Ontologies of Rock Art

Images, Relational Approaches, and Indigenous Knowledges

Oscar Moro Abadía, Martin Porr, Oscar Moro Abadía, Martin Porr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000339734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Métaphysique philosophique

Ontologies of Rock Art is the first publication to explore a wide range of ontological approaches to rock art interpretation, constituting the basis for groundbreaking studies on Indigenous knowledges, relational metaphysics, and rock imageries.

The book contributes to the growing body of research on the ontology of images by focusing on five main topics: ontology as a theoretical framework; the development of new concepts and methods for an ontological approach to rock art; the examination of the relationships between ontology, images, and Indigenous knowledges; the development of relational models for the analysis of rock images; and the impact of ontological approaches on different rock art traditions across the world.

Generating new avenues of research in ontological theory, political ontology, and rock art research, this collection will be relevant to archaeologists, anthropologists, and philosophers. In the context of an increasing interest in Indigenous ontologies, the volume will also be of interest to scholars in Indigenous studies.

Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780429321863/ontologies-rock-art-oscar-moro-abad%C3%ADa-martin-porr?context=ubx&refId=3766b051-4754-4339-925c-2a262a505074

Part I

Philosophical and historical perspectives

1Rock art and the aesthetics of hyperobjects AND hyperobjects

Graham Harman

1 Introduction

When we speak of rock art, we seem to be in the realm of archaeology rather than aesthetics. It will be a question either of the primeval remains of ancient peoples, or of more recent productions by cultures who still ply an archaic trade of petroglyphs or rock-wall carvings. Usually it is the former, and the rock art in question is taken as a clue to the broader features of a long-ago world. Among other things, this means that any sort of aesthetic formalism seems to be ruled out in advance, if we define “formalism” as the kind of critique that remains within the limits of the work itself, rather than minutely examining the socio-environmental framework within which it was generated (see Harman 2019c). Paradoxically, in the case of rock art, the now absent society gains the upper hand over the still-present work of art.

Of course, it is well-known that formalism has been out of fashion in the arts since at least the mid-1960s. Here I am speaking not of this or that formalist style—whether of Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, or Jackson Pollock—but of the intellectual justification used to promote or denigrate any formalist style in particular. In the art criticism of recent decades (just as in archaeology and philosophy during the same period), it has been easy to gain the moral high ground by passing beyond the limits of the work to that of a wider socio-political framework: especially if one focuses on the poor, the collective, and the non-European. Yet there is a sense in which formalism is inescapable in the arts. For example, while a given artwork might be rooted very much in a specific situation, there are always finite boundaries to how much of it is relevant to the art in question. When interpreting Picasso’s Guernica, we might well call attention to Franco, Hitler, and perhaps the global war machine, but not to the universe as a whole. Nor is this just a mental shortcut: Guernica is simply not related to the universe as a whole in any real sense, but at most to a limited if indefinite number of surrounding factors. The artwork itself often tells us what to include or exclude from beyond its walls, though in many cases this can be supplemented by the critic’s own social and biographical knowledge. And while debates might occur as to whether—for instance—some of the faces in Guernica are tasteless caricatures of Picasso’s friends or ex-lovers, such debates aim ultimately at a yes-or-no answer: all critical disagreement aside, each element in the universe is either deployed or not deployed in any particular artwork. In a non-trivial sense, the same holds true for archaeology and for everything else. For although holism is intellectually fashionable in our time, every portion of the cosmos is inherently cut off from every other, and is opened up to other zones only through some sort of genuine human or non-human labor.

