30, 000 BC: Painting Animality Deleuze and Prehistoric Painting

Prehistoric Art Chaos, Magma and Life

The paintings and engravings of Upper Palaeolithic (40, 000 10,000BC) parietal
rock art depict vibrant scenes of animality bison, horses, lions, mammoths, bears
and deer. The cave art at Altamira, Lascaux and Chauvet continues to directly convey
a profound intensity and extraordinary beauty with a vitality and invention often
associated with modernist abstract painters like Picasso, Klee or Miro; as the
prehistorian Emmanuel Anati claims, it is an art that remains contemporary. 1 In
these ancient caves animal forms are tilted, displaced, inverted, superimposed and
even placed upon a vertical plane, making them appear as if they were floating within
space. Alongside these clearly structured and organised representations of animals
there exist certain abstract elements whose figurative or symbolic nature seem
hopelessly obscure. As the prehistorian Denis Vialou has written: There is a spatial
and graphical reality which is juxtaposed and often superimposed on recognisable
representations as such they should be considered as separate graphic units. 2

There have been a great many theoretical approaches developed with regard to both of
these distinct elements within Palaeolithic parietal art e.g. Art for arts sake,
totemism, Abbe Breuils hunting magic theory 3 , Batailles theory of prohibition and
transgression 4 , Leroi-Gourhans and Laming-Emperaires structuralist theories 5 .
Recent influential approaches include the shamanic interpretative frameworks posited
by Clottes & Lewis-Williams 6 , the construction of a taxonomy of symbols by Anati 7
and the holistic approach favoured by Lorblanchet 8 . Typical to the approach adopted
by many of the early theoretical approaches was the extrapolation from the painted or
engraved surface of more or less complete and recognisable motifs, leaving behind the
remainder of seemingly irreducible entanglements of lines, marks, dots, daubs,
scratches, etc. Early prehistorians such as the Abbe Breuil expressed contempt for
what he called lines of interference, claiming that they were devoid of value and
that they obscured the beautiful animal figures. For many theorists these residual
elements serve a merely provisional function with regard to animal figuration, as in
Sandars memorable phrase, the splendour of forms yet to come 9 . Later theorists
such as Leroi-Gourhan and Vialou, despite focusing serious attention upon the
abstract, geometrical marks in the caves, continued to maintain a graphic dualism
between representational figuration and abstraction. 10 Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan
associated indeterminate lines and marks with what he called provisional unifinished
outlines. Since the great majority of Palaeolithic parietal art precisely consists of such

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

1
graphic units, i.e. abstract and complex interweaving lines and marks, abstracted
and isolated parts of animals, unrecognisable biomorphic forms, I wish to argue in this
paper that it seems unjustifiable to continue with this form of graphic dualism that
insists upon separating the integral animal forms from the seemingly disorganised,
chaotic and non-figurative elements. It seems illegitimate to separate and privilege
one type of visual space, apparently organised around good naturalistic
representational form, from another type of graphic space considered to be
incohesive, disorganised and which is taken merely to function as a subsidiary
and subordinate zone to the first. The possibility that a radical graphic fluidity might
exist within prehistoric painting and engraving has often been overlooked, sidelined
or diminished by prehistoric art specialists. However, two recent influential
prehistorians, Michel Lorblanchet and Emmanuel Anati, have made considerable
efforts to instantiate just such an approach. These prehistorians assign indeterminate
lines and marks a much more important place within the overall prehistoric aesthetic.

Anatis approach posits that prehistoric art is a form of writing in a primary language
that when deciphered will prepare the ground for a universal history. He argues for the
presence of three distinct but interrelated types of sign in all forms of prehistoric art
pictograms, ideograms and psychograms. Pictograms are images (human figures,
animal figures, structures and objects); ideograms are symbols that are repeated and
have, Anati claims, a standard significance; psychograms are exclamations and as
such are not repeated or standard. For Anati psychograms were created under the
influence of intense impulses, violent discharges of energy and as such were capable
of expressing sensation. Each psychogram is unique. For Anati all three distinct
elements constitute the fundamental structure of all prehistoric art found throughout
the entire world the same modes of expression, the same associations, and the same
themes are found throughout the world. 11 Anatis approach has the virtue of not
imposing an artificial graphic hierarchy but of conceiving prehistoric art as a coherent
and unified graphic assemblage where figuration and abstraction are seen to be
fundamentally related and as operating together. It is a virtue shared by the
interpretative approach developed by Michel Lorblanchet who argues for an
integrated understanding of the relationship between the animal figures and the
unorganised tangles of lines and marks. For Lorblanchet these lines and marks
indicate a clear metaphysical intention a primeval magma where all living and
imaginary beings merge in formal games. 12 Thus these indeterminate lines and
marks contain potentialities for the becoming of latent figural images and as such are
for Lorblanchet a crucial element within the prehistoric figuration of a mythology of
creation. Here the figurative components are born from a formless tangle or magma,
e.g. from the formless web of subsidiary lines perhaps a hoof or an antler emerges,
perhaps a muzzle or a creatures spine, perhaps an eye stares out from the depths of
the graphic chaos. The seemingly incohesive graphic chaos is seemingly vibrant with
emergent forms of Life.

