite: no calculative rationalization of living space and social activity, no abstract system of social divisionism, no accumulation of material wealth, no accounting and written form of communication (no alphabeticism), and no autonomous form of technological media communication. In a paleo State, “art” exists as a fear or as potentiality, as something to be resisted or anticipated, but not as an actuality. Art, generally speaking, is an activity that marks a separation between life and its representation or objectification. Art demands the assignation of a distinct role in society given to those who make artistic works. This ideology destroys the Upper Paleolithic activity of painting caves, which is not art, but its polar inversion. Painting caves is everything that counters “art.” Painting caves is a practice of cultural transmission without assigning the creators a social distinction, without the making of objects classed as “art” or “artworks,” a praxis without commodification, without a technological agency assuming independence, without a division of nature and culture. Everything that “art” stands for in a historical sense is turned on its head by Upper Paleolithic image-making. If “art” does not actually exist in an Upper Paleolithic context, it does exist potentially. The modernity of art exists potentially in the styles and techniques used to create cave paintings. Picasso himself acknowledged this when he referred to Lascaux as the implied modernity of art. By the same token, a Paleolithic cultural expression, which is an unnamable praxis indistinct from life, is also found potentially in contemporary art and culture. In the same way that the hunter-gatherer would have understood what can destroy a nomadic world, so the modern state in turn knows what can destroy it. Anarcho-primitivism is an example of a modern political movement designed to destroy the modern capitalist state, through the practical implementation of primitive economies based on barter, exchange without the medium of money, communitarianism, nomadism (no material accumulation), and so on. The potential for capitalism to be destroyed as a modern economic and cultural system is also the telltale sign of a paleolithic State, in its presentday guise. The paleocybernetic argument can be stretched even further, and molded into a thesis that is more controversial, more iconoclastic. Art can be destroyed by the worldview of Upper Paleolithic cave painters. Imagine, in a



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paleo State utopia, a world where everyone can paint and engrave, or at the very least, where everyone can participate in activities of cultural transmission and memorialization. Rather than defined social roles, everyone partakes in the activity of filling the cave with images, from babies to grandparents. In the case of cave painting, everyone in the community is involved in one or more activity, including the preparation of pigments, the transportation of ochres, the hunting and collection of food, the preparation of meals, the scrubbing of walls, the making of images. This paleo State undermines the specialist and exclusive position of the artist in a modern State apparatus. As I intimated earlier, it would be a mistake to think that the paleo State is simply a utopia. Here is where I part ways with Deleuze and Guattari. Vital materialism, and the new materialist wave that emerged in the wake of A Thousand Plateaus, for instance in the seminal writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel Delanda, and Jane Bennett, have all but institutionalized, within academic circles at least, the conceptual paraphernalia and unique utopias invented by Deleuze and Guattari. But to the extent that this Deleuzoguattarian “geology” has only perpetuated a philosophical field and a framework for academics, who continue to re-conceptualize and re-position the goalposts of a predominantly theoretical lubrication, cultural geographers, cultural geologists, media scholars, performance theorists have become Deleuzoguattarian conceptualists, inflating the bubble of theory. The Deleuze and Guattari club is high-level and highly exclusive, but it is a bit like Napoleon’s farm in George Orwell’s parable. It is functioning on the basis of an ideology that turned its back on itself. Materialism for academic bubble-making is not brute materialism, it is not practical materialism, and, therefore, it cannot be materialized so long as it holds on to pure conceptualization and armchair “re-territorializations.” The question is how to inject materiality into some of the very remarkable thoughts and provocations in Deleuze and Guattari’s joint, and impel a practical and implementable form of materialism. Deleuze and Guattari tried to address this question in their last book, What is Philosophy?, by arguing that philosophy is not just about turning and tossing concepts about, thus becoming academically complacent in the handling of ideas that have become regular, petrified, and reducible to a framework. The point is to make concepts up, to make ideas, to turn against what is framed

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and worked out, and to generate experience out of philosophy. As such, these authors argue that new concepts are the bread and butter of philosophy. But this is where the materiality of a vital materialism ends. It is not concept that brute materialism handles. It is not the concept of cave, of limestones, of bodies that matter to me. I do not care for conceptualized notions such as lobster, wolf, assemblage, geology, rhizome, and all the other items in the Deleuze and Guattari glossary. The problem is not that these concepts aren’t interesting, but that they forget the actual lobster, the actual wolf, the actual rhizome, and make discourse out of them.

Practicing paleo It is necessary to stop the conceptualization of matter and energy, to cease this pancake tossing of concepts, and to consider how the thought—not the philosophy but the action of thinking—can be lived out and materialized. Everyone knows what “matter” means, or at the very least has an idea of the meaning; the same applies to “transmission.” There is a way of knowing what these words mean by reading a book, this book or some other, and then there is a way of doing that knowledge, by being it, or by living it. In truth, I do not want to be an academic. Nor do I want to be an artist, dress up in statements, hang around in the right places. I want to be a life practitioner, and I want these ideas to be inscribed on my living being. As such, I want a brute way of implementing what I know. The implementation may fall well short of a political or social praxis, and my brute tactics may never aspire to reach the kind of praxis that can upturn governments, economies, or a religious amnesia. My life is not a utopia, though. The re-singularization of my life as a training ground for praxis ultimately puts all that ontology in its real-world context. That is why the cave comes back, and that is why I go back to it. In my own brute way, I have tried to keep these theoretical musings at the back of my mind, while consolidating a sense of paleo-experimentation that puts into practice these lubrications. Paleo-experimentalism has evolved, in my case, to the point of now finding myself ignoring the difference between professional, academic, or artistic life. It is all the same to me. It is all life



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praxis. I cannot disentangle the two subjectivities, nor can I claim an academic status that is separate from my brute persona. I cannot know one thing in my academic brain and then try to apply a pragmatic intervention in my own life. Life praxis cannot be parceled into different professional and social divisions. Everything is life, indiscriminately. With this premise in mind, I started caving several years ago as a strategy for the promotion of my own paleo life praxis, and also as the promotion of a novel research method. I wanted to gain a sense of how materiality itself could perhaps inflect or transform what I think, how I think, and possibly, or perhaps more importantly, how I act and respond to a living material world around me. This paleo-experimentation is prompted by the need to be part of a three-way ecology, where the natural world, my own sense of subjectivity, and the social life I construct with own my family is intermediated by nature-in-the-raw, by brute forces and brute facts. The caves I have visited over the last four years have had many different effects on me, and on how I continue to construe the subjectivity I think I am building for myself (or which is built upon me). The caves have had a cathartic, therapeutic, and pedagogic effect. Overall, they have underpinned my own (no doubt limited) understanding of how “performance” can be mobilized as a strategy for living. In this book’s Prologue, I intimated that performance is a kind of doing that carries agency with it. Performance is a way of doing that generates enough criticality, reflection, and intention to induce transformation. In my provincial understanding, performance is the opposite of an activity that simply transpires. It is the opposite of a happening that takes its course unnoticed, without meaning or consciousness. Accordingly, to perform a cave visit, to perform a cave climb, to perform meditation in complete subterranean darkness, to perform the journey underground, all bears upon an ultimately transformational way of doing life. That practice is one I have cultivated in order to energize the thinking that supports this book. Evidently, performing paleo experimental activities does not have a major impact beyond the remit of my own living. But my own life is a starting point for any process of performative transformation that may resonate beyond my own private practice. Performing one’s own change is an ethical imperative, since there is no way in which the transformation of societal views can happen if one is not prepared to change oneself first. Becoming other (for instance becoming

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indigenous, becoming animal, becoming child) is not merely a philosophical and academic gambit: Deleuzoguattarian becomings are a call to act in one’s own living, a call to change and change again. The ultimate change, I would argue, involves discarding the human in me. Can I change to the point where I affirm the inhuman I am, as Deleuze and Guattari provocatively argue in their philosophy? How do you do that in practice? How does one perform one’s own inhumanity? How do I become rock? How do I become earthling? How do I become deer or bison, or how do I strip myself of so much inherited rationalism, to begin to believe in the possibilities of a fluid and permeable paleo ontology? I have been openly naïve, strategically naïve, in the course of this journey. The reason is simple: I seek an affirmation of brute materialist ways of thinking. As I mentioned in the Prologue, the category of the “brute” includes at least three subcategories: “child,” “animal,” and “primitive.” To develop a way of thinking close to children, animals, and so-called primitive societies might be the naïve task of the brute materialist, and yet, this raises the question: how do I reconcile my inescapable middle-age and modern mindset with those utopian aspirations? How do I practice the paleocyber looping of old and new in a practical sense, rather than in a purely conceptual way? And if I do not adopt brute simplicity, and I cynically continue to produce high-level academic discourse devoid of performance, can I reconcile myself to the futility of academic philosophy? Like my five-year-old son, who is absolutely convinced that he is a velociraptor, and who is bitterly disappointed when his own anatomy shows him he is actually not a dinosaur, I am bitterly disappointed when I am reminded of my humanity. I want to be earthling. Brute in every sense, like children, nonhuman animals, or cavemen. I live in a world that has become dependent upon media technology to establish communication. But to the extent that I have become dependent upon laptop and iPhone, a mass subjectivity has encroached upon me, and I have had to resist, as Guattari tells me to, by re-singularizing myself every day, and by acting against mass media consumption by resisting the subjectivity that encroaches upon me through mass media, by resisting the conventional idea that mediation is technologically a priori, and more positively, by cultivating the practice of landesque immersion, in order to enrich my life with the energetic transmission of raw nature, wherever I can find it.



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If I was true to that grace, that integration of body and landscape, then I would not have to explain it. Like the man who draws a deer in Bateson’s illustration, it would be enough to act. And yet, because of the inherently critical condition of paleocyber subjectivity, that grace is often unattainable. I am mostly torn, in tension, and I often lack integration. Critique is what is left of me. This is not a purely theoretical critique, however. It is a brute critique, a crisis, happening inside my own body. The practice of life is a primitive question, and one which besets every artist, every image-maker, every life practitioner. This is an ethical and ecological question in equal measure. It is no good to plead that one sin of consumption or exploitation of nature-in-the-raw is unintentional, inevitable, or that it would have been committed by someone else anyway. Making media artifacts or artistic objects presupposes an ecological cost, and a responsibility. What environmental impact does a homo sapiens body standing and moving inside a cave have? Not much. This is therefore the ethical question. It is necessary to refuse mass media consumption to seek the inwardness of subjectivity, to fight against a subjugation by mass media culture, in order to reach out to that graceful integration of body and landscape. Transmission between body and landscape is not happening in a mass media channel. It is happening one body at a time, and a thousand landscapes deep.

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Astronauts and Cavemen Interstellar cave painting In 1972, a small space probe named Pioneer 10 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Conducted by the NASA Research Center in California, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft was the first man-made object to reach the asteroid belt and the environment around Jupiter. The probe managed to collect scientific data about an array of phenomena including solar winds and cosmic rays. Eventually, the spacecraft propelled itself to the far reaches of the solar system and heliosphere. On January 2003, radio communications were lost with Pioneer 10 due to the loss of electric power for its radio transmitter. The probe was traveling at a distance of 12 billion kilometers from Earth. It was bound for interstellar space. As Pioneer 10’s final tests were underway prior to shipment to Kennedy Space Center, a group of science correspondents from the US national press were briefed on the scientific mission. A correspondent present at this news conference pointed out that Pioneer 10 was the first emissary sent out by the human race. Suggestions were subsequently made to the engineers at NASA that the spacecraft should carry a special message, in case alien intelligence ever got hold of the probe. This message would tell any finder of the spacecraft a million or even a billion years hence that Planet Earth had evolved an intelligent species, and that this species was capable of thinking beyond its own time and beyond its own solar system. Astronomer and popular science author Carl Sagan was approached with the idea of creating the Pioneer 10 message. Along with Frank Drake, then director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Cornell University, Sagan set out to design this unique message. At 6×9 inches in diameter and less than

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an inch thick, the Pioneer plaque shows the nude figures of a white male in Vitruvian Man position, and a white female in Venus de Milo position, along with several symbols designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. Dubbed the “interstellar cave painting,” the plaque was approved by NASA, and it was subsequently attached to the spacecraft’s antenna support struts in a position that shielded it from interstellar dust. According to reports written by NASA engineers at the time, the expectation is that this “interstellar cave painting” will survive well beyond the age of humans on Earth. “The plaque represents,” according to Pioneer Mission managers Richard Fimmel and William Swindell, “at least one intellectual cave painting that might survive not only all the caves of Earth, but also the Solar System itself. It is an interstellar stele that shows mankind possesses a spiritual insight beyond the material problems of the age of human emergence.”1 About forty thousand years from now, which is about the same amount of time it took sapiens to transition from an Upper Paleolithic to a Neolithic way of life, Pioneer 10 will have coasted to the distance of the nearest star, heading in the direction of the constellation of Taurus. It will take Pioneer 10 around ten billion years, however, to reach another solar system in whose stellar neighborhood a planet such as our own may be found. Only in ten billion years or so will Pioneer 10 enter an intergalactic zone where extraterrestrial intelligence will have had any chance of evolving, assuming extraterrestrial life has also evolved, and that its evolution has transpired in conditions like those found on Earth. Against all odds, these super-intelligent aliens will have to be capable of detecting the spacecraft, of capturing it as it cruises in space, and then will have to manage to retrieve the probe for safe inspection. But what if they simply cannot understand the interstellar cave painting? What if, after a journey of billions of years, the message makes absolutely no sense? The premise of the interstellar cave painting project is to communicate with aliens that are assumed to be little more than an extraterrestrial projection of modern human beings, noticeably white and Western. Do the makers of this interstellar cave painting think that their message expresses the subjectivity of all human beings on Earth, or more problematically still, the subjectivity of all the human beings who ever lived on Earth?



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In 1977, the first of the Voyager program missions was launched to the outer planets of the solar system. Like Pioneer 10 before it, Voyager 1 carries messages from Earth, in this case in the form of both sounds and images that supposedly portray the diversity of life and culture on this planet. Once again, Carl Sagan was responsible for selecting the contents for NASA, and so material was recorded on a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. Presumably, the idea was that aliens would one day listen to this recording, and in doing so perhaps wonder about life in this planet. Voyager’s “Golden Record” contained 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, as well as sounds produced by birds and whales. Sagan’s commercially distributed Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record also featured musical selections from different cultures and eras. The recordings included spoken greetings delivered in fifty-five languages, and somewhat problematically, printed messages from the president of the United States and the United Nation’s secretary general. The contents of the Voyager probe consist of photo-images and canned sounds. Why did NASA assume that extraterrestrial life will be able to comprehend these media artifacts, or even play them? What kind of record player, compatible with whatever system was used for this interstellar record, do the NASA engineers expect aliens to have? If you show a book to a cat, or a film to a worm, or a ballet dance to a spider, these life forms will carry on unconcerned. The assumption made by the makers of interstellar cave art is that language is the foundation of intelligence, on earth as it is in outer space. By the same token, the assumption made by the makers of the Voyager recordings is that intelligence is a measure of media technological communication. Again, the anthropocentricism of this perspective is problematic. The interstellar message does not say something hopeful about life on the planet: it simply shows that the beings responsible for inventing these interstellar media are distinctly alienated from their own planet. It shows a group of beings sending messages and media things to outer space, convinced that there are extraterrestrial beings out there who also communicate in symbolic terms, or via technological media. The NASA project is bordering on the religious, and the insane. Like Daniel’s god, who is a human agent projected into the realm of the eternal and divine, this

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extraterrestrial life imagined by NASA is a projected humanity (distinctly white, and distinctly American). Sagan and Drake would have done well to consider what the cave paintings of Upper Paleolithic cultures transmit, before accepting the claim that their plaque constitutes a modern-day form of cave painting. No doubt, there is a paleocybernetic nod here, which acknowledges the cultural perseverance of cave “art” in the history and future of human civilization. However, there are two inverse movements going on simultaneously here: one, the movement of people who follow rocks, who follow lands, who follow spoors, and whose graphic marks follow the paths and trajectories of earthly grafts. Then, there is the movement of technologically propelled humans, humans who follow rockets; humans who follow space probes, and who communicate with one another via satellite communication. These two ways of following movement reveal very different trajectories, one that brings the human always back to Earth, to an earthling condition, and another that persistently sends the human away from Earth. This movement away from Earth is underpinned by an ideology, clearly articulated by the Voyager engineers, based on the belief that humans possess a spirit larger than this planet. What spirit would that be? What exactly is that human spirit that seeks to transcend earth? How could an earth-bound human ever transcend the one and only planet that has ever sustained us, and why on Earth would that ambition spur humanity at this time of crisis, when the need to care for the planet and remedy the environmental effects of human activity are most urgent? Sagan’s contributions to the Pioneer and Voyager missions brings me back to Youngblood’s prevarications. Youngblood imagined, also back in the early 1970s, that the paleocyber age would be typified by the figure of a caveman scientist. Maybe the paleocyber age can also be allegorized in the figure of a caveman astronaut. Indeed, a number of new cults claimed around the time of the interstellar cave painting project that modern culture emerged in the Upper Paleolithic due to the arrival of extraterrestrials. Alongside the experimental media practices that Youngblood and Davis have described as paleocybernetic in the context of US 1960s and 1970s counterculture, there flourished a number of belief systems and even alternative religions, some of which sought to establish esoteric and mystical links between paleo and sci-fi worlds. Thus,



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theories of ancient astronauts began to proliferate during the late 1960s and early 1970s, popularized by authors like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin. Of particular interest to supporters of ancient astronaut theory is the appearance of Epipaleolithic rock art, for instance as found in the Camonica Valley in Italy or the Magura cave in Bulgaria. The graphic works of this period, starting more or less 8,000 years ago, is completely unlike the cave “art” of Altamira, Chauvet, or Pech Merle, since it is characterized by the outbreak of representationalism and the dominant depiction of humans involved in scenes, as well as a prioritization of symbolism. Given the depiction of humans bearing what looks like a helmet in one of the petroglyphs of Val Camonica, and various other images of alien-looking figures found in Epipaleolithic rock art across Europe and beyond, ancient alien theory proposed the idea that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization arrived on Planet Earth during  this period, bringing civilization to Mesopotamia, Europe, the Americas, and China. That the great schism may have been provoked by the shift from nomadism to sedentism, and the invention of technologies of recorded communication and representational graphic communication, seems to have eluded these modern mythographers and paleofantasists. Buckminster Fuller suggested in “Speculative Prehistory of Humanity,” the first chapter of his book Critical Path, that human life began in the atolls of the South Pacific, where the average sea temperature is supposedly closest to that of the human body.2 Rather than evolving from simpler organisms, other organisms evolved from sapiens. From its base in the South Pacific, humanity developed boat-building technologies that enabled the colonization of the rest of the planet. The psychedelic pinnacle of Fuller’s speculative prehistory is his claim that Austronesians migrated to Europe over the course of the last Ice Age, thus colonizing and decorating the caves of the subcontinent. As easily dismissed as this paleofantasy may be—the same as theories of paleocontact and ancient astronauts—the paleocyber penchant for mixing cavernicole prehistory and extraterrestrial origins are perhaps desperate attempts to fill the gaps left by the demise of mainstream religion. Be that as it may, paleocontact theories also expose a widespread cultural synthesis of old and new. These myths reveal a contemporary desire to fold the high-tech future of mankind within a prehistoric past. But why? Both interstellar cave art

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and paleoastronaut theory reveal, from very different cultural perspectives (scientific and esoteric), a primitive impulse to project human life onto a larger sphere of cultural influence. Humans have expanded that sphere beyond Planet Earth. The emergence of rocket technology in the early decades of the twentieth century has literally blown up the religious-minded need to project shadows of humanity to extraterrestrial scales. But I sense a tension between the karst cave painting and the interstellar cave painting, between ancient hunter-gatherers and ancient astronauts. The projection of human agency, in the case of NASA’s interstellar cave painting, is very clearly directed by humans to aliens who are imagined to be fellow humans. The same applies to paleocontact theory or Fuller’s anthropocentric theory of the appearance of life on Earth. Aliens, according to these modern-day paleocyber myths, are nothing other than projected humans who introduced civilization from outer space to Upper Paleolithic peoples. Transmission is understood as an intermediating function happening from humans to a meta-terrestrial humanity, or vice versa. However, the Upper Paleolithic cave functions in a very different way. Not only does transmission happen as a result of a human standing before a wall, and projecting a figure, an action, or a pictorial image onto the volumes and contours of the rock, but the rock also transmits back to the Ice Age earthling. Between the two is the independence of a matter media, stretching between material walls and transmitted affect, establishing a relation between things and thoughts, between matter and mind, like an undefined identity between the two. Rather than projecting an image of humans into space, perhaps space ought to be projected back onto earthlings, such that we may understand how the movements of planets, the movements of galaxies, the movements of matter at a macroscale, affect our inhuman body. And if no such transmission is felt, if the moving solar system does not transmit anything that the body can sense, and if the intermediation is not felt immediately like a body feeling waves of movement inside a cave, perhaps it is because I have not spent enough time looking at reeling night skies, at solar winds, at passing meteors. The paleocybernetic ruse does not have to be limited to modern myths of ancient astronauts or interstellar cave paintings. One could adopt the sensitivity of Ice Age earthlings, who trained their senses to follow volumes and cracks



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on limestone walls underground, and refined a bodily capacity to perceive transmissions of life coming from landscape. By the same token, if humans are more preoccupied with life in space than in caves, we should tune our physical bodies to the rhythms of stars. This, it seems to me, is what digital artist Shawn Brixey had in mind when developing the Altamira project (2004). Altamira explored visual and semantic connections between optical, prehistoric, and astronomic imagery. To achieve this paleocyber loop, Brixey drew on the phenomenon of the phosphene. A phosphene is a light that can be seen without light actually entering the eye, since the effect is induced by mechanical, electrical, or magnetic stimulation of the retina or visual cortex. Because phosphenes have also been reported by people who undergo long periods without visual stimulation (for instance inside caves), or via the use of psychedelic drugs, the phenomenon has served as a neuroscientific explanation for cave “art.” According to prehistorian David Lewis-Williams, phosphenes are light patterns wired into the human brain, which, given the supposedly psychoactive effects of cave darkness, may explain similarities in the geometric patterning of prehistoric art worldwide.3 Echoing the neuropsychological theory of cave art, Brixey’s Altamira was a neuro-prosthetic interface that triggered electrophosphenes by producing subcutaneous pulses on the retina, in order to generate automatic images on the eyes of the viewer. The technological system developed for this piece used naturally occurring celestial objects (pulsars) as the primary electrophosphene input. In other words, the signals used to electrically stimulate phosphenes on the eyes of the viewer were real signals captured on radio telescopes from pulsars. Pulsars are rapidly rotating cores of collapsed stars ringed by massive magnetic fields. In a visceral and rather psychedelic way, rings formed as phosphenes or optical pulses and rings of astronomic pulsars are imaginatively placed side by side in Brixey’s work. The outcome, in the artist’s own words, is an exploration of “the uncanny connections that seem to exist between our biology and the universe from which we have emerged,”4 while also making the passing reference to the UNESCO-listed prehistoric cave. The project encapsulates my point neatly. To enter the space age like hunter-gatherers entered caves, it is necessary to tune the body to the awe-inspiring motion, to the spoors of life and light, which can be grasped

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not only from a strictly rational and empirical perspective, but also from a distinctly sensory perspective.

