One of the most important questions we can ask is how we came to recognize ourselves. This is not the same as asking when we first saw our image reflected in still water, or how we learned to react selfishly to pain and fear. It is not merely self-awareness we are after, but the awareness of oneself as oneself—the awareness of ‘I’ apart from the material continuum of the natural world, and without any other quality attached to it. So many uniquely human technological achievements—the fishhook, fire, cutting edges, even basic seafaring—the results of millennia of trials and errors—seem possible without recourse to ‘I’. But identity, philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis, and other foundations of classical and modern life are predicated on a language of introspection.

The answer to this question will involve changes in human anatomy and semiotic environment, but unfortunately evidence of these things remain scarce. Representation of the self and the world in art would seem to qualify as exploratory self-recognition and even self-reflection, especially if we remember that art has never been inextricably linked to the concept of audience. Franco-Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic cave frescoes, such as at Lascaux and Chauvet, along with the early Venus figurines, are cited as mileposts in the ripening of uniquely human mental faculties. The coordination of manual dexterity and ability to depict the world as iconography rather than intentionally variable notations becomes highly visible on the walls of Upper Paleolithic caves.[1]

If the rock art in the Chauvet cave is in fact 32,000 years old, it is the eldest of all European non-portable human art [2] and its implications for the evolution of culture are considerable, even if much older rock art is someday discovered. The front and rear sections of the cave seem to have been used in different ways by the artists. In the former, the majority of images are red and in the latter most everything is painted black. At least thirteen different species of animals are identified, though most of the depictions are of cave bears, lions, mammoths, and rhinoceroses. Aurochs, bison, horses, ibex, Megaceros deer, musk-oxen, panther, red deer, reindeer, and an owl are also represented. The choice of animals belies a significance greater than the common theory about sympathetic hunting magic, as only a few of them are known from the archaeological record to have been hunted.

The deepest caverns feature the most spectacular art. These dark, cold places could only have been colder 30,000 years ago. The last and deepest, the Salle du Fond, is the dwelling place of Venus and the Sorcerer, a charcoal portrait drawn on a high, a vertical limestone cone hanging from the ceiling. Classically Aurignacian in her proportions, and resembling other Venus figurines from prehistoric Europe, this Venus as well as others at Chauvet, seem to be positioned before corridors to other chambers, and may somehow indicate them. Also in this cold, deep place there is a chimerical figure appearing to be the lower body of a woman with the upper body of a bison attached. And scattered throughout the caves there are stenciled red ochre hand prints and hand stencils, as well as seeming abstractions made of dots and lines, and something vaguely butterfly in form. Perhaps the most aesthetically refined images are the Horse Panel and the Panel of Lions and Rhinoceroses. Werner Herzog, auteur of “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, a recent film documentary about Chauvet, is not the first to ascribe a sense of self-awareness to the art on the walls. As with all known European cave art, there are still no complete human figures, though the aptitude to create them is clearly in evidence.

“There is a certain strange, palpable power from these images, and it’s not only that the paintings are so accomplished,” Herzog said after visiting Chauvet. “There is something that touches us instantaneously, something that is completely awesome.  What you are witnessing is the origin of the modern human soul and the beginning of figurative representation.”

What kind of transition are we, in fact, witnessing? Even if earlier examples of figurative representation exist, Herzog’s point is still well taken. For at Chauvet we witness a near complete precapitulation of European schools and techniques—and so accomplished that we are taken to believe it is, like the Galgenberg figurine from Austria, the product not of some wild genius, but of generations of accumulated artistic tradition. In fact, Chauvet is a 5000-year collaboration, for radiocarbon dates range from 32,000± to 27,000± years. Although there is no evidence the caves were ever lived in, people visited them again and again. Human footprints belonging to a child seem to have been left many years after most of the art was made. Many of the paintings appear to have been made only after the walls were scraped clear of debris and concretions. This left a smoother and noticeably lighter area upon which the artists worked. Similarly, a three dimensional quality is achieved by incising or etching the outlines of certain figures.