Beginning then with the insights provided by Anati and Lorblanchet I will attempt to
show that it was through the evolution of a unified plane of composition that
prehistoric creators or artists were subsequently able to traverse, freely and smoothly
in all directions, between the two extremes; that it was the existence of a radical form
11
E. Anati, Ibid., pp. 3-4 (Anati is one of the key figures in the project to establish a World Archive of
Rock Art (WARA) See H. Caygill, [2002], pp. 19-25)
12
M. Lorblanchet, Ibid, p. 142

2
of stylistic free-play within prehistoric parietal art which allowed for the boundaries
between different living species to be so fundamentally and repeatedly transgressed.
Over thousands of years a number of styles evolved that permitted prehistoric
artists, in graphic terms, to migrate or transgress from one organism or creature to
another. The explicit presence of hybridised figures within a great deal of prehistoric
art 13 clearly indicates that the boundaries between animal species were far from
inseparable and were often transgressed. Indeed, if we look at a panel from Trois
Freres we are seemingly presented with one of the most extraordinary attempts at
picturing the dynamic magma of primordial animality.

The polyvalence within this panel is so hyperbolic that it is as if we are being

presented with a gestating world order, from chaos to order the birth of animality
itself within a graphic schema. In this paper I will argue that Deleuze and Guattaris
philosophical aesthetics can provide us with the necessary conceptual resources in
order to begin to restore this necessary radical graphic holism to prehistoric art.
Many contemporary prehistorians remain suspicious of any attempts to begin to
interpret the meaning of Palaeolithic art. Many believe that to even begin to
interpret Palaeolithic art without the extensive support of archaeological research to
provide a reliable cultural context is a dangerous and foolhardy venture. They would
argue that since we do not know the myths, beliefs and social and religious
frameworks within which these works emerged then it is virtually impossible to talk
of their meaning. Whilst this paper does not seek to posit a naively speculative
account of the meaning of these ancient artworks, what I do hope to be able to
demonstrate is that prehistoric art itself, when radically conceived, is capable of
disrupting certain aesthetic paradigms within Western thought. Through Deleuze &

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

3
Guattari I will seek to demonstrate that prehistoric art invites us to imagine alternative
ways of seeing, ways that render sensible within the visual fabric what
representationalist modes of seeing regard as invisible. The relevance of Deleuze &
Guattaris analysis to this debate resides in the claim that from its inception within
prehistoric engravings and paintings art has sought to invent means for rendering
visible certain intensities of Life affects, energies, rhythms and forces. Deleuze &
Guattari provide a radically alternative genealogy of the unfolding of Western art
which is elaborated within a variety of their works, a number of which I will seek to
elucidate within the second part of this paper. This alternative genealogy of art is
explicitly constructed from a deliberate engagement with two early 20th century art
theorists, Riegl 14 and Worringer 15 , who had explicitly set out to provide an historical

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

4
account of Western art based upon the notion of Kuntswollen (will to art) that
manifests itself in a unified manner throughout all of the arts of a given age. Despite
not being prehistorians as such both articulated a very specific conception of the
artistic will governing the production of prehistoric art. Deleuze & Guattari attempt
to reconfigure the notion of this singular task 16 by re-engaging with prehistoric art
and the entire subsequent Western art tradition. This reconfiguration can be read as an
articulation of what Merleau-Ponty in an essay on the art of painting had called the
single task stretching from Lascaux to Modernity. For Merleau-Ponty this single
task secretly inaugurates another history which is still ours and which operates like
fires answering one another in the night. 17 Deleuze & Guattari, through the
elaboration of an alternative genealogy of Western art, seek to commune with this
secret history in an effort to disrupt what they see as the dominant representationalist
paradigm within aesthetic theory. For Deleuze & Guattari while art can be figurative
it was not so at first; they argue that figuration is always a result. As we shall see in
the next part of this paper they posit an organic theory of expression as a means to
challenge the primacy and dominance of representationalism:

If representation is related to an object, this relation is derived from the form of

representation; if this object is the organism and organisation, it is because
representation is first of all organic in itself, it is because the form of representation
first of all expresses the organic life of man as subject. 18

A crucial element of this challenge is a radical re-description of the nature of

prehistoric art in order to identify what Merleau-Ponty had called the fraternity of

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

5
painters living the same problem across the vast aeons of time. 19 For Deleuze there
is a singular task that concerns all art across time, a common problem:

There is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art, and in painting as in

music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing
forcesThe task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are
not themselves visible. 20

In the second part of this paper I will attempt to demonstrate that Deleuze &
Guattaris alternative genealogy of art and painting is capable of fundamentally
restoring a sense of the continuity whereby animals, humans, and abstract marks, lines
and signs can become acknowledged as a dynamic multiplicity of visible stitches
within a continuous graphic fabric of co-creation and becoming.