Earth relativism In February 2017, NASA’s Astrobiology Institute announced the discovery of paleomicrobes encased for ten to fifteen thousand years in the famous giant crystal cave connected to the Naica Mine in Chihuahua (Mexico). The discovery offered Astrobiology Institute director Penelope Boston and her team an opportunity to study one of the most credible conditions for the emergence of organic life in other planets. To the extent that the organisms retrieved from the Naica cave are not closely related to any microbe known in existing genetic databases, these paleomicrobes can be considered blueprints of primeval life, resembling the unique conditions in which life would have first emerged on our planet, and which is expected to be replicated in other Earth-like worlds elsewhere in the universe. The re-animation of the Naica paleo-organisms in lab conditions reveals how the search for extreme lifeforms in subterranean environments can lead scientific communities to push, in a distinctly paleocyber manner, the envelope of life beyond Earth. Astrobiologists suspect that extraterrestrial life might be chemosynthesizing in subterranean and subaquatic extraterrestrial habitats similar to those found in extreme environments on Earth. Astrobiologists are therefore making atlases that may one day connect the geography of our own planet with that of other planets and moons. Do these atlases not involve a mapping of earthly caves onto other planetary caves? Are caves being reimagined in contemporary astrobiology and other distinctly paleocyber laboratories as the prime medium for transplanetary connections? Can caves function as gateways between Earth and Mars, and beyond? I will return to this point anon. For now, I must add that it is not the utopian projection of human subjectivity onto extraterrestrial conditions that concerns me. What concerns me is the inverse movement, involving the projection of extraterrestrial life back onto a changing human subjectivity. Astrobiologists are formulating a scientific model of extraterrestrial “nature” inside extreme paleo-environments, like



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modern hunter-gatherers mesmerized by the underground. The construction of a sense of life beyond earth is changing the way we understand life on earth, and the human condition as well. Stefan Helmreich calls this phenomenon “extraterrestrial relativism.” Helmreich argues that the scientific interest in extremophiles (life forms found in extremely dark, hot, cold, or toxic environments) is propelled by a changing cultural perspective of life on earth. The study of extremophiles on earth has largely problematized the idea that life is unique to this planet, or that the conditions prevalent on the earth’s surface amenable to human life are the only preconditions for the existence of life as a whole. Helmreich suggests that “extreme nature” could be the new dominant cultural paradigm in a world “after nature” or “post-nature.” There are clear echoes of a paleocybernetic vibe in Helmreich’s argument. Helmreich draws on the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and ethnographic studies conducted in Amazonia to propose a vision of extraterrestrial anthropology that is at the same time an archaic cosmology. Drawing on the concept of multinaturalism, an analytic used by Viveiros de Castro to describe interpretations of the world from creatures who all experience themselves as subjects, extraterrestrial relativism is a sort of perspectivism that tracks, according to Helmreich, “how different organisms summon different natures even as they share the enterprise of being alive.”5 In Helmreich’s use of the word, multinaturalism is therefore a multiplicity of lives and subjectivities in regard to many different natural conditions, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Whereas Western ontology is on the whole founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures, the Amerindian conception, at least as theorized by Viveiros de Castro, would suppose the opposite. Instead of thinking that there is one nature and many cultures, Amazonian Indians believe, according to Viveiros de Castro, in a spiritual unity and corporeal diversity. In other words, Amerindian cosmology is a topsy-turvy ontology, at least from a Western perspective: it affirms one “culture,” multiple “natures.” This would suggest that it does not matter if human communities are defined by different languages, different habits and practices, different fashions, and different rituals. It is all one culture, one

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human plane of cultural existence. What is multifarious is not culture, but nature. There are many natures, defined by different species, different bodies, different habitats, different climates. For Viveiros de Castro, the upshot of this paleo ontology is that Amerindian cosmology is not relativism as we know it—a subjective or cultural relativism—but an objective or natural relativism—a multinaturalism.6 Amerindian thought, in this interpretation, is like a theory of general relativity, in the sense that it is accepted as a matter of fact. Multinaturalism does not apply to relativity in regard to modern physics, of course, but to the wild natural world as it is materialized at the bodily or metabodily level by animals, plants, rocks, and landscapes. Multinaturalism is a theory proposed by a Western ethnographer that to some extent seeks to debunk the humanist division of nature and culture, mind and body, while destabilizing Eurocentric theories of nature (and post-nature). The body of a jaguar, and the body of a vulture, according to Viveiros de Castro, exist in different ontological planes, which results in completely different natures. Amazonian shamanism, accordingly, is a cultural multiperspectivism that is only beginning to make sense in the West, except from a mainly philosophical perspective. And this is the problem. A way of thinking that is understood physically in the Amazonian context is translated into a purely conceptual framework in the Eurocentric register. For a shaman, surely the need to relativize the human bodily experience must depend on ritual practices and bodily techniques that enable humans to perform jaguar nature, vulture nature, tree nature, so that these different physicalisms may educate and enrich human corporeal nature at the personal and collective levels. What is so unique about a shaman’s performance of the jaguar body, as opposed to a theoretical conceptualization of such performance, is that a shaman might not need to explain what is, de facto, performed. The knowledge is, in the case of shamanic shape-shifting, revealed. Revelation places the knowledge of multinaturalism, and multibodily experience acquired through shamanism, way beyond the reach of traditional Western thought. The same applies to the paleo ontology that I have tried to tease out from the material cave walls of indigenous Europe. It is impossible to know in words what is revealed to the body through performance, particularly when performance carries transformational effects at the level of shamanic shapeshifting. The critical point that Viveiros de Castro’s



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analytic raises is not whether shapeshifting can be developed as a practicebased methodology for eco-critical thinking, for instance as David Abram has proposed of late,7 but what means, if any, Western culture has left at its disposal to access a paleo ontological perspective, if Western discourse discards revelation offhand in lieu of empirical investigation. Recent interpretations of European cave art have tapped into ethnographic studies of present-day shamanism to support the speculative interpretation of parietal art as an expression of shamanistic worldviews. If I have largely eluded Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams’s theory of cave art as an expression of shamanism,8 or at the very least merely referenced it, it is because I do not want to endorse a one-size-fits-all interpretation of cave “art,” and must remain open to a sense of multinatural perspectivism that does not depend only on prehistoric shamans. In other words, it is not necessary to be a prehistoric shaman to access the cave as a site of relativity, a place where the body encounters itself from the perspective of another. The transformative effects of landesque immersion cannot be historicized and labeled “traditional” and “shamanic” as if modern humans were no longer bodies that breathe, sweat, emit and absorb heat, or bear the effects of air pressure and light; or as if our present-day bodies were not liable to be affected and transformed by this radically different habitat that is the subterranean cave. The point made by Helmreich is that multinaturalism is caused not only by a traditional anthropological interest in so-called primitive societies, but by a contemporary cultural move toward a post-nature and post-earth panorama, in which a fixed sense of life form is problematized and relativized by the utopian (and also scientific formulation) of non-earthly life. I would argue that the reappraisal of the non-Western perspective concerning the plurality and multifaceted diversity of natures can be incorporated into contemporary cultural panoramas not only at the theoretical and philosophical level, but also at the level of new cultural practices that cultivate physical intelligence and body-thinking, not least paleo-experimentalism and the kind of landesque immersion I have discussed throughout this book. The issue of mediation at the raw material and uncoded corporeal level (as opposed to the techniquebased and technological level) becomes the critical issue when it comes to adopting a raw and brute understanding of multinaturalism. When mediacy is

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understood to be the power of a particular agent to act as go-between and to generate matter-transmission and when this agency is understood to be earthly matter itself, then knowledge of natures as different channels of transmission becomes a practical reality. When mediation does not prioritize language or technology, but a raw physical and vital energetic transmission, the body becomes the consciousness and altered consciousness that overcomes the subductive forces of reason. According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is a quest in the human animal that is bent “on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture.” And they add: “It is Oedipus [the repressed human subject] who produces man in this fashion, and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression, a snowball gathering speed as it moves from Oedipus all the way to the Paleolithic age.”9 Instead of affirming an abstract sense of the human, Deleuze and Guattari propose the affirmation of an inhuman being, a subjectivity defined by the inhumanity of our own material bodies. To affirm the inhuman implies that I must cease to become alienated from earth. I must no longer affirm that abstract sense of the human imposed on me by religious dogma and the god tricks of remote media technology. I must accept the earth inside my brute body. Deleuze and Guattari add: The person who knows that the place of man [sic] is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning an alien being, a being placed above man and nature: he no longer needs the mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation . . . since he has attained those regions of an autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan—immediately atheist, immediately orphan.10

In other words, if humanity does not accept its own earthlingness, its own prehistory as plant, as mineral, or even further, as chemical soup of alien (i.e., extraterrestrial origins), there is no way humans can achieve mediation with their own earthly environments. Unless mediation is understood to be something other than language and something other than advanced technology, and unless mediation becomes a real transmission (real in the sense that it is



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material and corporeal), this autoproductive human, this Oedipus, remains an atheist orphan. A child without mothering earth. Abstract humanity is mediated by technologies of mass communication and long-distance interaction that have shrunk the planet, and that have turned it into a rather insignificant ball that fits the hand of this giant, invisible Oedipus. In an age of space travel, abstract humans can see the planet from above, from an Archimedean point, and then look back at Earth from a position of post-earthly distance and alien detachment. Humans have thus become removed from a grounded earthling condition, akin to what Hannah Arendt calls “earth alienation.”11 At the same time, the technological feat of transporting and communicating humans beyond earth has relativized our sense of bodily subjectivity, instigating a kind of space age multinaturalism. Unlike the Amazonian cultural worldview studied by Viveiros de Castro, the multinaturalism of the space age hinges upon a sense of the human body as an assemblage of chemical components for life that may also exist elsewhere in the universe, and which could have mixed and synthesized to produce life in other habitats and conditions elsewhere than Earth. As Deleuze and Guattari add: “Alienation becomes disalienating.”12 As such, the human being alienated from earth, removed from a material life on earth, is perhaps finding in hightech missions to outer planets, and advanced scientific studies of alien-like environments on earth, a disalienating new subjectivity that reconnects us to a multinatural existence. Corporeal relativism is not just limited to the external features of the body. Internally, the body is nothing more than a living assemblage of alien matter. In other words, multinaturalism should not only concern the position of a human body that has a unique perspective on the world. There is also a sense of our own internal body, which reveals a material relativism at the microscopic scale. As Jane Bennett points out: “One can invoke bacterial colonies in human elbows to show how human subjects are themselves nonhuman, alien.”13 Although for Bennett the word “alien” means “foreign to the human body,” the word could also be used in the science fictional sense. In other words, our bodies are made internally of chemical compounds that are not only found in this planet, but which are of alien (i.e., extraterrestrial) origin. The human body is alien not merely because I carry within my body

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beings that are foreign to my system (viruses, bacteria, fungus, parasites), but because, as Bennett writes, “I am a material configuration, the pigeons in the park are material compositions, the viruses, parasites, and heavy metals in my flesh and in pigeon flesh are materialities, as are neurochemicals, hurricane winds, E. coli, and the dust on the floor.” And she adds: “Materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. It draws human attention sideways, away from an ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans.”14 This relativization of the body is thus happening as a result of an ontology that is being sandwiched from within and from without: the sense of being human can be reconceptualized as alien both in terms of the extraterrestrial chemistry inside my body and the cultural awareness of extraterrestrial life brewing somewhere beyond the confines of anthropocentric humanity and Planet Earth. Life is not at home in the human body. It is only passing through. It is alighting on the human species. It is leapfrogging on Planet Earth, and moving on in the direction of nowhere. There is a fundamental problem with these paleocyber visions. What these theories of body-based multinaturalism and new-materialist relativism achieve is a shake-up of Western ontological traditions, and a break from history. One of the aims is to propose posthumanist and posthumous human ontologies. Drawing on prehistoric cosmologies is perhaps the necessary route to a discourse that is trying to break away from Western tradition. It is as if, in an attempt to undermine Eurocentric humanism, Paleolithic worlds, and non-Western traditions provided the most convincing cosmologies and ideologies to shake off the shackles. The relativity of life, as it is felt by each anatomically defined species, and by each unique body, or each unique assemblage of material stuff in a single body, ought to be considered not only from a philosophical angle. From a brute materialist perspective, the question is: How is it possible to practice this relativism, without necessarily having to call upon shamanistic and shapeshifting body practices? At the brute materialist level, the question surely concerns the need to affirm, from the perspective of my own physical body, a consciousness of the habitat and environment that supports my life, which cannot be taken for granted. What this astrobiological sense of a relativism of life exposes, going



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back to Helmreich’s critique, is not only a new discourse of “post-nature” or “ecology without a nature,” but also a more personal philosophy and life-aspraxis. To accept that I am a body, a body made of alien stuff, and that each body is thus living the world from its own sense of corporeal subjectivity, must encourage me to face the world with a clearer sense of just how rich, how varied, how complex, life on this planet is. At the same time, that consciousness must surely teach me just how vulnerable this life-supporting planet is. As human space technology and space media communication develop, and the human capability to map the cosmos continues, the search for planets capable of harboring any kind of life (let alone human life) reveals that the universe is massive enough to support billions of earth-like worlds. And yet, such is the incommensurable vastness of the universe, there is no way of bridging that distance with human technology. This earth, this planet, is all that our species knows and will probably ever know. I am alive only to the extent that I occupy a habitat that is alive with me, and that supports me. Failure to care, respect, and preserve that environment constitutes a direct affront on my own life and my own prospects of survival. Like the Ice Age caves, and their testament to a glaciated world where many species (including human species) were wiped out, the paleocyber cave also reveals that at the height of human technological domination of life on earth, the sapiens species is perhaps closest to its own annihilation.

Coming back to the cave As scientists begin to project future society beyond Earth, and colonization of nearby planets becomes a scientific and technological feasibility, so the need to focus again on planetary habitats, rather than interplanetary space, will become necessary. Perhaps then, caves will become a cultural priority once more. This, at least, is what some scientists at NASA have predicted in the case of future manned missions to Mars. One good example is the Caves of Mars Project, led by Penelope Boston. An early noughties program supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, Caves of Mars developed unique strategies to exploit the idea of extraterrestrial cave utilization. The

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project assessed appropriate locations to situate the habitation modules for a prospective human mission to the Red Planet. The rationale behind the project took into consideration that any future colonization of Mars would hinge upon a human occupation of Martian lava tubes, canyon overhangs, and other Martian cavities which would be potentially useful for manned missions, inasmuch as Martian caves offer several valuable features, including: protection from ultraviolet radiation, insulation, shelter from impacting objects, sealable space to contain a higher than ambient atmospheric pressure, and access to potentially important subsurface resources. According to Boston et al., caves in general are poorly understood and unappreciated by the vast majority of the population, to the extent that modern society is now characterized by surface-inhabiting peoples who bring a certain amount of “surface chauvinism” to the perception of caves.15 Boston and her team argue that to develop feasible plans for the colonization of other planets and moons, it is necessary to draw on modern indigenous and many ancient peoples’ acquaintance with the properties of caves and their environments. Boston et al. cite the archaeological find of a tent-shaped hut found inside the Grotte du Lazaret near Nice (France), whose main area of occupation is dated from 130,000–170,000 years ago, and which is believed to have been occupied by homo heidelbergensis or some proto-neanderthal human species. Boston and her team make the distinctly paleocyber claim that in the same way that early human groups were capable of constructing dwelling places inside caves, and in the same way that the Lazaret hut is one of the first known proto-sapiens efforts to build inhabitation modules in the second-to-last Ice Age, at least in the subcontinent, so the conditions for extraterrestrial colonization will demand a similar appreciation of caves as a means to cope with extreme conditions. For Boston et al., future exploration of Mars and possibly other rocky bodies in our solar system will depend on ET caves, as these will provide a natural “pressure vessel” for the construction of subsurface habitats. But there are also broad cultural repercussions to this claim, however utopian it may be. To be able to appreciate the precarious condition of human life in other planets, an appreciation of our own human precariousness is necessary. A preconception of human beings as surface-dwellers needs to be exposed. The



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surface chauvinism of advanced urban culture needs to be confronted. The reference to the Lazaret hut is revealing. Life for the early humans living in glaciated Europe almost two hundred thousand years ago was as precarious as life for humans trying to colonize Mars is today. A collective sensibility to the cave, to the rock, to the agency of subterranean life, is perhaps called upon to nurture a sense of human life relative to hostile and extreme environments, where caves once again will provide the shelter, the womb and tomb, for the preservation and transmission of future human life and culture. There is a paleocyber parable hinging on the astrobiologist’s cave. Human life in the surface of this planet cannot be taken for granted, nor can the conditions for surface life as we know it. Life on Planet Earth is faced with a number of environmental challenges. Like the global freezing that affected the planet two hundred thousand years ago, and then again forty thousand years ago, the planet is facing mass animal extinction, and a new kind of migration, envisaged as interplanetary in scope. Perhaps as scientists consider just how difficult a manned mission to Mars is, and just how vulnerable the astronaut is to real surface conditions on the Red Planet, a feeling of humility is being summoned. Humility, like the word humus, comes from a common IndoEuropean word meaning “earth.” To be humble thus means to be closer to the earth, the soil, or in this case, to reaffirm the human condition as earthling, as a being that requires protection and shelter from the hostility of changing environments, by the anchoring earth. Even if colonies of humans on Mars can one day claim a new subjectivity, and if those utopian colonists no longer call themselves earthlings but Martians, the need to anchor Martian humanity to Mars, to the planet itself, will perhaps echo the Paleolithic condition of earthlings clinging to rock and caves in order to find shelter from and provision for a precarious and hostile world. My point is that the Paleolithic worldview perhaps needs to be looked upon not as a historical stage of human development that has been superseded, but, even as space scientists now claim, as a cultural knowledge that will perhaps define the human capacity to survive extinction in our own environmentally threatened planet. Unlike the early NASA experiments exemplified by Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1, projects such as Caves of Mars have taken seriously the possibility that a new

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cave society, and a new cave culture, will perhaps dawn as human technology develops to the point of enabling manned missions to other planets. According to outer space anthropologist Lisa Messeri, “in connecting the mundane and the extraordinary, extraterrestrial place-making grounds knowledge of other planets in familiar contexts.”16 Thus, the construction of a post-earth understanding of place involves a mapping of earthly contexts onto unknown extraterrestrial space. The practice of extraterrestrial space mapping, according to this author, is not a purely cartographic work. On the contrary, the process of mapping extraterrestrial spaces involves the projection of different kinds of imaginaries and speculative scenarios. The place that prehistoric cave culture holds in the construction of early human culture may thus play a critical role, according to this emergent theorization of outer space anthropology, in the construction of extraterrestrial cultural geographies and cultural imaginaries. The relationship between caveman and astronaut is not a horizontal one, polarized by the straight line of progressive history. Between these two archetypes of the human nomad is a transversal connection, which is elicited by this projective sense of the human earthling. NASA projects such as the “interstellar cave painting” and Caves of Mars exemplify a more general aspiration, and a collective cultural imagination of the beginnings of human life on other planets. To imagine such new beginnings in relation to a presentday understanding of the dawn of human culture in Upper Paleolithic caves reignites the basic tenet of a paleocybernetic way of thinking in which old and new knowledge must necessarily coalesce.