So much is found on the walls of Chauvet: naturalism and zooanatomical precision combined with abstraction and an almost Cubist perspective; shading and perspective, such as would not be reinvented until Aristotle’s skenographia; cinematic motion; classical balance and completeness; mixed media; pointillistic and brushstroke techniques; stenciling; finely grained hues made of ground mineral and vegetable matter, and what you might call the artistic purity of pre-Classical Europe, celebrated by Nietzsche as Dionysian. Everything except calligraphy is found at Chauvet. It surely would have inspired the Primitivists, and indeed may have done, for we know Picasso visited Lascaux in 1940.

But how can we interpret art made 30,000 years ago? Why was it made and what can it tell us about the individuals who created it, and a society to which they may have played a special role? How can we be sure we are seeing evidence of self-awareness and introspection? We are at an immediate disadvantage because we can treat the art only as indexical signs, not as symbols. If they were intended to be symbols, this language has been lost. Thus, we are restricted to describing it iconographically and stylistically, and to interpreting its utility in speculative ways, from the expressly sacred to the purely aesthetic. Abbé Breuil’s description of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira as the vestiges of hunting magic, intended to procure success from the fickleness of nature, has become an interpretive touchstone. Max Raphael, a German art historian who studied the Dordogne caves, believes the animals in cave art were clan totems, the cave walls forming the narrative of an early epic clan saga. Other researchers use algorithms to analyze the frequency, positions, proximate placement of icons on the walls, or more simply study groupings and superimpositions of certain animals on certain panels to define a deeper syntax.

The importance of this perspective is that it allows us to set aside concerns about how the art functioned, and what exactly it symbolized for whom, and focus instead on the poetics of the sacred, and on the semiotic values of representation. The question of self-recognition in art should be approached first as the question of how life and semiosis emerge coterminously.[3] The Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll theorized that different species live in essentially different semiotic worlds (umwelt) though they may dwell in the same environment. By this is meant that an organism’s sensory perceptive organs and indices of communication define its reality, regardless of what more may be going on outside its body. Uexküll’s classic and eloquent study of ticks is helpful in understanding this.[4]

Given the differences in neuroanatomy, the semiotic world of humans is more complex, we might say, than that of the tick (if not that of the chimpanzee). But to appreciate and understand this difference, we must consider the dynamic relationship between our bodies and the rest of the material world. All technology, however we choose to define this, whether stone or fiber optic, allows us to extend ourselves, making us somehow more than we were—in the senses meant by both MacLuhan and the Futurists.[5] One aspect of this relationship is our ability to create representations, which  suggests we live no longer in an umwelt but in what Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman terms a semiosphere—a greater semiotic welt made up of all possible texts, behaving like an organism or mechanism. Technology, in a positive feedback loop with the human body, has allowed us to compile, categorize, and analyze as a rational system, all things on the planet.  Representation is part of this process.

This does not mean humans have transcended the tight hide of five senses. What all goes on beyond the borders of our bodies is still, at least in part, mysterious in the same way the inhabitants of Flatland cannot imagine Spaceland until they go there. The German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, drawing on Aquinas and Plato rather than biology, cited rationality as the faculty which allows the human person to live in an intertextual welt while other forms of life remain in their umwelten. The paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet may reveal vestiges of the sacred—of something pre-rational and pre-utility—but they are also formally coherent. They are logical articulations that demonstrate observation and analysis of animals.

We can only speak of semiotic complexity in terms of scale, not as a unique faculty. After all, we share far more invariant faculties with other animals in this regard than that which distinguishes us. Changes in the brain and organs of perception and speech during the Lower Paleolithic and before suggest to us the possibility of complex sign-mediated activity semiosis even among Homo erectus, but representation is not a communicative aspect strictly limited to humans. What distinguishes us, according to Agha, is the superimposition of systematized grammar on these shared faculties. I would argue the the systematized grammar is visible at Chauvet and Lascaux, but not in the engraved ochre piece from Blombos Cave.

Merleau-Ponty identified artistic demand and its visual perception—the obligation, to see beyond the representation and into the world of semiosis beyond the limits of his body—as the basis for the 1:1 relationship of subject and object—of I and me—predicate to self-reflection and all its trappings. Since this cannot have changed overnight, we are again limited to charting the course of self-reflection in parallel to the course of the development of grammar, especially recursion and the hierarchical concatenation of forms. As residents of grammatical Flatland, it is difficult for us to imagine grammatical Spaceland, but surely the final chapter is not yet written. Perhaps the eventual obsolescence of the human body, as Stellarc has theorized it, will permit an engagement with a yet more expansive semiosphere, such as that described by Eckhart, Swedenborg and other religious mystics. We can only guess.