Art, Sensation and Becoming

In What is Philosophy Deleuze & Guattari attempt to reconfigure the object of all the
arts as the capture of forces, the extraction of the percept from perceptions of
objects and from states of a perceiving subject, and to wrest the affect from affections
as a passage from one state to another. To extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of
sensation. 21 When percepts and affects are successfully separated from the
specificity of human perception and affections a sensory aggregate is formed. Deleuze
and Guattari argue that with this sensory aggregate one is not in the world, one
becomes with the world, one becomes in contemplating it. All is vision, becoming.
One becomes universe. Becomings animal, vegetable, molecular, becoming zero. 22
This radical becoming-with the world is achieved through a specific type of sensory
aggregate the artwork. The artwork, as a sensory aggregate, does not operate
through resemblance, but through what Deleuze & Guattari call an affect a non-
human becoming, or becoming with the world. The affect is defined as the becoming-
other, not merely as a passage from one lived state to another but mans nonhuman
becoming. For Deleuze & Guattari Life alone creates such indeterminate zones where
all beings whirl and rotate in a primeval magma. Art is capable of reaching, traversing
and penetrating this chaotic zone through its efforts at what they call co-creation. 23
Art gains its own vitality and life from plunging into this virtual field in Life, a field
capable of dissolving all organic forms and imposing the existence of a zone where
we no longer know or can determine what is animal or human. The artist is obliged to
create radically plastic methods and techniques for handling material in order to
recreate the vital and primitive magma of life, or what they call a single abstract
animal. 24 Artists are the presenters of affects, i.e. becomings with the world, they are
literally the inventors and creators of affects, of folds where one goes from one form
on the organic stratum to another. 25 Artists not only create them in their work, but
they give them over to us in such a way that we become with them, they draw us into
the compound of sensation.

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

6
For Deleuze & Guattari the artwork does not simply actualise what is essentially a
virtual event, rather the artwork in some sense comes to embody the virtual event
itself. The artwork gives this virtual event a body, life or a universe. These bodies,
lives, universes are neither virtual nor actual but are, they argue, possibles. The
possible becomes a privileged type of aesthetic category art is to be understood as
the realm of the possible virtual event. The formation or creation of the artwork takes
place upon what Deleuze & Guattari call a plane of composition, which they
subdivide into the technical plane of composition (which concerns the materials of
the artwork) and the aesthetic plane of composition (which concerns
sensations). 26 Within the first plane the sensation realises itself in the material i.e.
the sensation adapts itself to a well-formed, organised, and regulated matter. In
painting, this is the mode of representational, naturalistic and perspectival art, in
which sensations are projected upon a material plane or surface that is always already
inhabited by spatial schemata and coordinates that structure the morphology of the
figure. It is a kind of graphic hylomorphism hylomorphism being the doctrine that
the order displayed by material systems is due to the form projected in advance by an
external producer, a form which organises what would otherwise be chaotic or passive
matter. On the second plane it is the material that passes into the sensation, and here
we are able to think the self-ordering potentials of matter itself. So, rather than
sensation being projected upon the readily striated material surface, the material rises
up into a metamorphic plane of forces and discloses what they call smooth space.
For them matter is never simply an homogenous substance that passively receives
forms but is itself composed of intensive and energetic traits.

These implicit traits make the formation of matter into individuated forms possible,
but they also provide the means by which such forms can be continuously altered. The
forms of matter are never fixed molds, rather they are something determined by the
singularities of the material itself. It is then a principle of energetic matter in
continuous immanent development and variation. In painting, the materiality of the
paint itself comes to articulate and express forces the matter of paint itself becomes
the crucial expressive component in the artwork.27 Matter-movement carries with it
singularities as implicit or virtual forms. It is then the potential for material self-
ordering with which the artist negotiates. The form as such is something suggested by
the material itself rather than as the pure product of the mind of the artist. Forms are
created out of these suggested virtual potentials of the matter rather than being
something which is preconceived by the artist and then imposed on a passive matter.
The artist on the aesthetic plane of composition in some sense surrenders to matter so
the artist must follow matters singularities by attending to its traits, and then devise
strategies to bring out these virtualities, to actualise them as sensible individuated
possibilities. These two planes, the technical and the aesthetic, Deleuze & Guattari
26
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994], pp. 191-199
27
There is an analogous effort to elucidate the specific and peculiar logic of paint developed by
painters undertaken by James Elkins in What Painting Is [1998]. Elkins pursues this logic through
mobilising a fascinatingly fluid resonance between alchemy and painting. For Elkins painting has a
deep affinity with alchemy insofar as both concern an ongoing logical development emerging from a
negotiation with different fluid materials which are worked on without knowledge of their properties,
by blind experiment. For Elkins the ongoing dialogue with the material of paint by the painter, and the
development of a thinking in paint or a specifically painterly logic of sensation, is a largely unspoken
and uncognised dialogue where the material of paint speaks silently.