My own personal prehistory Erase una vez si tengo memoria Un tiempo lejano llamado prehistoria Cabalgaba el hombre lleno de salud En un elefante llamado mamut

When I was 7 years old, I wrote a poem entitled “Prehistory.” The poem is only a few verses long, but it delivers some rewarding rhymes. Because the poem was written in Spanish, the rhyming words do not translate into English in a



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straightforward way. However, there is something that rhymes conceptually between “memory” (memoria) and “prehistory” (prehistoria), or between “health” (salud) and “mammoth” (mamut). I transcribed the poem in a letter written to my grandmother, accompanied by the drawing in Figure 14. Before I embarked on the writing of this book, almost three years ago, I stumbled upon this old letter, as well as the sci-fi story containing a stencil of my own hand (see Chapter 3), both of which my grandmother returned to me before she died. I figured that if I were to write a book in earnest one day, I would have to include these childhood images. The paleocybernetic

Figure 14  Drawing of Prehistoric Scene by the author, aged 7.

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associations of old and new are not confined to marriages of pre- and posthistory, as I intimated in the preceding section. Paleocybernetics also concerns the marriage of child and adult within a familiar subjectivity. The mapping of extraterrestrial space relies on a sense of earthly familiarity projected onto unknown worlds. The analogy is clear. My future emerges as a projection of my own familiar self onto my children, or a back-projection of the person I supposedly am now onto my former self. The outcome of this bi-projective sense of identity is neither old nor new, but an assemblage of the two strata, which is conducive to a paleocyber conjunction. Adult life is often a process that involves forgetting one’s own childhood, or progressing beyond it. Something similar could be said about the transition from prehistory to history. But as the Little Prince remarks in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic: “Every grown-up used to be a child (but there are few to remember it).”17 At the heart of a paleocybernetic subjectivity, as in my poem, is the mediating substance of memory. The reason why memory rhymes with prehistory, in a conceptual sense, is because prehistory is not only the period in human culture before the invention of writing. Prehistory is also the period in my own life before I learned to read and write. Prehistory, in the proposed sense, is a condition that all preliterate children undergo, whether today or thirty thousand years ago. When I was 7 years old, I thought that my ability to paint a picture of “prehistory” depended on my own memory. Perhaps I was trying to remember what the world felt like before I learned to read and write. In that poem, I associated my prehistoric world with “health,” and given my 7-year-old unadulterated imagination, I acquainted prehistory with an image of myself “horse-riding” a mammoth. The prehistoric world is unworded, but it is animated nonetheless by a sense of life transmitted physically and sensorially, through material thought, action, and play. Riding a mammoth transmits something essential to the preliterate boy I once was. To draw that, going back to a point I made at the very beginning of this book, is an expression of something quite essential or substantial. Figure 14 is not a representation of a real mammoth ride. It is the depiction of a life contained in my 7-year-old fantasy. What the medium of the drawing transmits, like the drawing of a box containing a sheep in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic, is not a hard object of mediation, but the substance of



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the image—the imagination. What is transmitted by that drawing is the energy of an ebullient mind, which has not been entirely programmed by linguistic and technological ways of thinking. Swiss gestalt psychologist Jean Piaget wrote in his work The Child’s Conception of the World that the construction of mental reality in children depends on sensorimotor experience. For Piaget, to understand how the child’s world is constructed, it is necessary to look into the sensorimotor activities that lie at the root of child thinking. Piaget argued that children build physical and psychic universes that serve as a sort of order in the world, both material and moral. Two characteristics are at the origin of childhood reality according to Piaget, namely, the child’s egocentricity (children believe they are at the center of their world), and the idea that their world is governed by moral rather than physical laws (i.e., by forces that are good or bad to the child). Piaget makes one further explanation, which is crucial to the point I wish to make at this closing stage of the book. Although a child’s sense of reality is the result of an attitude of mind before reflection, the child’s egocentric and moral sense of the world is coupled with a latent animistic attitude, which hinges upon feelings of participation between child and world. In other words, Piaget identified that animism was not only a mind-set typified by primitive worldviews, but that it is an intrinsic disposition in a child’s construed sense of reality. What determines child animism is participation. Children participate in the world of objects, and objects participate in the world of children. There is no discontinuity in the child’s conception of the world. The magic that joins child and object is the principle of cause and effect, which can be broken down into four different schemata, at least according to Piaget’s studies. According to this framework, there is magic by participation between actions and things; there is magic between participation between thought and things; there is magic by participation between objects; and, finally, there is magic by participation of purpose. In the latter case, objects are regarded as living and purposive. Piaget adds: “There is animism. This participation consists in believing that the will of one object can act of itself on that of others and the magic lies in making use of this participation.”18 Animism, in sum, is a mental attitude that is grounded not only in the belief that things are alive, but also in the knowledge that objects participate in the will of the child. A child commands the clouds to

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open up and reveal the sun. The clouds obey because they are participating in the child’s thought or action. The child’s command of an animic world is not limited to clouds and sun—this is only one example of child animism given by Piaget based on his empirical work with children. Every single thing can participate in a child’s will, and every object can become co-participant in a world of cause and effect, at the center of which is the child. The child knows that he or she is alive, and that a sense of will derives from that self-conscious living. To the extent that the world of objects co-participates in the child’s will, and there is no division between child and object as far as participation goes, so the world is understood to be a living extension of the child’s will, which is why the world, in summary, is also understood to be alive. Piaget warned his readers that the use of the word “animism” to refer to a latent childhood mind-set was not without pitfalls. Piaget’s studies on child animism was thus presented with a caveat: if there is any sort of objection to the use of a word developed by anthropologists to describe primitive beliefs then it must be this: “If we use [the term animism] here in speaking of the child it is as if we were deciding out of hand the question as to whether these beliefs were identical for the primitive and the child. But such is not the case.”19 Piaget used the word as a generic term, leaving the question open as to whether the two types of animism have the same psychological origins or not. Whether the connection between child animism and so-called primitive animism are embedded in a common human psychological condition is not a question I am qualified to address. However, the speculative realism that underpins paleocybernetics intuits that child and primitive types (or what I  call “brutes”) are not polarized dispositions, but rather tangentially connected ontologies. Tim Ingold’s concept of an “animic ontology” can help me clarify this final point, not least since Ingold’s efforts draw on Piaget’s research. Against the hackneyed ethnographic definition, Ingold points out that “animism” is by no means an archaic or pre-premodern way of thinking. Quoting Piaget, Ingold argues that “psychologists have suggested that animistic beliefs are founded upon the bedrock of an unconscious predisposition that even educated adults share with children and primitive folk—a predisposition to act as though inanimate objects are actually alive.”20 In other words, the predisposition to



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recognize matter itself as a besouled entity is not native to primitive peoples or children, but to a particular ontology. What Ingold speculatively proposes, therefore, is the superimposition of child and primitive worldviews and the formation of a common predisposition, which this author then dubs the “animic ontology.” Animic ontology is not confined to an archaeological past or an ethnological sense of traditional culture. As a way of thinking about life, and through life, this particular ontology marries old and new, child and adult, modern and primitive. Ingold adds: “Animism is more typical of people in western societies who dream of finding life on other planets than of indigenous peoples to whom the label of animism has generally been applied.” He finishes off: “[Animists] are united not in their belief but in a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth. In this animic ontology, beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships.”21 Ingold’s understanding of the “animic ontology” raises a number of questions I have already posed in this chapter, for instance: is the ambition to find life on other planets and embark on extraterrestrial migrations (including exoplanetary cave exploration) yet another mode of animism, perhaps akin to a techno-animism? To project human life onto extraterrestrial beings, going back to Sagan’s “Interstellar Cave Painting,” is as much an expression of animism, or more so, than the animism depicted in Upper Paleolithic caves. And yet, there is a fundamental difference between the commodity animism of the contemporary era, which assigns life to technological artifacts and artificial intelligence, and the brute material thinking discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Paleocybernetics is a critical perspective that challenges belief in the power of language and technology to animate the world around us. It is a human-only world that is brought to life by the ruses of media technology. Ingold introduces the notion of “animacy” in his discussion, which may well be useful in the present context as well. Animacy is the power of animistic beliefs to foreground an ecological kind of thinking, and also an indigenous kind of thinking (indigenous to the prelinguistic body). Commodity animism dominates adult life, but that can be contested by the child’s raw animistic tendencies. The child does not assign life to man-made things only, but indeed, to the entire world around him or her, at least according to Piaget’s studies.

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Indeed, children possess an innate proclivity to establish animic relations with brute forces and brute entities that are not rationally prescribed or industrially manufactured. Children relate, more often than not, to wild places and nonhuman animals. Ingold concludes: “The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.”22 This is a significant insight, which in my opinion clarifies the nature of a paleo ontology. Paleo ontology is a vision of life that does not accept the prior division of agency and object, and which does not accept the division of life from raw matter. As I explained in Chapter 3, what naturalizes a paleo ontology, or what anchors a paleo ontological sense of life to a core “nature,” is the interconnected, fluid, permeable, and complex relation between energy and matter. This quantum condition, which cannot be split up to serve the ruses of rational understanding, is Nature. Nature, from this paleo ontological perspective, is a condition of possibilities defined by the continuity of energy into matter, and matter into energy, and the non-divisibility of this relation. If rationality weans animism from a person’s worldview through the artificial power of language, and through modes of participation in the world activated through linguistic means, the introduction of a symbolic language and a logocentric way of rationalizing the world is the critical issue at stake. Destruction of an animistic tendency hinges on the disruption of prelinguistic worldviews, and the irruption of writing and media technology as sole means to achieve participation in the world. As I intimated in Chapter 4, the irruption of alphabetic writing on the wall, and the imposition of remote forms of theologically determined communication, can undermine the power of matter-transmission. The effects of language and technology on relationality can spell the demise of an animic ontology, or the rationalization, at the very least, of this animic relationality. The critical problem is that language and technology are dominant modes of mediated participation. That is how the gulf between raw nature, and natures that are artificially recast, opens up. The rationality of object-based communication can suffocate the raw animism of the child. Animacy is suffocated by the contemporary educational obsession with literacy and numeracy. The addictive dependence of contemporary society on communication technologies (based on alphabetic, numeric, and



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alphanumeric communication) can suffocate a reality where body and land are related through energetic transmission. If the introduction of written language in the development of a child’s cognition is postponed, and if a child does not learn to read and write until late in their cognitive development, the animic ontology may be preserved. To the extent that speech and writing are superimposed on the sensorimotor plane, the child meets a formidable obstacle when learning how to speak, and even more so when learning how to read and write. According to Piaget, a child does not appear to be rational at the outset of verbal expression, not least because the child manifests a series of temporal displacements in comprehension. The child first of all moves in the world and touches it. The moment the child begins to speak, the thought that is being put into words is brute; it is unprepared for rational communication. The child’s distinctly material way of thinking sounds dislocated in the medium of verbal speech. Likewise, when the child learns how to read and write, a profound displacement occurs, insofar as he or she tries to match conceptual thought (and words) with a world that has already been disclosed to the child in the form of sensorimotor action. The implication of Piaget’s studies into child animism is that if a child postpones speech and literacy, the animistic perspective will survive and flourish in later years. As Piaget puts it: “language always lags in its aptitude for expression.” He adds: “Adult language provides the very conditions necessary to foster [or destroy] the child’s animism.”23 It is only through the introduction of a metaphoric language, an image-rich language, a language full of slips and metonyms, full of imagination and material contingency, that animistic tendencies can be fostered and sustained into later years. Is the opposite true? Does the language and imagery of the child, say the language and imagery I recovered from my own childhood years, help preserve my adult sense of rationalized animism? To preserve the child’s animism does not constitute a regressive call to infantilize the adult. The paleocybernetic position is not, I insist, predicated upon the romantic ideal of a return to primitive or child-like Nirvanas. Unlike Gene Youngblood, I do not think that the paleocybernetic age is defined by the merging of progress and regression. The coming together of caveman and astronaut is, quite the contrary, a process whereby two strata, two layers,

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are merged to form a new condition of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari’s paleocybernetics are very clear about this point. They write: It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary, central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states. . . . These states are intermediaries between different formed substances (substances of content and substances of expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and superimpositions.24

Deleuzoguattarian thinking is heavily conceptual, which is why it needs to be translated into brute terms. The gist of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking can be recast in relation to the two archetypes I have discussed in this chapter, the caveman and the astronaut. These two poles of human subjectivity are likewise “nomadic,” in the Deleuzoguattarian parlance, except that they lie at opposite poles of history. It is a mistake to think that a person can return to an idyllic prehistory when caveman humans and animals lived supposedly in harmony, and that this return can be established by means of a regression, a reversion to primitive nomadism. However, it would also make no sense to think that civilization transpires in a developmental and progressive manner. As I intimated at the beginning of this chapter, the actual enterprise of sending astronauts to Mars will demand, according to some NASA researchers, a change in popular perceptions about prehistoric cave cultures. Space Age culture will help recast the way cave cultures in the Upper Paleolithic are valorized. Prehistoric cave culture can teach us more about survival in extreme new environments than the whole of Socratic philosophy and its disparaging depiction of cave dwellers. What Deleuze and Guattari characterized as “substances” cut through historical layers, creating superimpositions and outgrowths. The connection of strata through percolating substances is what provides the continuity of an animic ontology, going back to Ingold. Between cavemen and astronaut, the sense of an animic worldview and a sense of life as substance percolate.



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This superimposition of caveman and astronaut produces a new “epistrata,” to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari again. Crucially, this ontology that sees all things as living, and the substance it perpetuates through participative memory and imagination, “is not animism any more than it is mechanism.”25 For Deleuze and Guattari, the animic is not a belief system; it is not a superstition or a child magic that will be inevitably wiped out by the arrival of adulthood. Animism is a reality as much as mechanism is. Magic is as real as science. Becoming child, according to these authors, denotes the maturity of the philosopher. As the French duo puts it, this time referring to their beloved Spinoza, “Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher.”26 What is the status of transmission media in all this? Earlier I pointed out that animism is indigenous to the body, and to a sensorimotor way of understanding the world. In other words, because mediation is here understood as raw physical transmission, and this way of participating in the world can postpone language-based communication, transmission media presupposes an ecological relation between physical bodies and geophysical land, which is indigenous to a sensorimotor reality. Why should this ecology of transmission practiced by “brutes” matter? According to Noam Chomsky, the fact that “Indigenous communities have begun to find a voice for the first time in countries with large Indigenous populations [is] a tremendous step forward for the entire world.”27 Chomsky has further stressed that at a time when the world is facing potential environmental catastrophe, “the only communities standing between humankind and the realization of such a catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people.” He concludes: “All over the world, it’s the Indigenous communities trying to hold us back: First Nations in Canada, Indigenous people in Bolivia, Aborigines in Australia, tribal people in India. It’s phenomenal all over the world that those who we call ‘primitive’ [or indeed brute] are trying to save those of us who we call ‘enlightened’ from total disaster.”28 Chomsky’s comments come not only as many Indigenous groups across Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, and other world regions characterized by strong indigenous culture have started to push back (against global corporations) and forward (to the constitutionalizing of indigenous worldviews). The need to understand European heritage also from an indigenous perspective, from

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the perspective of an Upper Paleolithic indigeneity, is equally significant, since the revalorization of the Upper Paleolithic tradition in the European subcontinent can help destabilize Western ideas of enlightenment and so-called progress from within. At the same time, a validation of European Indian identity (in the form of so-called cavemen or Cro-Magnon) establishes strong connections with indigenous worldviews outside the subcontinent. Ontological perspectives advanced by international indigenous groups may be probing Western worldviews from outside the historical purview of Western culture, highlighting the catastrophic effect that Western models of economic development are having on the planetary ecology. Meanwhile, the recent re-appreciation of prehistoric European heritage (for the instance, the revalorization of prehistoric caves, neanderthal cultures, and paleoexperimentalism) can likewise shake the very foundations of Western imperialism, which is so confidently (and erroneously) grounded on a sense of Ancient Greek origins. The fundamental shake-up happening as a result of a global Indigenist movement does not even have to be exoticized. An expanded sense of indigeneity can be applied to the “animic ontology,” which according to Ingold, is a worldview not confined to so-called primitive people but also to modern people who find life in inanimate objects (like astrobiologists imagining life on Mars). European civilization can contribute to an upturning of its own catastrophic legacy to the rest of the world, so long as Western culture is prepared to accept its own indigenous tradition, for instance in the form of the paleolithic State. Contemporary continental philosophy has begun that process, not least through a Deleuzoguattarian conceptualization of modern nomad subjectivities, or indeed the continuity of a paleolithic State within contemporary processes of state formation. Likewise, Jean Clottes’s advancement of a philosophy of immanence derived from a speculative interpretation of Upper Paleolithic material cultures invites a radical reconsideration of where European schools of thought and philosophy should position their center and periphery. Finally, one of the biggest contributions to ecological thinking that the cave cultures of Upper Paleolithic Europe can make, in my understanding, concerns the need to question the subordination of human thought to



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language and technology, through the affirmation of a very different understanding of mediation. Mediation in a paleocyber age can be now summed up as follows. In an indigenous European context, and in the context of a posthistorical age that seeks to recast that prehistory in the light of new materialist ethics and new object-oriented ontologies, life participation happens not as a result of dominant alphabetic language and dominant technologies of communication. In other words, what is most significant about the practices discussed in this book, is that they question the hegemony of media communication over transmission media. While media communication hinges on the power of written and spoken language, and the power of media artifacts to establish artificial systems of relationality and participation, transmission media in the sense proposed in this book pries open a much broader media ecology. As I showed in Chapters 3 and 4, transmission media bypasses the mediating function of language and communication technologies, and the commodity fetishistic belief in the power of industrially produced media artifacts, in order to tether body and land in an erotic ecology. The body’s materiality transmits energy to the land, while land transmits back to the body. This form of media transmission, when enshrined in cultural practice, may begin to consolidate an ecological way of thinking that is indigenous to the preliterate body. If contemporary families in cities around the world gather around the light of their television sets or computer screens, and if what affords participation and interrelation in a vast number of domestic settings worldwide are television programs or computer games, the future of family life is terrifying. Mass media has no substance. I do not mean that television, games, radio, magazines, and other mass media have no substance of content. That may or not be the case (who am I to judge?). My point is that mass media, and I draw again on Deleuze and Guattari, have no substance of expression. In other words, what comes out of the television set or computer (the light and the images, the sounds, the messages) transmit no vital energy. If, on the other hand, families gather around fire, around river, around forest, around clean air, the kind of transmission enshrined in such interactions preserves an ecological way of practicing mediation. Echoing Félix

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Guattari once again, it is necessary to combat the “gangrene of mass-media consumption.” This is the case not least because, at least according to this author, “domestic life is being poisoned by mass-media. Family and married life are frequently ossified by a sort of standardization of behavior. It is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority—be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic—that is compromised in this way, in a sort of regressive [media] infantalization.”29 Creating new singularities, within the setting of paleocyber family life, is a radical project that rests on the capacity that each person has to resist the alienating influences of mass media technology in their lives, and to form family values around elemental transmission media. If the valorization of transmission media is inculcated and instilled as a basic form of domestic education and a core family ethics, and if such a process of resingularization enshrines the belief in body to land transmission, then a respect and care for the only raw planet we have may become as popular as mainstream TV. David Henry Thoreau wrote from his cabin in Walden: “Who does not remember the interest with which when young one looked at any approach to a cave?” He adds: “It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us.” Thoreau goes on: “We may imagine a time when in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again.”30 What Thoreau is implying in the passage cited above, which sums up this chapter, is that a child brings the world to its very foundations every time he or she animates their construed reality, every time the child draws, every time the child explores and climbs, in every high-energy move, every shout, every release of wild animic desire. We owe life to that participation in the most fundamental of indigeneities. All humans are ultimately earthlings. We are all indigenous to the same physical and material planet. I am saved by my children. They bring me back to what matters; to adventures so immediate and so physical, language is ultimately exposed. Children reveal how much language lags behind matter-transmission. Language lags, but life transmission hits you straightaway, like a newborn child crying. And in every curious attempt to know from the sensing-moving body, from the wildest of landscapes, I follow them on paths to my most personal indigeneity. Philosophy only names what



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children live profoundly in their revealed discoveries. What a child calls out for, no rational discourse can address. Or as French speleologist Norbert Casteret put it: “with a savage cry that comes from the far distant past, a cave man answers my childish cry in the twentieth century.”31 It is true: my old self is growing up to become contemporary with the child.