Yet we can still say that art is more formalistic than archaeology, at least in a relative sense. Whereas in the limit case art can restrict itself to a visual play of lines and enclosed shapes with few if any ulterior associations, archaeology can never aspire to a focus this narrow, and must at least aim at a rough understanding of the society in which a particular piece of rock art arose. The present article is written from the “art” perspective. I will try to zero in on the specifically aesthetic features of rock art, avoiding any speculation about the cultures that give rise to it, an exercise for which I lack professional qualifications in the first place. One seemingly easy way to do this would be to forget that we are dealing with art of a very ancient date, and behave instead as if we were observing works in a twenty-first-century gallery, thus placing rock art on the same stage as recent productions by Louise Bourgeois or Damien Hirst. Yet this would not really succeed, since the great age of such works certainly seems to have an aesthetic force all its own and not just a purely archaeological one. There is something about the primeval character of rock art that makes it different qua artwork, and not just qua cultural product, from any similar pieces that might be executed by a living artist.

Here it might seem that the easiest way to account for the special aesthetic force of extremely old works would be through an appeal to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime, referring to that which is “absolutely” large (the mathematical sublime) or “absolutely” powerful (the dynamical sublime) (Kant 1988, 103). Although Kant’s mathematical sublime primarily refers to phenomena of overwhelming size, such as the nighttime vision of a vast and starry sky, it seems perfectly legitimate to change this spatial sense of the sublime to a temporal one. Is there not something obviously sublime about the fact that the famous cave paintings at Lascaux have an estimated age of 17,000 years, dating to a pre-agricultural and pre-urban world whose contours we can hardly begin to surmise?

There has been at least one previous attempt to link object-oriented ontology (OOO) with the Kantian sublime. I refer to Steven Shaviro’s claim that OOO is devoted too much to the sublime and not enough to beauty, an objection that has a certain surface plausibility (Harman 2011b; Shaviro 2011). After all, OOO emphasizes the withdrawal of real objects behind any attempt to know or manipulate them, and this seems like a good match for the overwhelming otherness of sublimity. Nonetheless, two obstacles immediately arise in Shaviro’s path. The first is that for Kant even beauty is incommensurable with any concept, prose summary, or possible set of rules for generating beautiful objects, as Jacques Rancière has noted in a different connection (Rancière 2011, 64). Beauty for Kant belongs to the realm of taste, which must be a direct aesthetic experience, meaning among other things an experience that can never be paraphrased in literal or conceptual terms. Meanwhile, the Kantian sublime is always treated as infinite (at least by contrast with the human scale) and as rather amorphous, whereas the object for OOO is always finite and fully articulated even if beyond our direct grasp. This leads us to the second problem with Shaviro’s link between OOO and the sublime: namely, there may be no such thing in the first place, at least not in the Kantian sense. Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject”—meaning an object distributed in time or space far beyond the human scale—functions in part as a rival and alternative to the sublime (Morton 2013). Rock art cannot be sublime, precisely because Morton demonstrates that the sublime in the sense of the “absolutely” large or powerful does not exist. In the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor stunned the mathematical world by proving that the single word “infinity” conceals the existence of a limitless number of different sizes of transfinite numbers. There is a sense in which Morton has provided the opposite service for philosophy, by showing that Kant’s purportedly infinite sublime also serves as a cover for countless large finite magnitudes. Let’s begin, then, with a brief explanation of these hyperobjects.

2 Hyperobjects

Some years ago, the journal New Literary History invited articles on OOO and literary criticism by me (Harman 2012a) and Morton (2012), followed with a moderately critical response by our occasional fellow traveler Jane Bennett (2012). The main difference between OOO and Bennett’s position, of course, is that while OOO highlights the role of discrete individual objects in philosophy, Bennett—in the wake of Gilles Deleuze and others—adheres to a more continuous model of the cosmos. As she phrases her alternative position: “One [should] … understand ‘objects’ to be those swirls of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long enough to vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate momentum of the throbbing whole” (Bennett 2012, 227). Along with Deleuze, one can easily detect the influence of Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson in this passage as elsewhere in Bennett’s work (Bennett 2010). Although she presents her position as more balanced than OOO, as able to account for both discrete individuals and the continuous character of reality, the continuum clearly has the upper hand in her work: the cosmos is primarily a “throbbing whole,” and individual objects are generated as byproducts or swirls of this dynamic totality that precedes all more specific entities.