7
argue, finally express only a single plane, what they call the plane of aesthetic
composition. And it is upon this plane that a radically non-hylomorphic mode of
artistic production becomes possible, a production that consists of extracting and
rendering sensible virtualities:

The essential relation is no longer matters-formsneither is it the continuous

development of form and the continuous variation of matter. It is now a direct relation
material-forces. A material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly
harness forces; these forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer
a matter that finds its corresponding principle of intelligibility in form. It is a question
of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of a different order: the
visual material must capture nonvisible forces. 28

The percepts and affects, the beings of sensation that are extracted from the
perceptions and affections of everyday corporeal experience, become the
compositional elements that the artist shapes and forms on the aesthetic plane of
composition and renders perceptible through materials that have themselves been
rendered expressive. This aesthetic plane of composition is configured as an infinite
field of forces and intensities, an infinite play and transmutation of forces. The
artwork engages with these forces as they operate within a process of becoming. The
aesthetic plane of composition can be thought of as a type of embodied becoming. In
this way we can begin to think of prehistoric art as being engaged in a ceaseless
search to create a finite monument that in some way restores a sense of the infinite.
The prehistoric artist can be understood as attempting to commune with infinite chaos
and bringing back varieties that no longer constitute the mere reproduction of the
sensory in the organs (i.e. perceptions) but rather establish the being of the sensory,
a being of sensation (i.e. the percept) upon a radically anorganic aesthetic plane of
composition. It is this aesthetic plane that is capable of restoring to this extract the
infinite. According to Deleuze all art fundamentally struggles with primal chaos in
order to bring forth a vision that illuminates that chaos for an instant, that instantiates
it as a sensation. Prehistoric art should, I suggest, be reconceived as a cohesive
composition of chaos that attempts to yield the vision or sensation of chaos. It
constitutes a type of sophisticated composed chaos that is neither foreseen nor
preconceived.

By denoting the type of universe that "becomes" "possible" on the "aesthetic plane of
composition", and by assigning art with a role of co-creation, Deleuze & Guattari seek
to align the aesthetic plane of composition with the natural plane of composition, i.e.
the plane of immanence whereby an actualisation of the virtual self-forming forms as
organic life occurs. This natural plane of composition is simply that of every living
form in its ongoing process of concrete embodiment and individuation. As Deleuze &
Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus:

There is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything

is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished
from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated
assemblages depending on their connections, heir relations of movement. A fixed

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

8
plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. A single abstract
Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it. 29

The aesthetic plane of composition is to be understood as being involved in engaging

this immanent Life (the plane of immanence or single abstract Animal) in an
enterprise of co-creation a co-creation or becoming through sensation.

In Difference & Repetition Deleuze argues that all thought begins in sense-experience
or what he terms the becoming-other of the senses, and that this becoming-other of
the senses is a sign of the passage of the virtual into the actual. 30 The
production of the actual in Life is everywhere to be understood as a becoming actual
of the virtual, i.e. as a process of organic individuation. The fundamental process of
creation in nature is as a continuous actualisation of a virtual force. However, this
virtual is always in some sense held back in reserve in absolute immanence. As such
the virtual entails an ongoing creative force of natural composition through which the
virtual becomes actual. So there is a virtual dimension of force that is always
immanent within the virtuals actualisation or individuation. Whilst the virtuals
actualisation occurs in actual bodies as a dynamic process of organic individuation,
there is, immanent to that process, a passive force of the virtual. The virtual in itself is
always something distinct as the self-forming form, which is grasped independently of
any actualisation and it is this virtual as a principle of self-forming form that is
engaged in an ongoing process of individuation. The virtual thus becomes actualised,
but also always remains something immanent within the actual, a virtual multiplicity
always in reserve, still to come. The actualisation of the virtual is twofold - actual
individuated bodies and material forces and the invisible passive syntheses of
retentive connections that make up the conditions of possibility for there to be any
manifest and material conditions. 31