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What are the odds? Having traveled a good few thousand kilometers to be as far away from school as possible, I ended up bumping into a group of classmates. Not what I had planned, but then again, things like that happen at the age of seventeen. It was another life, when traveling light during the long summer breaks meant not having to carry the weight of a single responsibility, let alone a backpack. But even in those conditions of unadulterated freedom, there is always the possibility of triggering some unfortunate set of events. Having traveled south to be far away from the monotony of senior school, bumping into some nerdy boy scouts from my class felt like dumping a girlfriend, only to run into her grizzly mum around the corner. In all fairness, I wasn’t just running away, I was also running after something. I was running after lots of things: experience, literature, art, anything that caught my excitable imagination. In this particular case, I had traveled south to see the millennial Fitzroya cupressoides, the largest and oldest trees in South America. My arrival may have been somewhat of a disappointment given the encounter with the boy scouts. Seeing them in their uniforms, with their neatly laid out tents and their fully equipped bivouac, felt as though my anticipation for the wild had back-slammed with images of first day back at school. In the middle of that Valdivian forest there would have been more than one tree to hide behind. Except that there was no one else there but the boy scouts and me, and no number of trees could have made my arrival at the camping site slip by unnoticed. Courteously I said hello; I might have pretended to be happily surprised to see them, and after a brief and brisk exchange, I told my classmates that I had to be on my way. Not true. I was hoping to spend the night at this camping site. After having traveled without a map, a plan, a guide—I should point out that this episode happened in those days before mobile phones and Google maps—it came as a massive surprise to me that

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apart from the camping site, there was no mountain refuge or cabin, no hostel. All I had was money. But where would I spend the night? Before parting ways, the scouts gave me a good tip. A few kilometers up the mountain path along the Chaicas rivulet was a picturesque site called Laguna Triángulo (Triangle Lake). Scenery worth the visit, with plenty of attractions, including a handful of old F. cupressoides along the way, plus a whole grove of these mighty trees dramatically perched up in the rocky promontories of the Andean peaks, all viewable from a turquoise-colored lagoon. Without any further ado, I set off to my Bermuda Triangle. On hindsight, these solo expeditions I embarked on when I was sixteen and seventeen were not an opportunity to travel light, but more like a case of traveling recklessly. My options seemed quite limited to either traveling in some unplanned and impulsive way, or else contemplating suicide back home. Not much of a palette. The boy scouts were right. Laguna Triángulo certainly was worth the five-hour trek. Finally, I felt like I had left behind whatever I had traveled there to forget. On the pebbly shores of the lagoon I found a hastily carved out tree trunk that performed passably well as canoe. I mounted the primitive bark, picked up an improvised paddlestick, and rowed along the silent turquoise waters. I hadn’t brought a camera with me, but you could say that the moment was captured in a snapshot. A memory. What peace! And then, with little warning, night. How could I not preempt this? Did I not think that night would fall, and that I had no place to stay in that wilderness, five hours away from the nearest camping site? I was five hours away from safety, assuming that the return trek would take me the same amount of time as the outbound trek. Was it arrogance? Stupidity? Feelings of youthful invulnerability? As I rowed back toward a darkened bankside, now inconclusively delineated against a dimmed-out forest, my good vibes sank. In colors that now mimicked the sky at dusk, the mourning waters lapped somberly against a different forest, blotched out into a cavernous black. And I sensed that I had done something terribly wrong. First, I opted for a brisk walk. The path was sufficiently wide and clear, so there was no reason to think I would stray from it. At first, the prospect of a night trek didn’t sound too bad. But the dense thicket dispelled all glimmer of

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light, and darkness took over. It was not long before my trek turned uncannily Dante-esque. I cannot say whether I was thinking about Dante at the time. Dante found himself in the gloomy wood astray midway in his life, and I was only seventeen. I was a boy. Lost in the forest. And I started to run. The tidy and well-kept pathway suddenly wasn’t there. I found myself without my last line of contact with that world I thought I wanted to leave behind. There I was, alone in a wood, several kilometers away from safety, and to all intents and purpose, lost. I ran more. But no pathway came to my rescue. I was running through thick coihue and mañío, aimlessly. And the entire space around me began to pulse, with racing beats cutting through my body in panic. The vibrant darkness had awoken, and the entire forest began to sway and whirl. The murmuring networked itself all around, as if millions of undisclosed little creatures around me were commenting, or worse still, plotting. In the ferocity of the chase, every sound and motion became hyper clear, as the verve of the forest intensified with my frantic race. So, I started to cry. How full of menace is the forest. Didn’t you consider that mountain lions live in the reserve? The odds of seeing a puma there were as high as running away from school to the farthest reaches of the Panamerican Highway, only to find the same schoolmates you were running away from. So I cried some more—with a feeling that I hadn’t had in my life: utter panic. The word just nails it. Panic, from Pan—meaning the Roman god of wilderness, but also a synonym for “everything.” Everything warped under the feeling I was succumbing to. A space that was previously extensive was now a purely intensive space with no “me” and no “them.” No more “I.” No more human “here” and forest “other” over there. In that panic-stricken race through the forest nightscape, everything became the same. Immanence. And after having drowned the multitude of sounds of the living forest with my uncontrolled panic for a long while, I suddenly heard a sound of distinction. I heard a pecking sound. Tock, tock, tock. I froze. The panic turned into something distinctly physical. There were butterflies in my stomach that were fluttering so intensely, the sensation made its way up to my mouth, making me want to vomit. A cold shiver unfurled itself like a second skin. The feeling did not come about as a result of a physical feeling of cold. It was a physical iciness that took hold of me, a paralyzing grip without the low temperatures—just a

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chill of the heart. The tingling remained on my back like a ghost brushing itself against me, and I stopped in my tracks. There it was, naked. Without light to veil its insides, the tock-tock inside this forest felt like a wooden heart sounding out to be heard. And through streams of tears I listened. I wasn’t hearing. I was listening with inner attention, without vision to fool around with my perception, without a sense of difference or an object to gaze at. The heartbeat was also inside my own bodily space, its steady rhythm no longer felt accelerated and out of control. As I was calming down, eventually, so I began to attune my senses a little better, just about adjusting to the intensity. It was a woodpecker. High up in a tree, it was doing what it often does: it was pecking wood. I sighed deeply, and thought: how I wish I could be with the boy scouts right now. How I wish I had known all along that it was the size of my own self that I had been fleeing from. The path reappeared like an Ariadne thread. And I was breathing myself again. I should have learned the lesson. The pain took a while to subside, much longer than the immediate realization of what had actually happened. I had slipped maybe three meters down the gully, onto my backside, squashing and breaking the lantern that I had precariously hooked onto my belt. For a first attempt at solo caving, this was a serious disaster. I was stuck in some pit inside Grotte Portel, and I had broken my torchlight, my only hope in that shameless darkness. I stretched my aching back, and felt the limestone floor, groping the ridge with my hands. There was another drop before me, a lengthier fall to the bottom of the cave, where the river was tumbling noisily into some deeper earth. In that darkness where eyes wide open and shut mean the same, the image of the woodpecker came back to me. You could say that there are bright caves and dark caves. Portel is more like the latter. By comparison, the famous cave of Pont d’Arc Chauvet is bright. The cave opens out to an elegant curve of the Ardechè river as it meanders along a majestic limestone gorge. The modern entrance to the underground karst faces a gentle slope, behind which the impressive natural rock bridge of Pont d’Arc rises monumentally over crystal waters. The cave faces south, and it is sheltered from the winds. The passage to twilight zone in the case of Chauvet is a sharp transition from a wide panoramic and sunny limestone ridge, straight to the darkness of the limestone cave. You can easily carry the sunny exterior

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to the darkness inside. Portel is another story. The cave emerges at the bottom of a thickly forested hollow, at the squeezed intersection of two gently curved but ominous looking hills. The rivulet descends into a knife-shaped crack that opens ten meters high, like a titan’s wound. To get to Portel I had already had my spirits dampened, as the descent had led me down a shady and humid dell, unlit and foreboding. The cave is live, that is, it contains a running stream of water, and so it resonates with an upheaval of stone and water. It is a cave of echoes and voices. Now that I had fallen down a ridge and lay several hundred meters cave deep, without my light and on my own, the slew of premonitions was proved right. I remembered the incident at Parque Nacional Alerce Andino, when I got lost for seven or eight hours in a wild Valdivian forest. Now that I was nearing forty years of age, I was perhaps supposed to behave less rashly. For a start, I did not run. I would be less susceptible to panic, and perhaps more able to overcome the problem calmly. To surmount the predicament meant climbing a vertical wall whose surface grip was firm, to squeeze through a narrow gulley over a fairly deep chasm, and then make a three-meter crossing over to the other side of the cave along a wall with no firm grip and slippery surface. Past that, I would have to perform a very short walk along a fairly horizontal floor level, to an underground riverside boulder where I had left my rucksack with two or three spare sets of flashlights. Assuming I would be able to find my rucksack in complete darkness, and assuming that I would manage to sort out all those preceding dangers, I would then be able to walk back well-light for another three hundred meters, wading past an underground pool, to the mouth of the cave. The way back to the rucksack, however, was no more than one hundred meters. Not a lot, but I would have to make my way in absolute darkness. And the darkness took over. But this darkness is like no other. My hand placed directly before my face is utterly invisible in such impenetrable black. A cave darkness is the darkness of a place that has never seen light, except for whatever humans venturing in that underground have brought with them to illuminate their footsteps. What had impelled me to go there, and to risk this fall? There is a prehistoric image said to be contained in Grotte Portel, a charcoal drawing of a faceless horse, which incidentally I never found. But the image I had seen online appeared in my imagination, and as I clung onto

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the cold rock, motionless, like an invertebrate trog forgotten by evolution, I pictured the faceless horse in my mind. Blind as I was, I imagined that these rocks on which I moved ever so slowly were the panel upon which the faceless horse was resting. Without a light to tell me the opposite, I imagined that I had found what I was looking for. As strong as the feeling that propelled me was—the image of my children waiting back home in London egged me on—I did not move much, but only shifted ever so slightly, one inch at a time. I groped the rock, eyes closed, alerting all my body and skin to the transmissions, the vital geophysical information relayed by the gradation and inclinations of limestone, the texture and firmness of the grip, the level of slip and humidity. The message was not relayed to my palms only, but to my whole anatomy, outstretched and sensitized—the body manipled, all hand and all palm, sensing in every pore. Although I practice indoor climbing, and an artificial wall will have a grading (typically rated 3 to 9 in the UK), it struck me that climbing the walls of Grotte Portel in complete darkness utterly failed to qualify in the ranks of outdoor sports. Something caveman-like rose from my limbs, a kinetic atavism, realized in the abnormally slow delivery of my movements. I had no choice but to think mineral, and to follow the movement of rock no longer with my eyes. Much more immediately, I followed the rock through blind, tactile, and kinesthetic means. I imagine that bone, the organic mineral in me, was holding me tightly against the limestone mineral, and that one day, after death and decomposition, the two would hug again, and conjoin. In order to climb in darkness, I had to try to be rock, to squeeze up until the calcite bone and the calcite limestone were tightly clasped. Only then could I entrust my whole physical delivery of weight and grip to the wall. Trusting that the rock would not let me go, and that my arms and legs would be strong enough to hang on, I moved, inch by inch, like a rocky entity growing prodigiously fast in geological terms and prodigiously slow in human terms. I made my way back lingering, one inch of the rock after another. This mounting sense of physical distance covered between the site of the accident and the location of my rucksack one hundred meters away reminded me of pilgrims back in my home country of Chile, who sometimes drag themselves on the floor along the motorway for hundreds of miles on

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their way to the Virgin of Lo Vasquez, perhaps embodying in this way the painful distance between body and spirit. Not even walking. Merely dragging my flesh and bones, I imagined myself like a human speleothem, a nonhuman pilgrim coming back from some godless underworld. I was no longer moving toward the imaginary horse without a face—the image that had impelled me to Grotte Portel. I was dragging my body so that this speleothem being I had become could finally rejoin my old self, my walking and thinking self, who was waiting for me outside the cave, and who would walk me out of the deathly hollow back home to my wife and children. It was not the last time I ventured down a cave. In fact, Portel was the first of many excursions. What started as a reckless tactic to get in touch with a lost teenager in me grew into a still ongoing process of SIMBY paleocyber experiments. Over the course of the three years I have spent writing this book, I have descended many caves containing Upper Paleolithic paintings and engravings. Some of the Upper Paleolithic caves I have explored are open and free of access, like Portel, Massat, Carriot, Cantal, Sainte Eulalie, Papetier, Pergouset, Le Cuzoul des Brasconnies, and Le Baume de Ronze. Other sites I have entered as part of a tourist visit, as in the case of Font de Gaume, Les Combarelles, Niaux, Pech Merle, L’Abri Cap Blanc, Santimamiñe, El Castillo, Las Monedas, Church Hole Cave, Robin Hood Cave, the Côa Valley rock art. Others I have visited in the form of life-sized replicas (e.g., Neocueva Altamira, Lascaux II, Caverne du Pont d’Arc/Chauvet). Last but not least, I have been fortunate enough to visit the original caves of Altamira and Mas d’Azil as part of scientific research programs. Like the incident at Alerce Andino, my journey down Portel was lifethreatening. Not only is the memory of Portel locked in my brain, taking me back to a profoundly sensory and transformational experience, but the Portel incident also drew me close to death. Here is a dilemma Deleuze confronted in his last book, entitled Immanence: A Life, written months before hurling himself out of his Paris apartment to his own death. The problem concerns the question of immanence, that is, a life that exists only in itself. Life which has no transcendence, and whose perpetuity is resolved in a purely material plane of existence. I am not writing here about my life, or his life, the biographical life of Gilles Deleuze. I am writing about a life, that is, the drive for life, which

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is only passing through me, and for which I am just a vessel. In other words, I am writing about how, from the singularity of my own body, my memories, and my inner life, I try to gain awareness of pure immanence. Inside the caves I visited are forty thousand years, give or take, of collective and anonymous memory revealing ways in which many thousands of singular lives, and a life, are mediated. I am making a distinction between the earthling subjectivity of Upper Paleolithic peoples and a present-day “paleo” fad that concerns lifestyle strategies for a better quality of living. Two worldviews, one collective and co-subjective, one individualistic and egocentric, have clashed. There is not a single mark of individuality, no self-portrait, no autograph, no “I was here” (other than a cache of printed hands) in the whole of European prehistory. By contrast, subjectivity in a post-Paleolithic era can be characterized by a progressive move toward savage individualism. The singularization and individualization of living is not the same as a life. Living for myself, for my own gain and pleasure, for my résumé, for my Facebook page, is a mode of subjectivity that clashes with a life, not least because a life is a force that stops at nothing and spares no one. The narcissistic effort of living for oneself sometimes amounts to a rejection of that immanence, and a claim of transcendence (through fame, through glory, through legendary acts, through beauty, through intellect, through social capital). But what am I trying to transcend from? The material reality of earth? In order to become what? If living rejects a life, and the death that a life promises, then it is not a life at all that beckons from beyond, nor indeed an afterlife, but the narcissistic illusion of having transcended. How can I possibly think that my living, my identity, my sense of self, my ego, will somehow outlive my life, and that my soul will live on in some metaphysical plane? Anyone who believes such religion will ultimately feel uncomfortable with an earthling subjectivity, because the two positions are inimical. You cannot transcend earthlingness. That is the parable of the cave. Mediation, when it is emancipated from the transcendental ruses of technology and religion, acts as a tethering of body to landscape, a belt around living and a life. My living does not belong to me, but to a life, which belongs to no one, only perhaps to itself. To sensitize the body to that mediating power, is to accept one’s earthlingness,

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and in the process, to affirm one’s death—not as a gateway to heaven, but as a material stage after which all that is inorganic in me will be delivered back to the earth, so that plants and animals may feed on me, just as I fed on them. In this book, I have argued that a life cannot ascend to planes of representation, and that technicity (the construction of subjectivities through technique and technology) are strategies for a fatal leap that leave brute physicalism behind, thus removing me from the raw inhumanity that makes me real earthling. Here is a good epitaph: I did not want to be human. I never did. I am happy to be earthling. It is an epitaph written not on tombstones, but limestones, a message from paleo-humans to posthumans, not to be taught by academic experts and to be delivered via media technology. The emissaries are primitives and brutes, nomads, animals, children, rocks. The mediacy is found in material memory, imagination, sensation, sensuality. No matter how much technoscientific progress happens, the Upper Paleolithic caves of Europe and beyond will remain where they are, and wherever it is they are shifting to in their slow tectonic journeys. Furthermore, as technology continues to advance, it will become necessary to reaffirm or at the very least reinterpret and come to terms with the old world that technology is trying to leave behind. With over forty thousand years of Upper Paleolithic cultures invested in becoming mobile, becoming animal, becoming child, and becoming limestone, our Upper Paleolithic years are not past, but stratified beneath a few thousand years of Neolithic history. The paleocyber disposition teaches me that I will not transcend, that I will only transmit and transform, and that my fate is not human but humus. I have found myself caught up in strange loops. I see myself getting old, seeking connections with my childhood and my children, cultivating the circular power of memory and youthful imagination. If I gave this away, and I bowed out to claim a career, a fame, a transcendence that lies supposedly straight ahead, the child in me would never forgive me. Now that is one death I am truly afraid of.

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Notes Chapter 1 1 Jameson, F. (1982), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2 Von Petzinger, G. (2016), The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols, New York: Simon & Schuster. 3 Schaetz, R. Limestone Mining. Full text available at: http://geo.msu.edu/extra/ geogmich/limestone-mining.html (Accessed March 21, 2017). 4 Delanda, M. (1995), The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation. Available at: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/geology.htm (Accessed March 21, 2017), unpaginated. 5 Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, vii. 6 Marx, K. (1995, 1999), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume One), translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, Marx/Engels Internet Archive marxists.org, January 23, 2017. Available at: https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm (Accessed March 21, 2017), unpaginated. 7 Harvey, D. (2012), Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso.

Chapter 2 1 André Leroi-Gourhan, and many subsequent experts after him, has pointed out that the style of Lascaux’s paintings was consistent with other paintings of the Magdalenian period (circa 15,000–13,000 BCE). Radiocarbon test results obtained in 1998 from a fragment of a spearhead found inside the cave places the artwork at a slightly earlier period, but not significantly earlier, that is, at the junction between the Solutrean era and the pre-Magdalenian, roughly 17,000

270 Notes BCE. See: Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1982), The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 38. 2 Aujoulat, N. (2004), Lascaux. Le geste, l’espace, et le temps, Paris: Seuil, 58. 3 Bataille, G. (2005), The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, edited and introduced by Stuart Kendall, translated by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendal, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 99. 4 According to the Lascaux website, the original cave was visited by one million tourists from 1948 to 1963. Following the closure of Lascaux cave due to environmental concerns, the replica cave (Lascaux II) has received more than ten million visitors since 1983, and it receives now over half a million visitors per year. See: Equipe Lascaux. (2016), Lascaux, Lascaux II, III, and next? (blog). http://www.lascaux.fr/en/blog/detail/25-lascaux-puis-lascaux-2-puis-3et-apres (Accessed November 27, 2017). 5 Kopytoff, I. (1986), “Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–91. 6 Appadurai, A. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7 Lascaux III has an insurance value of €1.6 million. See: http://www.lascaux-expo. fr/locations/. 8 Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 9 Bataille, G. (1993), The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 226. 10 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 226. 11 Ibid. 12 Opened in December 2016, Lascaux IV is a state-of-the art architectural, landscape design, public space design, and master planning project that blends the center’s building site with the limestone hill where the original cave is located. Commissioned to Snøhetta + Duncan Lewis Scape Architecture, with scenography and multimedia by Casson Mann + Jangled Nerves, the interior design features of the project include high-tech scenography for immersive visitor experience. Source: http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/lascaux-iv-cave-paintingcentreby-snohetta-duncan-lewis-casson-mann (Accessed March 21, 2017). 13 Bednarik, R. G. (2001), “Cupules: The Oldest Surviving Rock Art,” International Newsletter on Rock Art, 30: 18–23.

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Chapter 3 1 Mallory, J. P. and D. Q. Adams. (2006), The Oxford Introduction to Proto-IndoEuropean and the Proto-Indo-European World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 120–1. The idea that “human” and “earth” have a common root is well preserved in the Latin adjective humanus (meaning human or humane) and the noun humus (meaning earth or soil), or the Phyrygian zemelo, meaning “man” and “earthly.” 2 Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 190. 3 The passage is from Genesis 3:19 (KJV). 4 Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 340. 5 Bachelard, G. (1948), La Terre et les Rêveries du Repos: Essai sur les Images de l’Intimité, Paris: Corti. 6 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 378. 7 Gaiman, N. (2010), The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, London: Headline. 8 Clottes, J. (2016), What is Paleolithic Art: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 131–2. 9 A number of specialists, including Iegor Reznikoff, Michel Dauvois, and Steve Waller, have studied the relationship between specific sections in prehistoric caves containing large numbers of graphic “art,” and the echoic resonance of these chambers. The conclusion is that in a certain number of cases (for instance in Niaux), accumulations of paintings coincided with places of heightened echoic resonance, which supports an acoustic theory of cave “art.” 10 Clottes, What is Paleolithic Art: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, 102. 11 Cooke, M. and David Horn (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also: Zelade, R. (2015), Austin in the Age of Jazz, Charleston, SC: History Press. 12 Büchner, G. (1987), The Complete Plays, London: Methuen, 203. 13 Abram, D. (2010), Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 10.

272 Notes 14 See Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation (1982), translated by Stanley Lombard, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. 15 Kuryluk, E. (1987), Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 19–25. 16 Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, 24. 17 Ibid., 24. 18 Eshleman, C. (2003), Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 19 Clottes, What is Paleolithic Art: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity. 20 Marshack, A. (1972), The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation. New York: McGraw-Hill. 21 Clottes, What is Paleolithic Art: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, 94. 22 Ibid., 133. 23 Ibid., 135–6. 24 Ibid., 138. 25 van Gelder, L. (2008), Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2. 26 Sharpe, K. and L. van Gelder. (2004), “Children and Paleolithic Art: Indications from Rouffignac Cave,” International Newsletter on Rock Art, 38: 16. 27 Saint-Exupéry, A. (2010), Wind, Sand and Stars, translated by Lewis Galantiere Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 94. 28 Clottes, What is Paleolithic Art: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, 164. 29 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 282. 30 Florensky, P. (2002), Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, translated by Wendy Salmond, London: Reaktion Books, 134. 31 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 274. 32 Abram, D. (1996), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World, New York: Pantheon Books, 66.