As an object-oriented thinker, Morton is inclined instead—as I am—toward the autonomous and primary character of individual entities. Despite Bennett’s aforementioned skeptical attitude towards this standpoint, there is one place in her response where she does yield some ground. Citing Morton’s rejection of models in which “flowing liquids become templates for everything else” (Morton 2012, 208). Bennett admits that “Morton succeeds in making me think twice about my own attraction to ontologies of becoming when he points out that they are biased toward the peculiar rhythms and scale of the human body” (Bennett 2012, 229). Ontologies of becoming remain fashionable today, in an age when Deleuze and more recently Gilbert Simondon (2005) still hold great prestige among theorists in the humanities, but Morton succeeds in reversing the relation such theorists assume between objects and continua. Whereas the Bergson-Deleuze-Simondon model posits that the flowing whole come first and objects are human-scaled derivatives of this whole, Morton counters that the purported continuous flow of syrup requires a human sensual apparatus: after all, a hypothetical four-dimensional being would see no flow at all, while the tiny and speedy neutrino cannot interact with syrup in the first place. What comes first, for Morton as for anyone else invested in OOO, is the discreteness of individuals at countless different scales; continuous flow is merely a local phenomenon relative to a perceiver of a specific dimension.

This brings us back to Morton’s fertile notion of the hyperobject (Morton 2013; Harman 2019a, 2019b). Although originally designed for ecological purposes—by drawing our attention to the super-human time scales over which radioactive materials decay or plastic cups degrade in a landfill—hyperobjects also have an obvious aesthetic function, taking this word in its original Greek sense of “pertaining to perception.” Morton (2013, 56) gives the gripping example of the artist Felix Hess, who recorded a week’s worth of sound from his Manhattan apartment. When playing back the recording later at high speed, he heard an eerie droning noise in the background, which upon further inquiry turned out to be the shifting tone of the standing pressure wave over the Atlantic Ocean. Just as with the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” that planets supposedly generate in their orbits—inaudible to humans too accustomed to this cosmic dirge to notice it—Hess discovered a sound hidden from us due precisely to its familiarity and slow rate of change. This largely inscrutable object was present in the environment all along, blocked from our notice by its super-human scale.

Our environment is filled with such hyperobjects, which are taken for granted in our perception and use despite their almost timeless backstory. Morton speaks:

I start the engine of my car. Liquefied dinosaur bones burst into flame. I walk up a chalky hill. Billions of ancient pulverized undersea creatures grip my shoes. I breathe. Bacterial pollution from some Archean cataclysm fills my alveoli—we call it oxygen.

(Morton 2013, 58)

Although the Pythagorean music of the spheres is an especially famous example in the West, Morton also gives due credit to an important thinker of medieval Islam:

Ar-Razi writes that gold, gems, and glass can disintegrate, but at much slower speeds than vegetable, fruits, and spices … How much would a ruby degrade between the time of Hipparchus and the time of Galen? So the degradation rate of a celestial body might be to that of a ruby as that of a ruby is to that of a bunch of herbs.

(Morton 2013, 66)

The apparent solidity of rubies, just like the evident flux and flow of syrup, holds only for those who experience time at the scale of a human lifespan. For hypothetically long-lived and slow-moving aliens, we could imagine a ruby visibly disintegrating before their eyes. Does this mean that we are stuck with a relativism in which the question of whether flux or the individual is primary can only be decided ad hoc by a local beholder? Not quite. For whatever exists must exist as something definite, and as such it is different from everything else. Even if syrup were truly determined to be constantly changing and flowing rather than motionless, it would be this specific flow and no other. That point is already enough to establish that a flow is an object. Syrup is an object, oxygen is an object, a pillar of granite is an object, and the lowly may...