For Deleuze it is this passage of the virtual to the actual, understood in terms of
passive synthesis, which is experienced as sensation but it is a sensation beyond the
norms of common sense and recognition. He argues that this notion of sensation is to
be understood through a notion of the synthesis of different forces; a being of
sensation is to be understood as a contraction or retention of vibrations that occurs
through a kind of passive synthesis. Each being of sensation is already accumulated or
coagulated sensation each and every sensation is a concentrated and synthesised
assemblage of forces. These intensive accumulated forces synthesised within the
sensation cannot be grasped by the empirical senses. It is only upon the aesthetic
plane of composition and within the artwork that these invisible forces, which are now
captured, configured or rendered sensible as blocs of sensation, confront us. For
Deleuze the being of sensation entails an act of creation, which he calls the mystery of
passive creation. He regards the fundamental process of creative evolution in nature as
a continuous actualisation of the virtual, and that the passage of the virtual itself
entails a passive force of composition whereby the virtual becomes actual. He thus
distinguishes between the form and the force of the virtual. The linkages, bonds and
connections whereby the virtual self-forming forms grow and take shape presuppose
the force of passive synthesis, which involves the contraction of a past into a present
within a conserving and contemplating soul. For Deleuze every self-forming form is
29
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 255
30
G. Deleuze, [1994], pp. 139-40
31
Ibid. p. 81

9
conceived as a fundamentally sensing form that is able to become through a creative
retentive contraction of the past into the present this creative retentive contraction is
experienced as sensation.

As I indicated earlier, for Deleuze & Guattari the most general aim of all art is to
produce a sensation, to create a pure being of sensation. Thus the work of art utilises
the passive synthesis of the being of sensation to produce affects of its own. The
synthetic and accumulative principles of sensation themselves become the principles
of composition upon the aesthetic plane of composition. Art attempts to capture or
seize this virtual force immanent to the actual by attempting to seize the becoming-
other of the virtuals passage into the actual, the event, as sensation. Art, in its attempt
to render a sense of non-human becoming something perceptible within a work, must
wrest this becoming-other away from any organised bodily or human structure of
perception and affection. Deleuze & Guattari adopt the modernist dictum of Paul Klee
not to render the visible, but to render visible 32 the fundamental task of all art is
not the mere reproduction of visible forms but rather the capture and presentation of
the non-visible forces that act behind or beneath these forms. All art attempts to
extract from the realm of intensive forces a bloc of sensations in an effort to produce a
material artwork that is capable of capturing and sustaining such invisible forces. This
is ultimately to be understood as the sensuous presentation or configuration of the
virtual as pure possibility itself i.e. not merely the passage of becoming from the
virtual to the actual conceived as a possibility, but as the virtual perpetually immanent
within the actual as a force of pure possibility:

It is now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of a

different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Render visible,
Klee said, not render or reproduce the visibleMatters of expression are superseded
by a material of capture. The forces to be captured arethe forces of an immaterial,
nonformal, and energetic cosmos. 33

According to Deleuze & Guattari, both the natural plane of composition and the
aesthetic plane of composition are finally to be recognised as planes of nature planes
of the actualisation of virtual self-forming forms. The aesthetic plane is a plane of
composition of Being and its object is to engage life in an enterprise of co-creation.
Arts possible is the embodied virtual, the event as alterity engaged in an expressive
matter 34 . Arts universe is that of an expressive matter attempting to render the
sensations of the virtuals passage into the actual something palpable or sensible. In
other words the aesthetic plane of composition is a world of immanent, virtual forces
within bodies. Through extracting percepts and affects, combining them and
subsequently forming assemblages of sensation, art is able to render palpable a sense
of this passive force of the virtual immanent to the actual through the aesthetic
category of the possible. It is this infinity of possibility with regard to becoming that
art seeks to catch sight of, an infinity of possibility to which it attempts to construct a
stable monument upon its aesthetic plane of composition. Arts concern is not with
merely imitating, representing, reproducing or resembling stable and good organic
form as it emerges within the organism, but rather with exploring and figuring the
force of the immanent virtual and its ceaseless passage into Life. As Deleuze &
32
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 342
33
Ibid. p. 343
34
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1994] p. 196

10
Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, it is a matter of becoming-intense, becoming-
animal, becoming-imperceptible:

No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative. Suppose a painter

represents a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent
that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure
colour. Thus imitation self-destructs since the imitator unknowingly enters into a
becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she
imitates. One imitates only if one fails, when one fails. The painter and musician do
not imitate the animal, the become-animal at the same time as the animal becomes
what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with Nature. Becoming is
always double, that which one becomes no less than the one that becomes block is
formed, essentially mobile, never in equilibrium. 35

In Becoming-animal the vestiges of the human are traversed and swept away. For
Deleuze & Guattari Art provides a means of accessing the animal, of traversing
asignification and getting beyond mere representational meaning by means of intense
sweeping, blazing and becoming:

Becomings-animaltheir reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one

corresponds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us
become a proximity, an indiscernability that extracts a shared element from the
animal. 36

Art thus seeks to transfigure the virtuals force and energy upon its own plane of
aesthetic composition. In this sense the artist must allow, through an act of co-creation
(becoming-animal), for a passage of the virtual into their work, for it to become
captured as sensation. The virtual must become something to be struggled with
aesthetically and its productive vitality put to work, and it must be allowed to breed its
forms in the visual space of the work, without its chaotic energy destroying the overall
cohesion of that work. Art unleashes becoming.