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Chapter 4 1 Lacan, J. (2006), Ecrits, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton and Co., 132. 2 Lacan, Ecrits, 343. 3 Cohen, J. J. (2015), Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 131. 4 Bachelard, G. (2002), Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, translated by Edith R. Farrell, Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 10. 5 Blanchot, M. (2000), “The Beast of Lascaux,” translated by Leslie Hill, Oxford Literary Review, 22: 9–18. 6 Blanchot, M. (1993), The Infinite Conversation, translated and foreword by Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 432. 7 Clottes, Jean, Interview in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir. by Werner Herzog (2010). 8 Clottes, Interview in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, n/p. 9 Ibid., n/p. 10 Ibid., n/p. 11 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1968), The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe, London: Thames & Hudson, 40. 12 DreamTime II (Fantasmagoria) (June 4–November 28, 2010) was the second installment of the “Art and Transhistory” exhibitions at the Patrimonial site of the Cave of Mas d’Azil in the French mid-Pyrenees. The exhibition featured installation and performance works by a number of well-known contemporary artists, including Marina Abramovic, Jan Fabre, and Olaf Breuning. 13 Hill, Gary, Hitting a Wall, Finding a Shape: an Interview with Gary Hill (with Ana Beatriz Duarte), available at: http://studiointernational.com/index.php/hitting-awall-finding-a-shape-an-interview-with-gary-hill (Accessed March 22, 2017). 14 Hill, Hitting a Wall, Finding a Shape, 278.

Chapter 5 1 Corrado, M. (2015), “Il sentiero della foresta,” in Matteo Meschiari (ed.), Paleolithic Turn, Pleistocity Press, 66. 2 McLuhan, M., and Bruce R. Powers. (1989), The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 45.

274 Notes 3 Crary, J. (2001), Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 10. 4 Bachelard, G. (1948), La Terre et les Rêveries du Repos: Essai sur les Images de l’Intimité, Paris: Corti, 199. 5 Eliade, M. (1964), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, London: Routledge, 51. 6 Eshleman, C. (2003), Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 139. 7 Schechner, R. (1988), Performance Theory, London: Routledge, 66–68. 8 Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2000), “Kinetic Tactile-Kinesthetic Bodies: Ontogenetical Foundations of Apprenticeship Learning,” Human Studies, 23.4 (October): 343–70. 9 Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 19. 10 Eshleman, C. (2003), Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 186. 11 Developed at the University of Illinois, Chicago, by the late 1990s, CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environments) was developed by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel Sandin Thomas de Fanti, Robert Kenyon, and John Hart. The name of this technology refers, according to the creators, to Plato’s cave. 12 Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Daniel J. Sandin, and Thomas A. DeFanti. (1993). “Surround-Screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE,” Computer Graphics, SIGGRAPH Annual Conference Proceedings, 1993. 13 Heim, M. (1995), “The Design of Virtual Reality,” in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (eds.), Cyberspace/Cyberbody/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, London: Sage, 74. 14 Heim, “The Design of Virtual Reality,” 75. 15 McLuhan, M., and Bruce R. Powers. (1989), The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 45. 16 McLuhan and Powers, The Global Village, 78. 17 Bateson, G. (1987), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 138. 18 Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 29. 19 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 317. 20 Ibid., 341.

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Chapter 6 1 Shanken, E. A. (2009), Art and Electronic Media, London: Phaidon, 16. 2 Huhtamo, E. (2010), “Natural Magic: A Short Cultural History of Moving Images,” in William Guynn (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Film History, London: Routledge, 4. 3 Zielinski, S. (2006), Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2–3. 4 Lewis-Williams, D. and Thomas Dowson. (1988), “The Signs of All Times,” Current Anthropology, 29: 201–17. 5 Abbé Henri Breuil, an early pioneer in the study of European prehistory and Paleolithic art, called Lascaux the “Sistine Chapel of prehistoric times.” The same name was used earlier to refer to the cave of Altamira. The cave at Niaux (Ariège) was nicknamed the “Versailles of Prehistory.” 6 Giedion, S. (1960), “Space Conception in Prehistoric Art,” in Edward Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (eds.), Explorations in Communication, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 80. 7 Henry Christy and Édouard Lartet were perhaps the first to refer to the work of Upper Paleolithic people as “art,” which for these authors has a primarily decorative function. Via Salomon Reinach’s application of James George Frazer’s theories, the idea that these graphic works served a magic purpose became popular—hence the notion of a magic or sympathetic “art.” Max Raphael put forward in the 1940s his well-known theory of cave painting as evidence of totemic or animistic art. 8 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 326. 9 Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 326. 10 Bergson, H. (1922), Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan and Co., 323. 11 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 324. 12 Bergson, H. (1929), Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and M. E. Dowson, London: John Allen and Unwin, xii. 13 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 130–31. 14 Stiegler, B. (2014), “Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 47: 15. 15 Stiegler, “Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema,” 11.

276 Notes 16 The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. [Film] Dir. Werner Herzog, Germany. IFC Films, 2010. 17 Bakhtin, M. (2004), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 18 Bergson, H. (1922), Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan and Co., 323. 19 Azéma, M. (2010), L’Art des Cavernes en Action Tome 2: Les Animaux Figurés. Animation et Mouvement, l’Illusion de la Vie, Paris: Errance. 20 Azéma, M. (2008), “Representation of Movement in the Upper Palaeolithic: An Ethological Approach to the Interpretation of Parietal Art,” Anthropozoologica, 43.1: 117–54. 21 Azéma, M. (2008), L’Art des Cavernes en Action Tome 2: Les Animaux Figurés. Animation et Mouvement, l’Illusion de la Vie, Paris: Errance, 13. 22 Bergson, H. (1922), Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan and Co., 283.

Chapter 7 1 Voegtlin, W. (1975), The Stone Age Diet: Based on In-depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man, New York: Vantage Press, xvi. 2 Voegtlin, The Stone Age Diet, 7. 3 Bateson, G. (1987), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, New York, NJ: Jason Aronson, 154. 4 For a more detailed account of my encounter with the animals at Parque Cuaternario, see Salazar Sutil, N. (2017) “Jism for Schism: Turning the Animal on,” Performance Research, 22.2 (March): 1–8. 5 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 138. 6 Ibid., 102. 7 Youngblood, G. (1970), Expanded Cinema, New York: Dutton, 41. 8 Davis, E. (2005), “Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man,” in Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen (eds), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 28. 9 Some examples of recently launched museums, visitor centers, and reinterpretations centers of European prehistory include: Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann (1996); Pôle International de la Préhistoire in

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Eyzies-de-Tayac (2002); Parque de la Prehistoria de Teverga (2007); Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre, UK (2009); Museo de la Evolución Humana in Burgos (2010); Neanderthal Museum in Piloña, Spain (2010); Human Evolution Gallery at the Natural History Museum in London (2015); Centre International d’Art Pariétal Montignac-Lascaux (2016), all of which add to major cave replica projects such as Lascaux II, Neocueva de Altamira, and Caverne du Pont d’Arc. 10 Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum, 33. 11 Pindar, I. and Paul Sutton. (2000), “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Three Ecologies, London: Continuum, 9. 12 Pindar and Paul, “Translator’s Introduction,” 9. 13 Ibid. 14 Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum, 27. 15 Meschiari, M. (2015), “Premessa,” in Paleolithic Turn, Pleistocity Press, 12. 16 Guattari, F. (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Revolution, London: Penguin, 18. 17 Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum, 51. 18 Meschiari, M., Maurizio Corrado, and Francesco Gori. (2015), “Paradigma Pleistocene,” in Paleolithic Turn, Pleistocity Press, 23. 19 Meschiari, Corrado, and Gori, “Paradigma Pleistocene,” 29. 20 Meschiari, M. (2015), “Mano sulla pietra,” in Paleolithic Turn, Pleistocity Press, 55. 21 Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 88. 22 Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 431. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 408. 24 Youngblood, G. (2010), “Free Press interview/Gene Youngblood and Arthur C Clarke,” in Stephanie Swam (ed.), The Making of 2001: Space Odyssey, New York: Random House, 205. 25 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007), The Merleau-Ponty Reader, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 260.

278 Notes

Chapter 8 1 Fimmel, R. O., William Swindell, and Eric Burgess. (1974), Pioneer Odyssey: Encounter with a Giant, Washington, DC: Scientific and Technical Information Division (NASA), 142. 2 Fuller, B. (1981), Critical Path, New York: St Martin’s Press. 3 Lewis-Williams, D. (2002), The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 127. 4 See: http://shawnx.com/altamira.php (Accessed June 30, 2017). 5 Helmreich, S. (2012), “Extraterrestrial Relativism,” in Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine, and Valerie Olson (eds), “Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos,” Anthropological Quarterly, 85.4: 1127–41. 6 Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004), “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2.1: 6. 7 Abram, D. (2010), Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2010. 8 Clottes, J. and David Lewis-Williams. (1998), Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. 9 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 108. 10 Ibid., 58. 11 Arendt, H. (2013), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 83. 13 Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 120. 14 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. 15 Boston, P., G. Frederick, S. Welch, J. Werker, T. R. Meyer, B. Sprungman, V. Hildreth-Werker, D. Murphy, and S. L. Thompson. (2002), Human Utilization of Subsurface Extraterrestrial Environments: Final Report, Boulder, CO: Complex Systems Research, Inc. Available at: http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_ report/710Boston.pdf (Accessed July 1, 2017). 16 Messeri, L. (2016), Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 17 Saint-Exupéry, A. (2014), The Little Prince, West Hartford: Pelekanos Books, 1. 18 Piaget, J. (1929), The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 134.

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19 Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, 170. 20 Ingold, T. (2011), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge, 63. 21 Ingold, Being Alive, 68. 22 Ibid. 23 Piaget, J. (1929), The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 248. 24 Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 71. 25 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 278. 26 Ibid. 27 Chomsky, N. (8 October, 2015), “Economic War on Latin America: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Chris Spannos,” New Internationalist. Full interview available at: https://newint.org/contributors/noam-chomsky (Accessed November 28, 2017). 28 Ibid. 29 Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum, 51. 30 Thoreau, H. D. (1995), Walden, or, Life in the Woods. New York: Dover, 34. 31 Casteret, N. (1951), Cave Men New and Old. London: Dent & Sons, 161–62.

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Index Abram, David  91, 106–8, 237 Abramovic, Marina  273 Abri de La Madeleine  93–4. See also Magdalenian acoustics  145–6, 148 acoustic space  13, 145–8, 156 acoustic theory of cave art  13, 90, 271n. aerography  124, 132, 170 aesthetics  55, 64, 88, 172, 177 aesthetic gaze  188 air  4, 19, 31–4, 86–7, 105, 123–4, 133, 144, 163–4, 237. See also elements pollution  202, 256 saturation in caves  90, 133, 146 Alcalde del Rio, H.  46 alien  14, 113, 227–32, 240–1 alienation  40, 50, 70, 127, 148, 157–8, 238–9, 256. See also earth alienation alphabet  119–20 alphabetic communication  145, 156, 160, 250–1, 255 writing  119, 123–4, 145, 176, 250 alphabeticism  220 analphabet  120 Altamira. See also bison, masks, Museo de Altamira, Neocueva, Hall of the Polychromes boar  191–2 cave  9, 13, 29, 83, 95, 128, 131–8, 140, 153–4, 161, 171, 177, 191–2, 198, 207, 231, 233, 265, 275 Amazonia  104, 235–6, 239 Amazonian shamanism  236 ambiguity  78, 84, 139 anarcho-primitivism  204, 208, 220 anamorphism (graphic technique)  126, 194, 197 animacy  190, 249–50

animal  5, 7, 17–19, 21, 24–31, 40, 45–50, 56, 59–62, 70–8, 80–2, 89, 91, 94–6, 98, 107–8, 118, 120, 124–5, 128–34, 137–8, 148–9, 153, 162–4, 168, 170, 173, 176–8, 181, 186–8, 193–7, 206–7, 212, 224, 236–8, 250, 252, 256, 267, 276n. behavior  26, 178 in brute materialism  7, 120, 250, 267 extinction  62, 189, 243 as humans  34, 40, 60, 67, 69, 94, 130, 196–7, 238, 252 life, 17–18, 61, 71, 138, 243, 250, 256 mobility  25, 164 motion  21, 28, 30–1, 81–2, 89, 126–8, 168, 170, 173, 179, 181, 193–7 rights  34 animic  104, 176, 192, 199, 248–50 animic ontology  249–4 animism  11, 41, 247–53, 275n. See also child animism anti-Christian  207 anti-human  92 anti-industrial  209 Anti-Oedipus  215, 274, 277. See also Deleuze, Deleuzoguattarian and Guattari Appadurai, Arjun  54, 58–9, 65 archaeology  96, 128 archi-cinema  14, 182, 186–8, 190 architecture  53, 213, 270n. See also landscape architecture, architectural design cave architecture  46, 53 Ardèche  12, 37, 262 Arendt, Hannah  239 Ariège  32, 37, 143, 149, 210, 275 Aristotelian  182, 185, 190 art  6, 10, 35, 43, 45, 49, 64, 72, 76, 81–2, 91–5, 100, 104, 121, 124, 127–8, 130,

288 Index 138–9, 150, 160, 167–79, 185, 189, 193, 196, 210, 217, 219–21, 225, 233, 237, 269. See also cave art, dance, digital arts, digital performance, grotesque art, installation art, music, parietal art, prehistoric art, rock art, sculpture, music, theatre, video art art history, 127, 171, 195, 217, 270n. artist  8–9, 35, 43, 45, 54, 64, 81, 92, 95–6, 124, 138–40, 150, 167, 173–4, 188–9, 196, 202, 210, 220–2, 225, 233, 273n. Artaud, Antonin  149 astrobiology  230, 234, 240–4, 250, 252 astronaut  227, 231–3, 250–3 atmosphere  31–2, 62, 97, 128, 133, 153, 242 Aujoulat, Norbert  44 Aurignacian  72, 78, 131, 133, 147, 170. See also culture auroch  29, 47, 67, 125, 196 Axial Gallery (Lascaux)  47–8, 52 Azéma, Marc  14, 193–8, 276n. Azilian  143. See also culture, Mas d’Azil Cave Babylonian  117–20 Bachelard, Gaston  4, 72, 124, 146 bacteria  63–4, 105, 239–40 Bakhtin, Mikhail  13, 152, 165–6, 189. See material bodily grotesque, grotesque realism, heteroglossia Barad, Karen  7, 86, 221 Bataille, Georges  50–2, 60–1, 270 Bateson, Gregory  14, 163, 206–8, 211–13, 225 bear (animal)  6, 29, 66–7, 93–4, 129 Beast of Lascaux  122–6, 136–8, 199. See also Blanchot Bednarik, R. G.  270 Bennett, Jane  7, 36, 87, 221, 239–40 Bergson, Henri  14, 171, 177, 180–1, 183–5, 189–93, 198 Bible (King James)  71 biology  233 biological  5, 17, 38, 86, 152, 178, 194, 206 bison man (Chauvet and El Castillo)  84–6

bison women  84–6 bison  44, 79, 84–6, 98, 129, 136, 146, 173, 187, 224 Blackton, J. Stuart  192 Blanchot, Maurice  124–6, 138, 199 blurring  74, 79–80, 176, 191, 193. See also motion-blur boar  191–2 body  1–2, 6, 12–13, 18, 21, 26, 29, 32–3, 37, 40, 45–8, 57, 60, 65, 69–71, 77, 79, 86–7, 90–3, 96, 98, 100–1, 105–11, 121–2, 125–6, 128–9, 131, 138–41, 148, 151–3, 155–7, 159–60, 165–6, 169–71, 174, 177, 179, 193, 195, 202, 205–7, 213, 225, 231–3, 236–9 expanded body (landscape)  90–2, 96, 225 bone  12, 17–19, 66–7, 86, 93–4, 96–8, 100–1, 105–6, 108, 131–2, 140, 196, 198, 265 Boston, Penelope  234, 241–2, 278n. Boulle, Pierre (Monkey Planet)  102 Braidotti, Rosi  7, 202, 221 Breuil, Henri (Abbé)  46, 49, 83–4, 149, 191–2, 198, 275n. Breuning, Olaf  273n. Brixey, Shawn  233 brute  7, 9, 35, 38–9, 81, 96, 113, 160, 166, 202, 224–5, 250–2 body  139, 238 fact  7, 32, 104, 125, 128, 130, 186, 223 force  7, 12, 223, 250 matter  7–8, 10–11, 36, 117, 123, 125 transmission  205 brute materialism  6–8, 11–12, 15, 32–3, 35–7, 39, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 117, 128, 155, 163–4, 214, 221–2, 224, 237, 240, 249, 267 brutes  7, 118, 120, 222–4, 248, 253, 267. See also animal, children, primitive Bryant, Levi  7 Büchner, Georg  90 burial  18, 66–7, 71 calcite  17, 19, 24, 86, 106, 264 calcium carbonate  17, 23, 33

Index calligraphy  120, 124 Cantabria (Spain)  22–3, 85, 133, 137, 205 Cantal Cave  265 capitalism  39–41, 54, 204, 220 carbon dioxide  24, 63 Carpenter, Edmund  13, 159–60, 180 Carriot Cave  265 Cartailhac, Emile  191–2 cartoon  77–8, 191–2, 198 Casteret, Norbert  257 CAVE (Cavern Automated Virtual Environment)  154–5, 157, 274n. cave (geological)  2, 4–6, 8–18, 20–4, 26–33, 43–68, 71–4, 81–92, 97–102, 107–8, 112–17, 125, 127–9, 131–3, 140–5, 149–50, 153, 156, 160–3, 170–81, 183–7, 190–5, 197–9, 205, 210, 216–17, 220–5, 227, 232–3, 241–4, 256. See also karst, Altamira, Chauvet, Lascaux, Pech Merle formation  5, 87, 90, 92, 97, 146 (see also speleothem) replica  43, 49–50, 52–5, 57, 62, 64, 72, 172, 182, 210, 265, 270n., 277n. of sex  92–3, 108, 153 cave art  10, 14, 45, 49, 127–8, 130, 159– 60, 167–9, 171–8, 185, 193, 195–6, 217, 219–21, 230–1, 233, 237 parietal art  13, 93, 97, 127, 130, 179, 192, 237 cave engraving  10, 23, 44, 78, 88, 93, 131, 140, 147–9, 161–3, 174, 176, 179, 187, 265 cave media  4–5, 8, 10, 13–14, 18, 21, 29, 35, 71, 89, 108, 130–2, 141, 145, 159, 168–9, 175. See also subterranean landscape media Cave of Forgotten Dreams  14, 72, 175, 177, 187. See also Herzog Caves of Mars (see NASA)  241–2, 244 cave painting  10, 12–15, 20, 23, 26, 28–9, 43–4, 46, 52, 64–5, 74, 81, 85, 88, 98–9, 104, 124, 126, 129, 131–3, 135, 137–8, 143, 147, 150, 169–5, 178–88, 191–6, 210, 216, 219–20, 228, 230  cave sculpting  25–7 Caveman Diet  14, 201–4, 218

289

cavemen  112, 119–20, 224, 252, 254. See also Cro-Magnon CAVERN (CAVE Research Network)  155 Caverne du Pont d’Arc/Chauvet (replica)  182, 210, 265, 277n. Célé River  20, 82 Centre International d’Art Parietal Montignac-Lascaux (Lascaux IV)  61–8, 277n. chamois  196, 198 charcoal  12, 23, 30, 72–4, 78–9, 81–2, 85, 125, 134, 136–8, 140, 149, 169, 175, 263 Chauvet Cave (Pont d’Arc Cave)  9, 12, 14, 20, 29, 54, 72–3, 76–7, 79–82, 85, 92, 98–101, 124, 134, 154, 161, 163, 170, 173, 175–9, 181–2, 184, 186–9, 191, 231, 262, 265  Cheddar Gorge  20, 37 Cheddar Man  20 chemical  5, 18, 24, 38, 40, 70–1, 86, 105, 124, 203, 238–40 child animism  247–53 child  1–2, 7, 15, 18, 46, 100–1, 104–5, 129, 164, 176, 193, 224, 239, 246–57, 264–5, 267 Chomsky, Noam  253 choreography  124, 126 Christianity  207 Christy, Henry  275 Church Hole Cave (Creswell Crags)  265 cinematographic method  14, 176–80, 182, 185–6, 189–91, 193, 196. See also Bergson citification  201–3 Clarke, Arthur C.  218 climate change  20, 62, 188, 202 climbing  9, 88, 164, 180, 223, 256, 263–4 Clottes, Jean  12, 89–90, 93, 95–8, 103, 127, 129–30, 138, 141, 148, 157, 181, 219, 237, 254 Côa Valley (Portugal)  161–6, 265 Cohen, Jeffery Jerome  4, 123 color  11–13, 19, 21, 23, 28–9, 46–8, 64, 87, 90, 95, 97, 99, 104, 124, 130–8, 141, 169, 175, 183, 191, 260

