Matter Transmission

Mediation in a Paleocyber Age

Nicolás Salazar Sutil

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501339462
• eBook ISBN: 9781501339479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

Arguing for a paleocybernetic approach to current media studies debates, Nicolas Salazar Sutil develops an original framework for a new media ecology that embraces the primitive, the prehistoric, and the brute. Paying serious attention to materials used for cultural mediation that are unprocessed, unexplained, and raw such as bones and limestones, Salazar Sutil posits that advanced industrialisation of new media technology has prompted countercultural movements that call for radical new ways of transmitting culture, for instance through an experiential and high-tech appreciation of prehistoric landscape heritage. The future calls for a Palaeolithic awareness of living landscape as medium for the embodied transmission of cultural imaginaries and memories. The more media technology spurs mass forms of instantaneous media communication, the greater the need for primitive knowledge of earthling body and earthly landscape, our prime media for sustainable cultural transmission.

1

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 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 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.

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 whos e 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, 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 nature-in-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 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 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 expressi on 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.

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 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 av...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• 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
• Copyright