It is precisely this notion of co-creation (becoming-animal) that is particularly relevant

with regard to understanding the unity of prehistoric parietal art. For Deleuze &
Guattari the processes undertaken by art to embody the virtual immanent to the
natural plane (within actual Life) is in some way absolutely fundamental to all forms
of art. Thus, if prehistoric art is even to be considered art it too must always already
have been actively engaged in this process of co-creation (becoming-animal), and it is
precisely such a point we find outlined within a brief section of A Thousand Plateaus
entitled Nomad Art 37 . Here Deleuze & Guattari explain the nature of what they
term the haptic space and abstract line in prehistoric art through the notion of co-
creation and becoming. They begin by discussing the notion of tactile, or what they
call haptic space, which they distinguish from optical space. The notion of the
haptic is a borrowed concept from the early 20th century art historian Alois Riegl
who created the concept as a way of explaining the type of aesthetic associated with

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

11
primitive art. 38 Deleuze & Guattari mobilise the opposition introduced by Riegl
between the haptic and the optical in an effort to begin to think the aesthetic
configuration of two distinct types of space which they term the Smooth and the
Striated. The Smooth is the space of the virtual and is defined as a relatively
undifferentiated and continuous topological space (hence Smooth) which is
incessantly undergoing discontinuous transitions and is progressively acquiring
determination until it condenses into a measurable and divisible metric space (hence
Striated). The relation between the Smooth and the Striated is that between
what Deleuze & Guattari call intensive and extensive properties the extensive
properties of striated space are easily divisible, easily isolated and abstracted, whereas
the intensive properties of Smooth space are radically continuous and are relatively
indivisible. Smooth space is a fluid space of continuous variation characterised by a
plurality of local directions. If one were to speak of it in purely geometrical terms, the
difference between Smooth and Striated Space may be expressed in terms of an
inversion in the relationship between points and lines so striated space treats the line
as something that traverses between two points, as in Euclidean geometry. However,
in Smooth Space, the priority is given to the line itself (the line is given
independence) and as such it treats points simply as relays between successive lines.
The two types of lines are thus very different. They argue that striated space closes
off a surface and allocates it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks, in
the smooth one distributes oneself in an open space according to frequencies and in
the course of ones crossing. 39 The aesthetic plane of composition itself becomes
explicitly figured as a way in which this distinction between virtual and actual or
smooth and striated can be thought. Central to this account of the aesthetic plane of
composition will be the specificity of prehistoric art or what they term Nomad Art.
For Deleuze & Guattari Smooth Space is to be understood as the object of a close-
vision par excellence and is the tactile element they call haptic space. Space
becomes tactile as if the eye were now a hand caressing one surface after another
without any sense of the overall configuration or mutual relation of those surfaces. It
is a virtual space whose fragmented components can be assembled in multiple
combinations. In this pure haptic Smooth Space of close-vision, all orientation,
landmarks and the linkages between things are in continuous variation i.e. a
continuous transmutation which operates step-by-step to no pre-arranged or pre-
governed schema. There is no stable unified set of referents since orientations are
never constant, but constantly change. The interlinkages themselves are constituted
according to an emergent realm of dynamic tactile relationships that have more to do
with how a Nomad conceives of their territory. Smooth Space is understood as the
principle of nomadic existence, i.e. it is the territorial principle of the nomad.
Deleuze & Guattari argue that the nomad is distributed in a smooth space which he
occupies, inhabits, holds. 40 So for the nomad it is always the journey itself that is
important, the points along the way being strictly subordinated to the paths they
determine. 41 Thus the paths traversed within nomadic existence serve to distribute
individuals and groups across an open and intermediate space:

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to
anotherA path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the

38
See note 14
39
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], Ibid. p. 481
40
Ibid. p. 381
41
Ibid. p. 493

12
consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the
nomad is the intermezzoThe nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence
and a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectoryThis
nomadic trajectory distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is
indefinite and noncommunicatingThe nomad distributes himself in a smooth space;
he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principleThey are
vectors of deterritorialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series
of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly varyThere is an
extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on
haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the
sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or
rather haptic, a sonorous much more than a visual space. The variability, the
polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth space. 42

And:

These questions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most
famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath them; the
ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the paws point in the
opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the body is turned upside down; the
monadological points of view can be interinked only on a nomad space; the whole
and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than
optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with ones mind, but
without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. 43

For this pure haptic eye there is no invariant horizon, stable background, central
perspective, limit, outline or form. Its function consists in what Deleuze & Guattari
term the Nomadic Absolute 44 , whereby it seeks to integrate each heterogeneous
element within a unified smooth space of tactile intensities. The haptic eye is able to
provide an infinite succession of heterogeneous linkages and changes in direction.
They claim that this purely haptic function of the eye is in some sense isomorphic
with the process of becoming It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with
process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its
manifestation. 45