290 Index commodity  7, 11, 34, 38, 40–1, 44, 51, 53–5, 65, 249, 255 commoditization  53–4, 60, 172 communication  1–4, 6, 13, 21–3, 25–6, 30, 36, 39, 58, 60, 88, 118–28, 131, 141, 145, 147–51, 158–63, 168–9, 174, 178, 192–3, 203–7, 213–14, 216–20, 224, 227, 229–31, 239, 241, 250, 252–3, 255 technology  120–4, 224 and transmission  3–4, 21, 23, 26, 36, 60, 122, 128, 145, 147–8, 150, 158–9, 163, 168, 178, 204–5, 211 via satellite  3, 30, 158, 230 complexity  6, 12, 129–30, 157, 181, 219 compost  32, 109 concrete language  89, 130, 149 consciousness  7, 9, 26, 35, 37, 41, 104–5, 117, 127, 147, 199, 205, 208–9, 223, 238, 240–1 altered states of consciousness (ASC)  127, 238 false consciousness  41 conservation  46, 52, 54, 63, 132 consumption  6–7, 19, 30, 35–6, 39, 51–3, 59–61, 156, 159–60, 163, 171–2, 174–5, 181–2, 187, 211, 224–6 consumerism  7 mass consumption  30, 53, 60–1, 224, 256 media consumption  35–7, 39, 60, 156, 160, 171–2, 256 cosmology  24, 54, 209, 235–6, 240 Crary, Jonathan  145, 155 creativity  59, 82, 91–2, 95, 132, 173, 209 Creswell Crags  148, 277 Cro-Magnon  254 culture  5–6, 11, 19, 21, 30, 36, 39, 49–50, 56–60, 63, 66, 69, 92–6, 104, 126, 129–30, 143–4, 147–8, 150, 156, 159–60, 167, 170–2, 174, 201, 203, 208–10, 215, 220, 225, 229–30, 235–8, 243–4, 246, 249, 252, 267. See also Aurignacian Magdalenian, Solutrean, Azilian cultures indigenous  22, 27–30, 50, 92, 96, 185, 253–6

industrial  53, 55, 59, 188, 201–5, 208–9 and nature  5–6, 50, 60, 69; global  57–8, 209–10 primitive  150, 204, 207–8, 218–20 space age  232–3, 239, 241 Upper Paleolithic  8–9, 12, 18, 20–2, 24, 28–9, 44–5, 53–4, 72, 89, 92–6, 104, 130, 148–9, 171, 173, 176, 210, 213, 230 Western  96, 171, 228, 235, 237, 254 cultural imaginary  26, 51, 56–7, 89, 191–2 memory  18, 20, 24, 26, 29, 51, 57, 63–5, 67–8, 70, 88, 147, 162, 169 transmission  3, 8, 51, 117, 131, 162–5, 220–1, 225, 232–3 culture industry  49, 57–8, 172, 176, 203 cupules  66, 176, 270 cybernetics  92, 160, 206–7, 218. See also paleocybernetics, paleocyber cyber-paganism  208 cyber-Platonism  155, 160 cyberworld  155 Dali, Salvador  78 dance  4, 9, 30, 61, 90–1, 149, 151, 170, 187, 229 Daniel (Book of)  117–21, 126, 229 darkness  23, 31, 43, 61, 65, 72, 86, 88, 90, 101, 125, 133, 136–7, 146, 171, 199, 223, 233, 261–4 Dauvois, Michel  271 Day, Wilfred E.  191 death  60, 62–3, 65–7, 70–1, 92, 105, 108, 116–17, 139, 153, 157, 166, 187, 264–7. See also life, extinction decomposition  32, 71, 105, 108, 264 deer  29, 44, 133, 146, 161, 167, 173, 187, 191, 196, 224–5 deformation (graphic technique)  77–9, 82, 153 Delanda, Manuel  7, 34–36, 221 Deleuze, Gilles  4, 7, 14, 34–6, 70–1, 95, 103, 185–6, 202, 215–19, 221–2, 224, 238–9, 252–6 Deleuzoguattarian  95, 215–18, 221, 224, 252, 254

Index design  14, 30, 49–50, 52, 55–7, 62, 64, 118, 156, 159, 161, 227, 270 architectural  50, 64, 270 art  64 digital  30, 53, 161, 270 immersive  55, 156, 270 lighting  49 of space  50, 55–7, 62, 270n. desire  28, 63, 90, 101, 115–17, 212, 256 dialectical materialism. See Marxism Diana (Roman goddess)  116 diet  14, 36, 201–4, 209, 218 digital  13, 36–7, 53, 63–7, 81, 143–4, 148, 154, 156–7, 159, 161, 210, 233 age  144, 148, 161 arts  64, 143, 233 culture  36, 156 image  53, 81, 157–8, 210 media  13, 37, 63, 65, 148, 155–6 performance  13, 143, 154–5, 161 scanning  53, 210 dog  7, 45–6, 48–50, 65, 115–17, 125 Dordogne  22–3, 43, 45, 49, 53, 55, 57, 93, 100, 153 Dover (White Cliffs)  19 drawing  1–3, 11, 13–15, 23, 26, 28–9, 48–9, 72–80, 82–5, 91–2, 94, 99, 104–5, 124, 134–5, 137, 149, 154, 159, 163, 180, 190–1, 198, 207, 245, 247, 263 on cave walls  23, 26, 28–9, 74, 85, 99, 124, 135, 137, 175–6, 180, 191 duration  36, 44, 61, 144, 170, 177–9, 185, 190 DreamTime II exhibition  138, 140, 210, 273. See also Mas d’Azil Earth (planet)  17–18, 31, 35–7, 63, 67, 69–71, 87–8, 105–6, 123, 131, 227–32, 234–41, 243–4, 266–7, 271 earth (substance)  31–2, 37, 45, 69–71, 87, 106, 124, 152, 153, 230, 239, 243, 262, 271. See also soil, humus, compost earth (element)  4, 31, 69, 123–4 earth alienation  148, 239 earth mediation  71, 86, 205 earth relativism  234–9

291

earthling  12, 14, 61–2, 69–71, 82, 106, 121, 129, 173–4, 178, 205–7, 212–14, 217, 224, 230, 232, 238–9, 243–4, 256, 266–7, 271 earthly  3, 34, 57, 69, 95, 106–9, 120, 140, 230, 234, 238–9, 244, 246 Earthquake. See seism echo  11, 50, 88, 90, 92, 130, 146, 171, 189, 243, 257, 263, 271n. See also resonance eco-critical  161, 202, 237 eco-culture  25 eco-phenomenology  91, 107 eco-self  211 eco-warrior  202 ecology  14, 25, 29–30, 32, 52, 62, 90–1, 148, 201–3, 206, 208, 211, 213–14, 223, 241, 253–4 cave  52, 62, 146 erotic  90–1, 255 media  5, 29, 126, 145, 213, 255 ecological  3, 6, 26, 28–9, 37, 57, 62, 97–8, 106, 126, 128, 148, 158–9, 203, 205, 207, 211–12, 225, 249, 253–5 economic  7, 11, 25, 28, 34, 38, 41, 44, 52, 54, 57, 65, 103, 152, 220, 254 economistic  44 economy  39–40, 54, 57 ecosophy  210–12 ecosystem  62, 64 El Castillo Cave  20, 85, 265 electricity  30, 32, 59, 158 electronic  139, 155, 158, 160, 167; age  139; media  160, 167 elemental  4–5, 32–3, 52, 57, 87, 91, 107, 119, 123–4, 198–9, 205, 256. See also fire, earth, water, air media  5, 33, 52, 57, 87, 198–9, 256 elements  4–5, 21, 64, 91, 105, 122–3, 174, 198 Eliade, Mircea  147 Empedocles  91–2 energy  1–3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 20, 23, 26, 29–30, 32, 40, 56, 58–60, 69, 71–3, 80, 86– 99, 100, 104, 115, 117, 125–6, 130–1, 137–8, 141, 148, 153, 158, 166, 176, 180, 185–7, 190, 216, 222, 250, 255–6. See also matter-energy

292 Index kinetic  80, 87, 97, 100, 114, 158, 180, 264 mental  87, 97, 115 physical  12, 29–30, 87, 97, 115, 158, 238 sexual  87, 90, 97, 153 spiritual  93, 95, 131 thermal  87, 97, 158 engraving  10, 23, 78, 88, 93, 127, 131, 140, 148–9, 153, 161–3, 174, 176, 179, 187, 265 environment  12, 21, 25, 30, 49, 52, 62–3, 89, 97, 105, 122–3, 130, 144, 147, 156–7, 164, 174, 187, 202, 205, 209, 211, 213, 225, 227, 230, 234–5, 238–9, 241–3, 252–3, 270n. environmental  30, 49, 52, 62–3, 89, 105, 130, 202, 225, 230, 243, 253, 270n. condition  62, 89, 105, 130, 243 crisis, 202, 230, 243, 253 damage  30, 52, 62–3, 225, 230, 253, 270n. Epipaleolithic  231 Eshleman, Clayton  92, 148, 153 Eskimo  13, 159–60, 180 ethics  8, 14, 26, 35–7, 65, 88, 93, 95–6, 103, 118, 126, 159, 202, 204, 219, 223, 225, 255–6 ethno-techno  208 ethnographic  9, 235–7, 248 ethnoscape  58–9 ethological  26, 28 exoplanetary  249 expanded  4, 89, 92, 106, 108, 121, 168, 175, 208, 232, 254 body (landscape)  89, 92, 106, 108, 121 media  4, 89, 175 Expanded Cinema  208. See also Youngblood experience  3, 13, 27–31, 37, 49–52, 55–8, 61–5, 71, 77, 90, 96, 106–7, 128, 130–1, 144, 146–8, 150–1, 155, 157, 159–66, 171, 177, 179, 181–3, 187, 205, 220, 235–6, 259, 265, 270n. filmic  175, 181–3 immersive  151–66, 179, 270n. subterranean  31, 147, 152, 163, 175, 177

experiential  24, 29, 184 experimental  9, 138, 196, 210, 222–3, 230, 237. See also experimental media, paleo-experimentalism extinction  62, 65, 67, 189, 211, 243 extraterrestrial  14–15, 228–32, 234, 238–2, 244, 246, 249. See also alien life  228–33, 235, 239–40 (see also extremophiles) relativism  235–6 extremophiles  235 Fabre, Jan  273 fatal leap  11, 37–8, 53, 57, 157, 267. See also Marx fetishism  41, 44, 93, 101, 255 fire  4, 12, 21, 27, 31, 87, 112, 118, 123–4, 206, 255. See also elements First Nations  253 flesh  96, 105–8 Florensky, Pavel  103–4 fluidity  12, 98, 129–30, 181 fluting  23, 127, 176 Font de Gaume Cave  265 force  3, 7, 10, 11–12, 18, 31, 36, 38, 41, 52, 61, 87, 90–2, 94, 108, 117, 119, 123–4, 139, 152, 165–6, 188, 217, 223, 238, 250, 266 animic  250 of attraction  91–2 bodily  90,152, 165–6 brute  7, 12, 125, 223, 250 geophysical  5, 18, 124 tectonic  18, 87 Frazer, James George  275 Freud, Sigmund  115–17, 125, 215 Frieze of Black Horses (Lascaux)  47–8 Frieze of Running Horse (Lascaux)  49 fuel  31, 40, 56, 58–61, 63, 91 Fuller, Buckminster  231–2 fungus  63, 240 future primitivism  204, 208, 220 Gaiman, Neil  83–4 Gargas Cave  101 geography  41, 176, 213, 234 geographic  18–22, 57, 85, 176

Index geology of morals  35–6 gesture  81, 93, 97–8, 100–1, 164, 178, 194, 196 Gibraltar (Rock of)  19–20 Giedion, Siegfried  13, 160, 172, 275 glaciation  20, 29, 160, 241, 243 gorge  19–20, 37, 147–8, 262 grace  32, 162–3, 166, 206–8, 210, 225 primitive grace  206, 208 grafting  123–5, 136–7 graphic  1–3, 9, 14, 19–20, 23, 28, 47–8, 64, 74, 79, 81, 87, 119–20, 123–6, 135–7, 144, 169–71, 176–8, 181–3, 185, 187–8, 192–7, 217, 230–3. See also drawing, engraving, fluting, grafting, painting arts  124 image  28, 47, 64, 124–6, 135–7, 171, 176, 178, 182, 187–8, 194 media  89, 132, 138, 194, 217, 231 technique  74, 79, 126, 169–70, 176, 181, 194, 197 grass  21, 76, 164, 206 grassland  206 grotesque  27, 71, 77, 79, 86, 92, 108, 149–53, 156, 161, 165–6, 190, 207, 214–15, 217. See also material bodily grotesque art  92 body  86, 92, 155, 165, 214 immersion  84, 92, 108, 149–53, 156, 161, 214, 217 realism  152 Grotowski, Jerzy  149 Grotte du Sorcier  93 grouping (graphic technique)  75, 162 Guattari, Félix  4, 7–8, 14, 34, 70–1, 95, 103, 202, 210–19, 221–2, 224, 238–9, 252–3, 255–6. See also Deleuzoguattarian Gwangmyeong Cave  55, 58 Hall of Polychromes (Altamira)  128, 133–5, 177, 191 Hall of the Bulls (Lascaux)  27, 46–8, 52, 56, 82, 125

293

hand  29, 81, 89, 98–104, 106, 111, 114, 117, 131, 135, 137, 140, 164, 170, 190, 245, 262 print  98–9, 101, 111, 114, 117, 170–1, 245 stencil  101–2, 140 haptics  28, 134–8 Haraway, Donna  5 Harman, Graham  7 Harvey, David  41 Heidegger, Martin  120 hematite  132, 137–8. See also ochre Herzog, Werner  14, 72, 175–9, 181–2, 187–9, 193, 197 Herzogenrath, Bernd  4 heteroglossia  189 Hill, Garry  13, 138–41 history  8, 15, 34, 46, 50, 54, 83, 87–8, 105, 120–2, 130, 143, 145, 159, 168–9, 171, 179, 191, 194, 215, 217, 230, 240, 244–5, 252, 267. See also neoprehistory, posthistory, prehistory, transhistory of art  88, 155, 171, 195, 233 human  34, 87 of media  2, 44, 122, 159, 168–9, 191, 216 natural  34 of theatre  150 homo heidelbergensis  242 horse  23, 29, 46–9, 75, 79, 130, 133, 146, 173, 195–6, 246, 263–5 Hughes, Ted  43 Huhtamo, Erkki  168–9 human  2–8, 11–12, 14–15, 19–20, 23–5, 28, 30, 32–41, 43, 45, 48–9, 52, 56–7, 60–1, 63, 66–71, 73, 78, 82, 84, 86, 88–9, 91–2, 94–6, 105–6, 112–25, 128–9, 131–2, 137, 140, 144, 148, 151, 153, 156, 158, 165, 170, 172–4, 185, 187, 196, 201, 203, 205–7, 209, 211–19, 224, 227–44, 246, 248–50, 252–4, 256, 261, 263. See also anti-human, prehuman, posthuman, posthumous human, proto-human humanism  70, 174, 240

294 Index humus  12, 67, 69, 70–3, 106, 108, 132, 153, 165, 243, 267, 271n. See also soil, earth, compost hunter-gatherer  20, 25, 32, 58, 122, 131, 165, 168, 173–4, 178, 196–8, 201, 217, 219–20, 232–3, 235. See also nomad hunting  26, 28, 31, 115, 117 images  31, 136, 187 Husserl, Edmund  182, 184–5 hyena  29 hyperscape  56–9 Ice Age  10, 19–21, 25–6, 28–31, 46, 49, 51, 60, 65, 89, 129, 131, 140, 147, 150–1, 201, 207, 212–13, 232, 241 icon  81 iconography  196, 273, 283 iconoclasm  202–3, 220 idealism  7 ideoscape  58 image  2–4, 14, 23–4, 27–9, 31, 48, 50, 44–6, 64, 68, 69, 76, 82–6, 92, 94, 96, 101, 119, 127, 133–5, 148, 149, 152–3, 162, 167, 171–5, 177, 180–9, 191–2, 197, 229, 231–2, 245–6, 251, 255 fantasy  24 graphic  47, 64, 124–6, 137, 178, 194–5 image-hunting  31, 122, 136, 187 and imagination  1–3, 28, 44–5, 138, 246–7, 251 making  48, 72–9, 97, 100, 104, 128–9, 132, 134–5, 137, 141, 168, 171, 176, 180–1, 197, 220–1, 225 mental  84, 182–3 moving  124, 146, 169, 178, 181–8, 191, 193, 196 recorded  145 reproduction  50–1, 134, 229 video  139–1 imagery  28, 47, 81, 83, 85, 89–90, 93–4, 100, 124, 127, 135, 171, 173, 177, 195, 233, 251, 287 animal  28, 47 cave  28, 47, 81, 83, 89–90, 95, 100, 124, 127, 171, 195 child  100, 251

landesque  173 plant  94 sexual  85, 90, 93 imagination  1–3, 11, 15, 20–1, 24, 26–7, 29–31, 44, 48, 51, 64, 67, 70, 76, 78, 80, 82, 85–9, 92, 97, 104, 124–5, 135–138, 145–6, 148, 159, 163, 169, 171, 173, 175, 178, 183, 194–7, 212, 216–17, 244, 246, 247, 251, 253, 259 haptic  135, 137 and image  1–3, 28, 44–5, 138, 246–7, 251 material  2, 29, 31, 48, 78, 82, 85, 97, 137, 148, 159, 173, 178, 267 immanence  7, 69, 88, 95, 103, 148, 152–3, 159, 254, 261, 265–6 immersion  2–3, 9, 13–14, 27, 47, 50, 84, 88, 90, 92, 108, 122, 128, 143–8, 149–66, 170, 179, 205, 207, 214, 217, 224, 237, 270 grotesque  84, 108, 149, 152, 155–6, 161, 165–6, 217, 253 landesque  2, 50, 90, 92, 148, 150–1, 156, 158, 160–4, 170, 179, 224, 237 mental  145–6 technological  13, 145, 155–9, 161, 166, 224 immersive experience  144, 148, 151, 157, 160, 162–4, 270 theatre  149–50, 154–5 immersive Virtual Reality (iVR)  155–8 impulse  92, 178, 197, 212, 232 incompleteness (graphic technique)  47, 49, 79, 82–3, 126, 177, 183, 195 indigeneity  6, 254, 256 indigenous  6, 12, 18–19, 22, 27–30, 50, 92, 96–7, 115, 129–30, 147, 185–6, 219, 223, 236, 242, 249, 253–5 Europeans  6, 12, 18–19, 22, 27–30, 50, 92, 96–97, 129–30, 147, 185, 236, 255 movements  255–6 industrialized  5, 8, 11, 33–5, 37–8, 40, 49–50, 53, 55, 58–60, 104, 144, 155, 157, 168, 188, 201–5, 208–9, 211–12, 214, 250, 255

Index materials  8, 11, 33–4, 38, 40, 49, 104, 123, 157 industry  5, 58–9, 116, 155, 201–3, 214, 221–2, 255 academia  59, 116, 155, 214, 221–2 food  201–3 industrialization  33, 37, 168, 188, 201–3, 205, 207–8 media  5, 168, 205, 214, 255 mining  58–9 tourism  50 information  3, 21–2, 25, 36–7, 51, 58, 60, 159, 162, 206, 228, 264 Ingold, Tim  248–50, 252, 254, 279 inhuman  70, 123, 153, 216, 224, 232, 238, 267 inhumation. See burial inorganic  17, 19, 28, 71, 92, 107, 117, 267 installation art  138–40, 174, 273 interaction  122, 134, 138, 179, 197, 239, 255 interactive technologies, 56 interconnection  12, 22, 129, 158, 181, 219 Interstellar cave painting  14–15, 227–32, 244, 249. See also Sagan  intersubjective  1, 96, 122 intuition  32, 125, 177, 194, 198–9, 212 Jameson, Frederic  21, 269 jazz music  90–1 jism  88–91, 94–6, 153, 189, 276 Jupiter (planet)  227 juxtaposition (graphic technique)  94, 176 karst  11, 13, 18, 22, 26, 43, 49, 62–5, 115, 146, 163, 168, 172, 232, 262. See also, cave, landscape, limestone kinesthetic  2, 11, 27, 37, 40, 73, 125, 136, 157, 171, 184, 264, 274 Kittler, Friedrich  4 Kopytoff, Igor  53, 55, 65, 270 Kuryluk, Ewa  92, 153, 272 L’Abri Cap Blanc (Dordogne)  23, 265 La Barre, Weston  149 Lacan, Jacques  111, 115–17, 125, 139 lamps  49, 148, 193, 197–8