Having established this idea of pure haptic space and the idea of a nomadic absolute
of topological and tactile points of connection and interlinkages, Deleuze & Guattari
proceed to explain the idea of what they term the abstract line and how it is linked
with the idea of a process of becoming. This abstract line traverses these points of
connection in haptic space and in effect it traces Smooth Space itself. The notion of a
prehistoric abstract line or Nomad line is derived from the art theorist Wilhelm
Worringer who in the early 20th century had posited an aesthetic phenomenon termed
the Gothic or Northern Line. 46 For Worringer this type of line was the product of a
fundamentally nomadic existence among what he called Northern or Barbarian
people. This is a line that passes between things and in the process imbues the figures

42
Ibid. pp. 380-382
43
Ibid. pp. 493-4
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid. p. 494
46
See Note 15

13
of people, animals, plants, etc. with a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its
movement gives birth to a dynamic and chaotic geometry of diagonals, jagged edges,
swirling lines that actively construct space rather than merely describing it. This
nomadic line connects and assembles heterogeneous elements while maintaining them
as heterogeneous. Thus space is assembled piece by piece, with each piece of space
having its own internal geometrical coordinates, its own temporal rhythms, and its
own dramatic intensities.

There is contained here, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the idea of non-organic
life; such a line does not delimit a stable organism but rather what they term a 'Body
Without Organs'. As Worringer claims, such an ornamental Gothic line delimits and
expresses a paradoxical non-organic life, and it is this specific characteristic which
resonates so clearly for Deleuze & Guattari with their own themes of the virtual and
the actual, becoming-animal, non-organic Life, Body-Without-Organs, the
labyrinthine fold, etc. They thus attempt to reconceive the notion of the Gothic line as
the prehistoric abstract Line. This more radical form of abstract line was, they claim,
capable of sustaining infinite figural possibilities and of breeding an infinite realm of
possible organic becomings upon a field of radically non-organic forms, and that
ultimately such a line is a genuine feature of the pre-historic nomadic aesthetic. Here
the abstract line embraces a wildly dynamic non-organic geometry of jagged lines,
twisting loops, superimpositions and accelerating spirals, ultimately blurring the
distinction between figure and ground and tracing out the smooth space of the
aesthetic plane of composition. The plant and animal forms that this abstract line
appears to trace within prehistoric art are thus deformed representational images
zones of indiscernability of the line are disclosed, in that the line is common to
different animal, to man and animal, and to pure abstraction. 47 They claim that if
prehistoric art is to become conceived as art it is precisely because of the exemplary
way in which it manipulates a purely abstract and non-rectilinear line to give
expression to radically non-organic forces of Life: If it [the Nomad Line] encounters
the animal, if it becomes animalised, it is not by outlining a form, butby imposing,
through its clarity and nonorganic precision, a zone where form becomes
indiscernible. 48

Thus the abstract Line is accompanied by what they call material traits of
expression 49 (virtualities) and that these implicit traits correlate with the flow of
matters becoming as a continuous actualisation of a virtual force (i.e. there is
then a fundamental correspondence, as I indicated earlier in this paper, between the
aesthetic becoming and the becoming on natural plane of composition or plane of
immanence). The abstract Nomad Line is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive
for being inorganic. 50 The feverish dynamism associated with this line liberates a
power of life which all matter expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it -
this is the power and force of the virtual immanent to the actual. If everything upon
the prehistoric plane of composition is then essentially alive it is precisely because of
the way in which it is the aesthetic expression of this virtual power in the actual of
matter:

47
G. Deleuze, [2003] p. 130
48
Ibid. p. 46
49
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, [1988], p. 498
50
Ibid. p. 498

14
If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organised
butbecause the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is
inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all
the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms. 51