295

land  1–6, 20, 22, 25–6, 31, 43, 51–4, 67, 87–90, 97–8, 106, 119, 126, 153, 158, 162–6, 178, 201, 214, 230, 251, 253, 255–6. See also landscape, landmark, grassland, moorland, wasteland, woodland as flesh  96, 105–6, 108 as or in relation to body  1–2, 6, 13, 18, 26, 33, 45, 57, 60, 71, 88–92, 98, 126, 151, 164–6, 179, 206, 225, 251, 253, 255–6 as sacred  53–4, 65 as slush (decomposing matter)  106, 108–9 and transmission  2–4, 6, 8, 18, 20–1, 23, 25–6, 29–30, 51–2, 57, 60–1, 67, 89, 96–7, 151, 158–66, 168, 175, 205, 225, 251, 253, 255–6 landesque  2, 22, 30, 50, 60, 64–5, 90, 92, 96, 144–5, 148, 150–1, 153, 156–66, 170, 173–4, 179, 205, 224, 237 imagination  64, 163 immersion  2, 50, 90, 92, 150–1, 156, 158, 160–4, 170, 179, 224, 237 media  30, 50, 156, 158, 174 memory  64–5, 145, 162 landmark  20, 22 landscape  2–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 19–26, 28–30, 32–3, 35, 37, 45, 48–9, 52, 56–61, 71, 86, 88–90, 92, 97, 106–8, 127–8, 131, 136, 146, 148, 151, 155, 158–62, 164–5, 168–9, 173–7, 179–81, 183, 197, 205–6, 210, 225, 233, 236, 256, 266, 270n. landscape architecture  210, 270n. landscape design  210, 270n. language  1, 69, 89, 95, 101, 108, 112–13, 115, 119, 126, 129–30, 138, 140, 144, 149, 152, 158–60, 163, 186, 189, 197, 229, 235, 238, 249–1, 253, 255–6. See also alphabeticism, literate, logos, mathematical reasoning, word, writing concrete  89, 130, 149 and mediation  1, 101, 112, 158, 160, 163, 253, 256 metaphorical  251

296 Index meta-verbal  149 and power  113, 250 and rationality  108, 112, 186, 250 sign  126 symbolic  115, 144, 250 and technology  140, 158, 238, 249–50, 255 and thought  129, 197, 251 verbal  89, 95, 101, 129–30, 251, 255 visual  138 written  101, 113, 119, 251, 255 Lartet, Édouard  275 Las Monedas Cave (El Castillo)  265 Lascaux Cave  9, 11, 24, 27, 29, 43–67, 69, 82, 122, 124–6, 128, 137–8, 150, 154, 161, 163, 167–8, 173, 182, 191, 195, 199, 210, 219–20, 265, 269–70n., 275n. See also Axial Gallery, Beast of Lascaux, Bataille, Frieze of Black Horses, Frieze of Running Horses, Hall of Bulls Lascaux II (replica)  11, 50–6, 210, 265, 270n. Lascaux III (exhibition)  11, 55–61, 210, 265, 270n. Lascaux IV (interpretation centre)  11, 62–5, 210, 265, 270n. Lascaux VR  11, 154 Lazaret Cave  242–3 Le Baume de Ronze Cave  265 Le Cuzoul des Brasconnies Cave  265 Le Regourdou (burial site)  66–8 Leroi-Gourhan, André  14, 75, 78, 81–5, 132–3, 178, 194–6, 269–70n. Les Combarelles Cave  265 Lewis-Williams, David  127–8, 171, 233, 237, 270n. life  3, 6–9, 11, 14–15, 17–19, 24–31, 34–8, 40–1, 43–5, 47–8, 51–6, 59–65, 67–71, 75–6, 80–2, 85–6, 89, 92, 95, 103–5, 107–8, 112–16, 123–5, 129–32, 137–8, 147–8, 150, 153, 155, 157, 160, 164–7, 172–8, 182–4, 186, 190, 192–5, 197, 199, 201–4, 207–8, 210–11, 214, 216, 218–20, 222–5, 229–35, 237, 239–44, 246, 249–50, 252, 255–6, 259, 261, 267. See also death, paleo life, vital, vitalism, wildlife

animal  18–19, 28–9, 40, 45, 48, 76, 125, 137–8, 178, 197, 207, 243, 250, 256, 267 bacterial  124, 239 of commodities  11, 34, 38, 41, 44, 53–5, 249, 255 earthling  14, 61–2, 69–71, 82, 129, 173–4, 178, 207, 214, 224, 230, 232, 239, 243–4, 256, 266–7 experience  3, 27–31, 37, 51–2, 55, 62, 107, 131, 150, 177, 235, 265 extraterrestrial  15, 229–32, 234–5, 239–42 human  24, 30, 36, 38, 40–1, 61, 63, 67, 71, 81–2, 85–6, 89, 105, 108, 112–13, 131–2, 150, 173, 201, 203, 207, 211, 219, 224, 230–2 industrial  34–5, 38, 40, 53, 55, 59, 201–4, 211, 214, 250 inorganic  17–19, 71, 92, 107, 267 material  7–8, 11, 14–15, 38, 41, 56, 65, 81, 216 plant  18, 40, 267 political  9, 113–14 organic  17–19, 24, 34, 64, 71, 82, 92, 105, 107, 195, 197, 234 social  9, 41, 113, 174, 211, 214, 220, 222–3, 256, 270n. somatic and bodily  61, 132, 152, 239 life-cycle  11, 15, 18–19, 33, 38, 44, 53–4, 63, 201 life-force  18, 31, 41, 52, 266 life-practice (life-praxis)  8–9, 14, 35, 173, 203, 210, 214, 220, 222 lifestyle  25–6, 50, 104, 201–3, 210, 266 lifeworld  25, 29, 114, 219, 250 light  27, 31, 46, 49, 58, 96, 133, 136, 144– 6, 155, 195, 197–9, 233, 237, 261–4; artificial  197. See also darkness, fire, electricity, twilight zone light-exposure (photography)  124 lightning  31–2, 46 limestone  5, 8, 10–13, 17, 18–41, 44, 46–8, 59, 63–4, 67–70, 78, 83, 85, 87, 89, 92–3, 97, 99, 101, 117, 122–5, 129–30, 134–8, 140–1, 143, 153, 169, 173, 182, 186, 191, 194, 197, 216, 222, 233, 262, 264, 267, 269–70n., 285n.

Index lion  29, 67, 72–9, 85, 173, 261. See also Panel of the Felines Little Prince (Saint-Exupéry)  1–2, 183, 246, 278n. locomotion  49 logos  112, 186 Lorblanchet, Michel  127 Lot Valley  82 Luddites  209 machine  2, 36, 120, 158, 217 McKibben, Bill  56 McLuhan, Marshall  13, 145–6, 156, 159–60, 216, 273–4n. Magdalenian  27, 93, 134, 147, 269. See also culture magic  45, 47, 137, 162–4, 247, 253, 275. See also sympathetic, animism, child Magura Cave  231 Mallory, J. P.  271 mammoth. See woolly mammoth Mars (planet)  17, 126, 128, 234, 241–4, 252, 254 Marshack, Alexander  94 Marx, Karl  7–8, 11, 38, 40–1, 53, 215. See also dialectical materialism Marxism  7–8, 11, 215 Mas d’Azil Cave  13, 138–4, 153, 210, 265, 273 masks  140–1, 153–4. See also Altamira and Mas d’Azil mass consumption  30, 51–2, 59, 61, 159, 211, 224–5, 256 media  159–60, 205, 211, 214, 224–5, 256 tourism  50–2, 64 Massat Cave  32, 265 material  2–8, 11–13, 15, 21, 24, 28–9, 32, 39, 48, 56, 65, 67, 72, 80, 85, 97–8, 101, 105–6, 112–13, 117, 121, 123–4, 132, 138–41, 144, 155–9, 165–6, 181–4, 189–90, 213–15, 239–42, 249–51 body  12–13, 32, 69–70, 91, 106, 122, 152, 155, 207, 214, 238 culture  11, 22, 45, 145, 170, 204, 215, 254, 265–7 history  44; life  18, 38, 40–1, 62, 65, 81, 152, 214, 216, 239

297

imagination  15, 21, 29, 31, 48, 78, 124, 137, 148, 169, 173, 267 memory  15, 21, 29, 31, 267 substance  11 things  40–1, 93, 97, 114, 137, 216 thinking  24, 29, 81, 85, 96, 103–4, 107–8, 116–17, 181, 185–6, 219, 224, 246, 249, 251 transmission  161, 163, 165 wealth  220 world  56, 59, 95, 108, 115, 130, 147, 157, 160, 165, 181, 223 material bodily grotesque  13, 152, 155. See also Bakhtin materialism  6–8, 10, 14, 33, 35–6, 39, 41, 70, 106–7, 212, 215, 219, 221–2. See also neomaterialism brute  6–8, 12, 15, 32–3, 35–7, 39, 103–4, 106–8, 155, 163, 221–2, 224, 240, 249 dialectical  6 new  10, 15, 34, 36, 97, 128, 212, 215, 219, 221–2, 224, 240, 255, 269, 282n. vital  7–8, 36, 70, 212, 215, 221–2 materiality  3–4, 11, 29, 38, 63, 67, 71, 97, 106, 123, 139–40, 155, 158, 179, 185, 194, 206, 214, 221–3, 240, 250, 255 materials  4, 12, 17, 19, 23–4, 26, 33–5, 37–8, 45, 93–5, 97–8, 104, 162, 174–5, 216–17 brute  7–8, 11, 31, 81, 95, 103–4 building  33 industrial  11, 33–4, 38 painting  45 porous  24 raw  33–8 mathematical reasoning  113 matter  1–10, 18, 24, 29, 32, 34–6, 41, 63, 69, 87–91, 94–8, 105, 108, 112, 115, 117, 122–5, 137–40, 157, 183–5, 215–17, 222, 238–9, 249–50 chemical  18 inorganic  17–18, 107, 117 living 107, 115, 155 organic  17–18, 32, 105, 117 raw  24, 157–8, 187, 206, 250 matter-energy  93, 95, 97, 115, 216 matter-media  71, 168, 175, 232

298 Index matter-movement  216, 232 matter-spirit  95 matter-transmission  1–3, 29, 88, 93, 126, 158–9, 206, 216, 238, 250, 256 mattering  11, 17–18, 33, 59, 95, 108, 216–17 media  1–6, 8–15, 18, 21, 23–5, 29–31, 35–7, 39, 41, 43–4, 51, 57, 60, 62–3, 65, 74, 82, 85, 88–9, 95–7, 100, 117– 23, 126, 130–1, 138–41, 145, 147–9, 151, 154–61, 167–9, 172–5, 177–9, 181–83, 192, 197, 205, 211, 214–16, 219–21, 224–5, 229–30, 232, 241, 249–50, 253, 255–6, 267 archaeology  10, 13, 96, 145, 168–9 artifacts  3–4, 10, 39, 54, 168, 216, 225, 229, 249, 255 communication  1–4, 6, 13, 21, 23, 30, 36, 39, 60, 88, 118–23, 131, 141, 145, 148, 151, 156, 158–60, 168, 192, 205, 211, 214, 216, 219–20, 224, 229, 241, 250, 253, 255 culture  5–6, 11, 21, 30, 36, 39, 58, 148, 156, 159–60, 167, 225 digital forms of  13, 36, 37, 53, 63–5, 143, 148, 154, 156–9, 161, 210 ecology  5, 29, 126, 213, 255 electronic forms of  139, 155, 158, 160, 167 energy  1–3, 6, 12, 29–30, 60, 86, 88, 97, 125, 130–1, 138, 153, 158, 216 experimental forms of  138, 230 geology  4, 215–16 history  2, 44, 122, 145, 155, 170, 191 orthodoxy  118, 120–1, 123, 158 technology  1, 3–4, 10, 12, 21, 23, 29, 60, 63, 65, 68, 88, 119, 121–3, 130, 141, 148, 154–61, 167, 169, 178–82, 184–5, 190–3, 198–9, 203, 205, 210, 224, 238, 241, 249–50, 255, 256, 266 transmission  4–6, 8, 23, 29–30, 35, 41, 57, 60–1, 88, 95–6, 100, 130, 145, 150, 158, 168, 184, 204–5, 216, 238, 253, 255–6 mediacy  6, 11, 14, 18, 21, 37, 39, 60, 66, 68, 120, 132, 170, 173, 175, 182, 205, 206, 237, 267

medianature  5, 159, 205, 285 mediascape  3, 25, 58–60, 148, 159 mediation  1–4, 6, 8, 11–12, 21, 25, 30–1, 33, 39, 48, 50, 52, 56, 60–1, 66, 71, 82, 86, 89, 97–8, 121, 123, 129, 132, 141, 145, 147–8, 153, 156, 158–60, 166, 168–9, 181, 198, 203–5, 213, 216–17, 224, 232, 237–8, 246, 255, 266 Méliès, Georges  192 memorialization  19, 67, 160, 163, 221 memory  1–4, 9, 11, 15, 18–20, 24, 26, 29–1, 48, 51, 57, 63–8, 70, 80, 88, 97, 125, 131, 145, 147, 159, 162, 169, 171, 183–4, 186, 189, 195, 197–8, 213, 245–6, 253, 260, 265–7  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  106–7, 219 Meschiari, Matteo  212–14 metaphysics  7, 120, 207 Michigan Limestones  33, 272 migration  21, 25–6, 231, 243, 249 mineral  4, 13, 17, 19, 34–5, 37, 59, 86, 88–9, 106, 122, 132, 137, 238, 264 mobile art  93 mobility  22, 24–6, 50, 56–7, 180, 190, 212 modern  10, 27, 30, 36, 41, 43, 50–1, 56, 58–62, 65, 80, 83–4, 101–3, 118, 127–8, 131, 141, 143, 150, 152, 154–5, 159, 168, 171–5, 178, 192, 196–7, 202, 204, 209, 211–13, 218–21, 224, 228, 230–2, 236–7, 242, 248–9, 254, 262 modernity  59–62, 103, 150, 154, 202, 218–19, 220, 270 money  6–7, 11, 38–9, 40–1, 52–3, 56–8, 60, 162, 220, 260 monetization  38–9, 40, 52–3 Monte El Castillo (Spain)  20, 85, 265 Montelle, Yann-Pierre  150–1 moonmilk  146 moorland  20–1, 29, 106 morals (geology of)  34–5, 215, 269 morphogenesis  74, 76, 178 morphological  26–7, 133–4, 146, 173 Morton, Timothy  241 motion  14, 25–6, 28, 30, 37, 40, 46, 58, 73–4, 79–81, 88, 123, 167, 169–70,

Index 175, 177–9, 181, 183–4, 190–7, 201, 233, 261. See also locomotion, movement, kinetic audible  37 bodily  88 animal  25–6, 28, 30, 40, 79, 126, 128, 167–8, 173, 179, 197 blur  79–80, 176, 192 picture  2, 183, 187, 191 of rock  31, 48, 74, 87 recomposition of  177, 190, 192, 194 representation of  169–70, 177–8, 194–6 motion blur (graphic technique)  79–80, 169, 176, 181, 194 mountains  18, 21, 83, 87, 164–5, 182, 205, 260–1 movement  11–12, 24–9, 36–7, 47–9, 57–8, 73–4, 80–2, 87, 89, 97, 100–1, 104, 111, 117, 124–6, 130, 133, 141, 169–70, 171, 175–86, 190, 192–200, 216, 218, 230, 232, 234, 238, 264 of limestone walls  12, 27–9, 47–9, 73–4, 80–1, 101, 125, 176, 178, 180 movement (social)  201–5, 209–10, 218, 254 multinaturalism  14–15, 29, 56, 57, 59, 61, 163, 174, 206, 235–7, 239–40 multiperspectivism  15, 84, 173–4, 178, 180–1, 214, 236 and multi-directionalism  145, 177 multiplicity  29, 189, 235, 252 multimodal  47, 150, 157 multisensory  145, 150, 171 Murmurs of Earth  229, 261. See also Sagan Museo de Altamira  13, 132, 277n. Museo de la Evolución Humana (Burgos)  277n. music  6, 90–1, 134–5, 137, 229. See also sound, jazz mythology  31, 149 Naica mine  234 NASA  14, 227–30, 232, 234, 241–4, 252, 278n., 282n. Native American  159

299

natural  4–8, 11–15, 23, 26–7, 29–5, 37, 38–9, 41, 44, 47, 50, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 66, 74, 78, 89, 94–5, 98, 101, 104, 106, 119, 121–2, 124, 129, 133–4, 136, 140, 143–6, 156, 158, 161–3, 168, 176–7, 191, 197, 201, 205–6, 208, 223, 235, 236–7, 239–40, 242, 250, 256 naturalization  30, 250 nature  3–6, 15, 19–22, 30–1, 34, 38, 40–1, 50, 57, 59–61, 68–70, 89, 91–2, 97, 106, 112, 119–20, 123, 126, 129, 137–9, 144, 148, 152, 156–60, 163, 168, 174, 197–9, 205–6, 209, 211, 220, 223–5, 234–8, 241, 250 animal  5, 19, 21, 30–1, 34, 40, 50, 59–1, 69–70, 89, 91, 120, 126, 129, 137–8, 148, 163, 168, 197, 223–4 contested term  5, 59–60 earthling  106, 206 extreme  20, 234–5 human  5, 15, 19–20, 30, 34, 92, 224, 235 medianature  5, 159, 205, 285 raw (see nature-in-the-raw) relativism (see multinaturalism) nature-in-the-raw  4–6, 19, 21, 30–1, 41, 56–7, 59, 60–1, 68, 106, 126, 129, 138, 148, 156–7, 160, 163, 168, 174, 205–6, 209, 211, 223–5 natureculture  5, 50, 60, 97 Neanderthal Museum (Mettman)  276 Neanderthal  20, 22, 43, 66–8, 108, 123, 186, 242, 254, 276n. Neocueva de Altamira (replica)  54, 210, 265, 277 Neolithic  201, 217–19, 228, 267. See also Paleolithic neomaterialism. See new materialism neo-paleo  96, 204 neoprehistory  116, 208, 212 neo-tribalism  208, 210 network; cave  21–2, 32, 140, 143, 146 media  4, 21, 155, 203, 211 new materialism  10, 15, 34, 36, 97, 128, 212, 215, 219, 221–2, 224, 240, 255, 269, 282n.

300 Index Niaux Cave  265, 271, 275n. Nietzsche, Friedrich  34 nitrogen cycle  31–2 nitrogen  31–2, 71 nomadism  218, 220, 231, 252 nomad  21, 25–7, 30, 51, 56, 57, 60, 148, 176, 178, 181, 192, 196–7, 199, 201–2, 204, 212–13, 217–20, 244, 252, 254, 267, 281n. See also se-dentary, Deleuzoguattarian, Braidotti nonhuman  5, 7, 8, 40, 66, 70, 92, 96, 108, 122–3, 124, 129, 148, 173, 187, 196, 224, 239–40, 250, 265. See also anti-human, inhuman, human, posthuman nonrealistic  85, 127 nonrepresentational  64, 78, 152, 155 non-Western  159, 186, 209, 240, 254 object  1–4, 6–8, 26, 28, 34, 38–9, 41, 44, 47, 51, 52–3, 54, 60, 67, 93, 95–8, 101, 104, 113–15, 127–8, 158, 174–5, 180, 182, 186, 192, 196–7, 211, 216–17, 220, 225, 227, 233, 236, 246–8, 250, 254–5, 262 art  95, 220 celestial  233 digital  158, 233 media  1–4, 8, 32, 38–9, 44, 51–3, 60, 158, 175, 179, 211 ritual  97–8 objectivity  114, 180 object-oriented ontology  7–8 ochre  13, 23, 63, 98, 100, 125, 131–4, 137–8, 169–70, 175, 221. See also hematite ontology  5, 7, 8, 12, 22, 30, 34, 89, 92, 95–6, 105, 115, 129–30, 157, 185, 207, 213, 219, 222, 224, 235–6, 240, 248–4. See also paleo ontology, animic ontology, object-oriented, space-oriented organic  17–19, 24, 32, 34, 64, 71, 92, 105, 107, 117, 195, 197, 234, 264, 276n. Orwell, George  221 overlapping (graphic technique)  78–9, 82, 126, 162

painting  10, 12–15, 20, 23, 26, 28–9, 43–6, 52, 56, 63–5, 74, 81, 85, 88, 98–9, 104, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132–3, 135, 137–8, 143, 147, 150, 161–2, 167–71, 173–81, 186–8, 193–6, 216, 220–1, 228, 232, 244, 249, 265, 269. See also Sagan; on cave walls  23, 26, 28–9, 74, 85, 99, 124, 135, 137, 175–6, 180, 191 Interstellar cave painting  14–15, 227–32, 244, 249. materials  45 Paleo diet  204. See also Stone Age Diet paleo ontology  12, 22, 30, 89, 95–6, 105, 129–30, 157, 185, 219, 224, 236, 250. See also ontology as opposed to paleontology  96, 129 paleo-experimentalism  196, 210, 222, 237, 254 paleoastronaut  232 paleocontact  231–2 paleocyber  14–15, 30, 61, 95–7, 165, 204, 210, 224–5, 230–4, 240–3, 246, 255–6, 265, 267 ecology  14 ethics  14, 211, 220, 265, 276n. subjectivity  210, 211–12, 225 Paleocybernetic Age  6, 10, 14–15, 205, 209, 219, 230, 251 paleocybernetics  14, 61, 95, 146, 201, 203, 207–13, 218–20, 230, 235, 244–6, 248–9, 251–2 paleofantasy  204, 231, 286 paleolithic State  14, 170, 215–20, 252, 254. See also Deleuzoguattarian Paleolithic turn  14–15, 212–15, 273n. paleontology  96, 129 Panel of the Felines or Panel of the Lions (Chauvet)  73–5 Panel of the Hand Prints (Chauvet)  98–9 Panel of the Three Small Mammoths (Chauvet)  77–8 Panofsky, Erwin  196 Papetier Cave  265 pareidolia  126, 128 parietal art. See cave art parietalism  126–9, 196