Deleuze & Guattari argue that it is always a question of this single becoming-animal
in prehistoric art, a single becoming that restores the idea of an aesthetic unity to the
art. This rests upon the idea that animality itself was fundamentally experienced and
expressed within the art as inorganic or supra-organic. The expression of this supra-
organic becoming-animality necessarily entails a form of pure abstraction rather than
the stable representationalism associated with the mere isolation and reproduction of
stable organic form, i.e. organisms, the animal. There thus exists a radical graphic
continuity in prehistoric art made up of dots, superimposed and broken lines, outlines
and profiles, and that all of these components can be understood through the operation
of the pure Nomad Line. This Nomad line repetitively folds back upon itself to form
partial organic outlines, fragments of animals, hybridised animals, which are
gradually accumulated and assembled until a more or less complete and stable animal
form emerges. This is then ceaselessly dissolved and fragmented back into what
Deleuze & Guattari call zones of indiscernibility; the animal becomes other, is
transfigured or hybridised into other animal species or back into the pure field of
intensities via the catastrophe of the pure abstract line, or what Anati has called
psychograms. Fragmentary animals fuse into fantastic intermediate and hybridised
animals which incorporate elements from a multitude of different species. The
complete isolated animal is only ever caught for an instant within a concrete graphic
form before it dissolves. It is clear that this process of segmentation, assemblage, and
dissolution are a consistent phenomenon throughout all prehistoric art, and is a
process illuminated by the aesthetic categories introduced by Deleuze & Guattari. As
Lorblanchet has posited, the graphic continuity in Palaeolithic prehistoric art can be
seen as a kind of supra-organic animality, a cosmic placenta, a primordial magma, or
a field of virtual intensities where all animal forms are transfigured, where there is an
attempt to forge linkages between animal forms. This transfiguring and linking of
organic forms should in the end be understood as the radically initial aesthetic attempt
to figure (through sensation) the virtual force of becoming-animality itself, and it is
the radical visual fluidity that this entails which has not been properly comprehended
by those who have approached it via a strict classificatory system governed by a
representational hierarchy.

Indeed, Deleuze & Guattaris aesthetics enable us to begin to elaborate upon the
insights provided by the prehistorians Anati and Lorblanchet, to recognise that what
was being ceaselessly explored within prehistoric parietal art was the infinite
variability and transmutability of the animal - the pure possibilities of all animal life,
of animal-becomings, of pure animality (the singular abstract animal). What was
being attempted was precisely the abstraction and transfiguration of the radically
inorganic virtual force immanent to Life within a coherent and unified graphic
schema. Prehistoric parietal art simply presents us with one of the very greatest
attempts within human art to catch sight of the vitality, energy and becoming of Life
itself rather than a limited concern with the mere representation of actual individuated
forms. There is within prehistoric art an attempt to capture the sheer exuberant flow of

51
Ibid p. 499

15
Life, Life as incessant becoming-other, Life as the vital inorganic force of the cosmos.
A path is traced and figured on the cave walls of Lascaux and Chauvet between
complexity and simplicity, between chaos and order. Upon these surfaces there is a
continual movement from the single abstract animal to becoming becoming-bison,
becoming-horse, becoming-lion, becoming-mammoth, becoming-bear and becoming-
human. In conclusion Deleuze & Guattaris aesthetics allow us to begin to reconceive
the prehistoric plane of composition as a zone of radical graphic experimentation
where aesthetic possibilities associated with virtual animality, the singular animal, are
allowed to manifest. By taking the aesthetic coherence of prehistoric art seriously and
attempting to understand the elements that make up the radical graphic continuity
found there i.e. the ceaseless repetition, folding, dissolving, superimposition and
becoming of animality, Deleuze & Guattari ultimately initiate through this alternative
genealogy of art an entirely new trajectory within Western aesthetics. 52

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

52
Thanks to Keith Ansell-Pearson and Emily Harding for their generous and helpful advice during the
preparation of this article and Constantin Boundas for his insightful and encouraging remarks.

16
Bibliography

E. Anati, Art and Symbolism : A Global Approach to Obtaining Meaning from Early
Art Paper presented at the Fifth World Archaelogical Congress, Washington D.C.
[2003]

G. Bataille, Prehistoric Painting : Lascaux or the Birth of Art, Trans. A. Wainhouse,

London: Macmillan [1955]

H. Breuil, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, Trans. ME Boyle, Montignac :

Centre detudes et de Documentation Prehistoriques [1952]

H. Caygill, Digital Lascaux: The Beginning in the End of the Aesthetic, Angelaki,
Vol. 7, No. 1 [2002]

J. Clottes & D. Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the
Painted Caves, New York: Harry Abrams [1998]

G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Trans. P. Patton, London: The Athlone Press,
[1994]

G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Trans. D. Smith, London:

Continuum [2003]

G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. B. Massumi, London: The

Athlone Press [1988]

G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Trans. G, Birchill & H. Tomlinson,

London: Verso [1994]

J. Elkins, What Painting Is, London, Routledge [1998]

A. Laming-Emperaire, La signification de lart rupestre Paleolithique, Paris: Picard

[1962]

A. Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe, Trans. N.

Guterman, London : Thames & Hudson [1968]

M. Lorblanchet, Lart des cavernes : atlas des grottes ornees Paleolithiques Franais,
Paris : Ministere de la culture [1984]

M. Merleau-Ponty, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence in The Merleau-

Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Trans. RC McCleary, Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press [1993]

A. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, Trans. R. Winkes, Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
[1985]

N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, New Haven & London: Yale University
Press [1985]

17
D. Vialou, Our Prehistoric Past : Art and Civilization, London : Thames & Hudson
[1991]

W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style,

Trans. M. Bullock, New York: International Universities Press [1953]

W. Worringer, Form in Gothic, Trans. H. Read, London: Alec Tiranti [1994]

18