Index parietism  12, 117, 122, 126–9, 138, 141. See also wall Parikka, Jussi  4–5 Parque de la Prehistoria de Teverga (Spain)  277n. Peak District (England)  20 Pech Merle Cave  20, 82–5, 92, 231, 265 perception  26, 28, 47, 59, 89, 146, 153, 158, 178, 182–4, 196, 242, 252, 262, 272, 274n., 280n. performance  8–10, 13, 90, 98, 143, 149–51, 153–4, 161, 174, 213, 221, 223–4, 236–7, 273n. See also theatre, dance, mime, music, ritual media performance  154 paleoperformance  150, 285n. proto-performance  13; space  58–60 Pergouset Cave  265 permeability  12, 24, 96, 98, 129–31, 141, 165, 181, 219 Peters, John Durham  4 phallus  92–5, 215 phenomenology  107, 185 philosophy  7–8, 34, 36, 103, 106–7, 112–14, 125, 128, 184, 190, 212, 217, 219, 221–2, 224, 241, 252, 254. See also Aristotelian, Plato, Deleuze, Heidegger, Husserl, Spinoza, Socrates, Marx Piaget, Jean  247–51 Pias, Claus  4 Picasso, Pablo  150, 219–20 pictographic  21 Pioneer 10 (space mission)  14, 227–30, 243, 278n. planet  15, 17, 67–8, 102, 144, 227–2, 234–5, 239–44, 249, 256. See also Earth, exoplanetary, Jupiter, Mars planetary  234, 241–3, 249, 254. See also trees, grass, plant life, rhizome, vegetal, vegetation plant  18, 20, 32, 34, 40, 59, 94, 96, 105–6, 109, 143, 187–9, 236, 238, 267 Plato  12, 112–17, 120, 141, 155, 160, 185, 190, 274n. on parable of the cave  12, 112–15, 117, 120

301

Platonism  155, 160 Pôle International de la Préhistoire (Eyzies-de-Tayac)  93, 277n. Pont d’Arc (Ardèche)  9, 20, 54, 72, 175, 182, 187, 210 porosity  24, 28–9, 31, 106, 130, 141, 165 Port Calcite (Michigan)  33 Portel Cave  262–5 post-nature  56, 235–7, 239, 241, 244 post-structuralism  34, 215 posthistory  8, 10, 145, 203, 209, 212, 219, 255 posthuman  70, 92, 219, 267 posthumanism  5, 240 posthumanities  4, 7–8, 14, 70, 212 posthumous human  240 postmodernism  56, 58–9 praxis  8–9, 14, 35, 150–1, 160, 202–3, 205, 214, 222–3, 241 pre-synthetic color  137–8 prehistory  3, 10, 23, 46, 67, 72, 93, 104, 128, 143, 145, 155–6, 160, 168–70, 173–4, 178, 183, 186, 203, 208–10, 212, 216, 231, 238, 244–6, 252, 255, 266, 275, 276n., 278n. prehistoric  3, 51, 82, 93, 131, 141, 144–5, 149, 163, 169, 174, 194, 196–7, 216, 218–19, 231, 233, 237, 246, 263, 275n. “art”  10, 64, 72, 100, 104, 133, 149, 167, 171, 173–6, 191–2, 196, 233 cave site  10, 13, 21, 32, 46, 54, 56–7, 60, 62–3, 65, 70, 85, 90, 92, 96, 107–8, 115, 127–8, 132, 137, 139–40, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 161, 167–8, 171–2, 181–2, 187, 190, 194–5, 198, 210, 244–5, 252, 254, 271n. Europe  20, 22–3, 93, 162, 193, 254 landscape  20, 210 myth  209, 240 people  20, 23, 30, 89, 99, 108, 115, 122, 126, 135–6, 148, 162, 168, 170, 172, 182, 237 prehuman  219 primitive  7, 41, 66, 70, 102–3, 115–16, 120, 150, 163, 190, 204, 206–8, 216, 219–20, 224–5, 232, 237, 247–9, 251, 253–4, 256, 260

302 Index primitivism  103, 204, 208, 220 printing (technology)  4 printing (hands)  98, 170, 176 proto-animation  13–14, 182, 190, 194, 196–7 proto-cinema  13, 141, 168, 175–7, 181, 187, 196 proto-human  218, 242 Proto-Indo-European  69, 271, 284 protension  184–5 psychedelia  209–10, 231, 233 psychoactive  233 psychoanalysis  116, 211, 215, 233 psychological  70, 128, 158, 248 psychology  116, 127, 183, 190, 247–9 psychophysical  9, 151, 233 putrefaction. See decomposition quantic. See quantum-like quantum-like  108, 173, 217, 250 quasi-linguistic  48, 197 quicklime  38 Raphael, Max  275n. Reinach, Salomon  275 reindeer  206–7 religion  41, 65, 81, 95, 105, 118–21, 123, 141, 147, 149, 222, 229–32, 238, 268 representation  2, 4, 9, 21, 47–8, 51, 64, 72, 74, 78, 83, 85, 104, 126, 150–2, 155, 157, 158, 168–9, 171, 173, 177–8, 181, 183–4, 195, 205, 220, 231, 240, 246, 267, 276n., 280n. resonance  11, 50, 86–8, 90, 144, 146, 189, 271n. See also echo, sound retention  184–6 Reznikoff, Iegor  271 Rhino. See woolly rhino rhizome  222 Rhone valley  21 ritual  9, 24, 28, 48, 54, 66, 81, 86, 92–3, 95, 97–8, 103, 129, 131–2, 147, 149– 51, 160, 195, 228, 235–6 Rivère, Florent  196, 280 Robin Hood Cave (Creswell Crags)  265 rock (mineral)  1–3, 8, 9–13, 17–20, 23–4, 26–9, 31–2, 34–40, 43, 46–8, 59, 63, 66–8, 70, 73–4, 76, 78, 82, 86–90, 93,

95–6, 98, 100, 106, 122, 124, 125–9, 132–8, 141, 146–7, 153, 161–4, 175, 177, 179, 191, 194, 197, 206–7, 215–18, 224, 230–2, 236, 242–3, 248, 256, 260, 262, 264–5, 267 cycle  11–12, 18–19, 32, 36, 38, 63 shelter  20, 43, 68, 93, 147, 161, 164, 242–3, 256 Rouffignac Cave  100–1, 272, 285n. sacralization  54, 65 sacred  53–4, 65, 119, 132 Sagan, Carl  227, 229–30, 249 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine  1–2, 103, 246, 272, 278n. Sainte Eulalie Cave  265 Salle du Fond (Chauvet)  12, 72–3, 76, 79, 85, 170, 180 Sami (tribe)  130 Santimamiñe Cave (Basque country)  265 sapiens  20, 22, 66–7, 82, 108, 123, 172, 193, 225, 228, 231, 241–2. See also human Sauvet, Georges  196 scenography  64, 151, 270n. Schechner, Richard  149–51, 274n. screen  10, 12, 14, 56, 64, 74, 82, 122, 138–9, 141, 154–9, 167–73, 177, 179–82, 255 screen-based media  141, 155, 158, 193, 197 sculpting  11, 23, 26–7, 52–3, 94, 174 seasons  20, 25–6 sedentary  25, 41, 50–1, 56, 201–2, 217–18. See also nomad sedimentary  17–18, 27, 43 seism  86–9, 91–2, 96–7. See also earthquake sensation  2–3, 11, 21, 26, 48, 51, 73, 86, 88, 101, 106–7, 112, 115, 136–8, 152, 162–3, 166, 169, 183, 194, 198, 205, 212–13, 216–17, 267 senses  108, 112–15, 122, 125, 137, 146, 150, 155, 164, 166, 175, 181, 232, 262 Seven Sisters (England), 19 sex  91–3, 97, 108, 153, 204, 272n paleo sex  204

Index sexual  85–7, 90–3, 97, 153 shaman  93, 149–50, 237 shamanism  45, 103, 127, 147, 150, 162, 206, 209, 236, 237, 240, 274n. techno-shamanism  208 Shanken, Edward  167, 169, 275 shapeshifting  236–7, 240 Sharpe, Kevin  100–1, 272n. sheep  1–2, 164, 246 Sheets Johnstone, Maxine  151, 274n., 285n. shelter  5, 20, 43, 68, 93, 147, 160–1, 164, 242–3, 256, 262 signal  126, 137, 158–9, 233 SIMBY (Start In My Back Yard)  8, 14, 37, 202, 265 singularization  14, 53–4, 222, 256, 266 Sitchin, Zecharia  231 slow  36–7, 50, 116, 163–6, 203, 267 Slow Food, 37, 203 Slow Media, 36–7 smell  3, 11, 137, 146, 157, 171 snottites  146 Socratic  112–14, 125, 190, 252 soil  12, 34, 68, 70–1, 105, 108, 243, 271. See also earth, humus, compost solubility  19 Solutrean  27, 67, 269. See also culture somatic  2, 12, 37, 60–1, 87–8, 132, 151, 174, 205, 213–14 soul  40, 182–90, 266 sound  1, 3, 10, 13, 29, 31, 58, 68, 89, 91, 124, 127, 130, 133, 144, 149, 154, 157, 158, 171, 189, 229, 251, 255, 260–2. See also echo, resonance, music sound recording  1, 29, 229 space  1, 13–15, 33, 46, 50–2, 57–8, 60–2, 64–5, 71, 86, 88–91, 93, 132, 136, 139–40, 143–8, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 171–2, 178–9, 206, 210, 213–14, 218, 227–30, 232, 241–2 acoustic  13, 145–8, 156 cave  33, 46, 50–2, 57–8, 61–2, 64–5, 71, 86, 88–90, 93, 132, 136, 144–5, 153–4, 178 outer  229–32, 239–44 performance  58, 90, 143, 150–1

303

theatre  143, 150, 154 space-oriented ontology  213 speech  89, 149, 163, 178, 189, 251 speleological  22, 43, 45, 90, 257, 265 speleothem. See cave formation Spinoza, Baruch  103, 253 spirit  11, 40–1, 61, 90–1, 95, 119, 129, 131, 138, 230, 250, 263, 265 spiritual  9, 24, 28, 54, 86, 92–3, 95, 98, 119, 129, 131, 147, 160, 195, 228, 235 stalactites  31, 85–6, 90, 92 stalagmites  90 state (politics)  14, 35, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 144, 217–22, 254. See also paleolithic State City-state (polis)  115 steppe  21 Stevens, George  179 Stiegler, Bernard  14, 182, 184–6, 190, 275 stone  12, 18, 43–4, 76, 93, 95–6, 98, 100, 105, 123, 131–2, 137, 146, 148, 263. See also dripstone, flowstone, limestone, moonmilk Stone Age  44, 72, 203, 212, 276n. See also Upper Paleolithic Stone Age Diet (Voegtlin)  203–4, 212, 276n. stop-motion animation  201 structuralism  7, 34, 75, 83–4, 194–5, 215 subjectivity  11–12, 14, 25–6, 41, 69–70, 113–14, 117–18, 120–1, 127–8, 140, 153, 173, 181, 197, 198, 201, 204, 206–7, 210–14, 216, 223, 225, 228, 234, 239, 241, 243, 246, 252, 256, 266 subterranean  3, 31, 87, 89, 140, 143, 146, 152, 163, 223, 234 cave, 18, 86, 92, 108, 147, 237 darkness  223 experience  152, 163 landscape  3, 88, 107, 146 life  243 subterranean landscape media  18, 88, 120, 131, 151, 175, 181, 183, 197. See also cave media symbol  21–2, 71, 93–4, 116, 120, 122, 133–4, 144, 146, 158, 167, 169–70,

304 Index 194, 228; symbolic  4, 14, 22, 75, 88, 115, 123–4, 132, 199, 216, 229, 250 sympathetic magic  45, 162, 164, 275n. tactile  3, 38, 136, 151, 157, 171, 181, 184, 264 tactile-kinesthetic  8, 171, 184, 264, 274n. taste  3, 137, 157, 171 technicity  120–2, 170, 181 technique  9, 14, 45, 53–4, 59, 74, 79, 124, 133, 169–70, 194, 197, 210, 220, 267. See also anamorphism, deformation, grouping, juxtaposition, motion blur animation  194–6, 199 bodily  165, 236–7 climbing  9 film  176-7, 179, 181, 186, 191 graphic  14, 45, 53–4, 59, 74, 79, 133, 169–70, 194, 197, 210, 220 performance, 13 research, 9 technology  1, 3–4, 10, 12, 21, 23, 29, 60, 62–3, 68, 81, 88, 119–24, 130, 141, 144, 148, 154–61, 167, 169, 176, 178–82, 184, 190, 192–3, 198–9, 203, 205, 208, 210, 224, 232, 241, 244, 249–50, 255–6, 266, 274n. biotechnology  203 communication  120–4, 224 digital  65–6 immersive  154–5, 157–8, 161, 179 lighting  197–9 media  3–4, 21, 29, 60, 62, 119, 121–3, 158–60, 167, 205, 224, 250, 255–6, 267 network  203 new  157, 192, 210 rocket  232, 241 screen-based  169–70, 176, 178–80, 182, 190–3 video  141 VR, 156, 158, 161, 274n. writing  81, 119, 121–3, 130, 144, 178 technoscape  58–9 techno-shamanism  208 tectiform (symbol)  22

television  6, 30, 214, 255 temperature  21, 25, 31, 33, 37, 86, 133, 146, 161, 163–4, 166, 231, 261 thaumatrope  196 theatre  4, 9, 13, 143, 149, 150–1, 154, 205 theatre anthropology  151 Thoreau, Henry David  256 thought  3, 6–7, 23, 69, 85, 87, 95, 107, 112, 114–17, 129, 178, 182, 183–90, 197, 212, 216, 221–2, 232, 236, 246, 247, 251, 254, 261 child  246–8, 251 conceptual  6–7, 107, 129, 184–5, 212, 216, 221–2, 251 irrational  115–16, 190 philosophical  186 as protension and retention  184–5 rational  112, 116, 164, 183, 185 representation of  117, 178, 183 schools of  7, 212, 254 as soul  190 transmission of  11, 23, 107, 184 time  3, 5, 8, 11, 19–21, 36, 40, 52–6, 72, 81, 92, 131, 133, 140, 143, 145, 150, 176–8 calculated  40, 52–3, 55 deep time (prehistory)  67, 72, 81, 144, 150, 168, 176, 230 as duration  36, 44, 61, 144, 170, 177–9, 185, 190 labor  38, 40 lifetime  164 lunar  94 reified  39, 52 secular and spiritual  147 timeline  140, 143–4 totemism  275 touch  6, 8, 13, 38, 56, 88–90, 93, 101, 103, 111, 114, 122, 133–7, 151, 157, 169, 181, 251, 265 touchscreen  56 tourism  11, 43, 49, 50–5, 60–5, 101, 164, 171, 189, 265, 270 tour guide  49, 50–1, 62, 72, 75–6, 161–4, 166, 189  trajectivity  175

Index transcendence  11, 120, 152, 158, 207, 165–7. See also immanence transformation  9, 11, 18–19, 33–34, 37–8, 40–1, 51, 54, 57, 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 112, 121, 150–1, 157, 166, 172, 207, 211, 223, 236, 265 transhistorical  10, 21, 67, 70, 140, 145, 165, 174, 186, 217, 273 transmission  1–6, 8–11, 21–3, 26–30, 36, 51, 57, 60, 66–7, 71–2, 81, 87–9, 91, 95–6, 100–1, 104, 117, 122, 128, 131, 144, 147–8, 150, 158–60, 162–6, 168, 178, 184, 192, 203, 205–7, 211, 214, 216, 220–2, 225, 232–3, 238, 243, 255 bodily  29, 88, 96, 100, 159–60, 163–4, 166, 205–6, 225, 232, 238, 255, 264 and communication  3–4, 21, 23, 26, 36, 60, 122, 128, 145, 147–8, 150, 158–9, 163, 168, 178, 204–5, 211 cultural  3, 6, 8, 10, 21–2, 28–9, 51, 96, 131, 144–5, 159, 162, 165, 205, 220–1, 243, 255 of energy  9–10, 29, 30, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96, 166, 224, 238, 251 force  36, 51, 217 of imagination  3, 21, 23, 67, 87, 104, 159, 163, 192, 205 material  5, 9, 26, 27, 66, 96, 100, 117, 145, 158–60, 163–6, 168, 205–6, 216, 225, 238, 253, 255–6 of memory  3, 21, 23, 67, 87, 159, 162–3, 192, 205 of movement  87, 97, 197, 232 sensory  3, 11, 21, 29, 101, 163, 205, 216, 253 of sexual feelings  87, 96, 153 slow  37 of sound  11 of thought  11, 23, 107, 184 through walls  8, 12, 23, 28, 100 of warmth  11, 29, 87 transmission media  4–6, 8, 23, 29–30, 35, 41, 57, 60–1, 88, 95–6, 100, 130, 145, 150, 158, 168, 184, 204–5, 216, 238, 253, 255–6 transmissivity  32, 48, 158–9, 163, 216–17

305

transversality  212–13, 244 trees  3, 35, 39, 43, 45–6, 93, 109, 124, 130–1, 161, 164, 236, 259–60, 262 Trois Frères Cave  84–5, 92, 149–50 Sorcerer of Trois Frères  83, 149, 191 tundra  25, 29 twilight zone. See light Upper-Paleolithic  5, 8–9, 12, 14–15, 18, 20–5, 28–9, 31, 33, 41, 44–5, 47, 53–4, 58, 60, 67, 72, 76, 78, 81, 83, 85, 89–90, 92–4, 96–7, 100, 102, 103–4, 115, 122, 129–32, 138, 140–1, 143, 147–51, 153, 164–5, 167, 169–71, 173, 176, 178, 181, 186, 191, 193–9, 204, 206, 210, 214–15, 217–20, 228, 230–2, 238, 240, 243–4, 249, 252, 254, 265–7. See also Stone Age Urry, John  59 utopia  15, 30, 213–14, 221–2, 224, 234, 237, 242–3 Val Camonica (rock art site)  231 van Gelder, Leslie  100–1, 103, 272n. van Gennep, Arnold  151 vegetation  20–1, 24. See also plant video  1, 6, 13, 39, 138–41, 178, 182 Virtual Reality (VR)  54, 141, 154–7, 182, 274n. vital materialism  7–8, 36, 70, 212, 215, 221–2. See also neomaterialism Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo  235–6, 239, 278n. Voegtlin, Walter  201–3, 205, 276n. von Däniken, Erich  231 von Petzinger, Genevieve  22 Voyager 1 (space mission)  229–30, 243 Vulcan (Roman God)  31 vulva  80, 88, 93, 173 wall  2, 8, 12, 23, 26–7, 29, 31, 38, 40, 44, 46, 48–9, 51, 62–6, 69, 72–5, 78–82, 84–90, 92, 97–101, 111, 115, 117–19, 121–9, 131–4, 136, 138–41, 146, 148, 152, 160, 165, 169, 171–3, 175–6, 178–80, 182, 184, 186–7, 189, 191–4,

306 Index 197, 198–9, 206, 221, 232–3, 236, 250, 263–4, 273n. See also parietal, parietism artificial  186, 264 climbing  9, 88, 263–4 drawing/painting on  23, 26, 28–9, 74, 85, 99, 124, 135, 137, 175–6, 180, 191 limestone  8, 23, 28–9, 31, 38, 40, 48, 63–4, 74, 78, 85–7, 92, 124–5, 129, 136, 169, 186, 194, 233 as means of transmission  8, 12, 23, 28, 100, 116–18, 128, 232–3 movement of  12, 27–9, 47–9, 73–4, 80–1, 101, 125, 176, 178, 180 sexual arousal by  86 surfaces of  23, 26, 47–8, 63–4, 69, 74–5, 87, 111, 121–4, 128–9, 132, 134, 139–41, 172, 186, 197, 263 talking to  129 as writing surface  81, 117–19, 121–4, 126, 160, 174, 176, 178; cave  2, 12, 27–8, 65, 73–4, 79, 99–1, 112–15, 117, 119, 123, 126, 128, 129, 131–3, 136, 138, 140–1, 148, 152, 160, 172, 174–6, 186–7, 189, 191–2, 196, 198, 236, 263 Waller, Steve  271n.

warmth  11, 29, 89, 96, 101, 198 weather  23, 25–6, 160 weathering  23 wild  20, 26, 28–9, 39, 103, 118, 137, 148, 166, 169, 191, 205, 236, 250, 256, 259, 261, 263 wildlife  29 wind  1, 19, 21, 103, 122, 206, 227 woodland  21 woolly mammoth  29, 67, 75, 77–8, 80, 84–5, 245–6 woolly rhino  29, 67, 75, 77–81, 98, 170 writing  4, 7, 35, 55, 81, 102, 104, 107, 117–26, 130, 144–5, 159– 60, 174, 176, 178, 202, 210, 218, 245–6 Würm. See Ice Age Yahweh  118, 121–6 yellow ochre  134, 136–7 Youngblood, Gene  14, 208–11, 218–19, 230, 251, 276–7n. youth  210, 260, 267 Zerzan, John  204, 286 Zielinski, Siegfried  168–9, 275n. zoomorphic  82, 119 zoophilia  91

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