It doesn’t matter whether we interpret the authors of the art at Chauvet and other Upper Paleolithic caves as shamans practicing sympathetic hunting magic, or celebrators of success, or epic taletellers, or impish doodlers; to active social practice constitutive of social order (as theorized by Hodder and the post-processualists) or to a dead issue following a vital process of creation. Does the handprint panel at Chauvet indicate self reference or “I”?  These things may ultimately be unknowable. We can only approach the question of self-recognition in terms of how, not why. 32,000 years later we have no answer to the question of why, beyond market concerns, we demand to artistically represent the world either as we see it or idealize it; why we make the concrete abstract, and turn fantasies into reality. We don’t even know the paintings at Chauvet were intended for an audience beyond their authors; nor do we do ourselves any service defining it as art, per se. As Bataille suggested, the purpose of the cave paintings, whatever it was, is only of partial account to the constancy and universality, and grandeur of our experience of it as a kind of visual poetry written in a language common to us all.

[2] There is some evidence of both portable and parietal figurative art practiced prior to 32,000 BP, c.f. the Berekhat Ram figurine from Palestine, and petroglyphs at Bhimbetka, India, both of which have been dated to the Acheulian Middle Paleolithic. In fact, many fundamental technological achievements seem to have been present in Eurasia prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens. Australia also has a very early rock art tradition.

[3] Winfried Nöth has even speculated on a broader origin of life in which the universe itself is coterminous with semiosis. See his article “Protosemiotics and Physicosemiosis.”

[4] “…this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood” (J von Uexküll & G Kriszat. 1934. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten. Berlin: J. Springer. English translation by Kevin Attell). For the tick, the umwelt is reduced to only three known carriers of biosemiotic information: 1) the odor of butyric acid; 2) the temperature of 37? C (i.e., the blood of all mammals); 3) miscellaneous tactile sensations.

[5] Perhaps in other ways technology can makes us less than we were. Consider Deleuze and Guattari. Consider Ted Kaczynski.

Werner Herzog continued…“What I Learned”:

Part 3

OK, here comes the fun part! 

Herzog shows footage from his oscar nominated Encounters at the End of the World. I feel a total disconnect between up and down. Had the explorers not been wearing wetsuits and flippers, had I not watched the bubbles of air float up, I would swear that we were looking back at earth from the moon. Are we on top of the world looking down or reveling in an enchanted abyss? Once you have oriented you realize that indeed these aquatic astronauts have entered this underworld via a 30 foot shaft drilled into the Ross Ice Shelf, Anatartica. 

Back on dry ground or high ground, Herzog talks about man’s ability to fly and freedom. A collective dream if ever there was one. He shows clips form his “The Great Ecstasy of Sculptor Steiner” (1975) the hypnotic study of Swiss ski-jumping champion Walter Steiner. Now granted Steiner never wore a parachute…

But we’ve come a long way baby!!! These guys below give a whole new meaning to human flight. Damn. They figured out they can loose the skis altogether…jump off Norwegian peaks and spread their squirrel suits. Cowabunga!

Werner Herzog continued…“This is what I learned”:

Part 2

That Werner Herzog is a lover of language and poetry. He speaks of the witnessing, the taxonomy of Virgil’s Georgics, a paean to the earth and all that grows and grazes there.

Herzog tells of the Icelandic Codex Regius, thought to have been written in the 1270’s. How he was allowed to actually hold the delicate document, made up of 45 vellum leaves, and of its return journey to Reykjavík in 1971 accompanied  by  the full Danish military escort. He further narrates on the oral traditions of Iceland preserved and reserved for vital consolation. Women whose husbands have been lost at sea, recite all 800 verses of the Codex to purge their grief.

And another note on a language lost, it’s last Aboriginal speaker, isolated in society, drops coins into a vending machine as if listening for the question only he can supply the answer to.  

Here are Excerpts from Virgil’s Georgics: Tranlated by  H. R. Fairclough

 Georgics Book I [43] In the dawning spring, when icy streams trickle from snowy mountains, and the crumbling clod breaks at the Zephyr’s touch, even then would I have my bull groan over the deep-driven plough, and the share glisten when rubbed by the furrow. That field only answers the covetous farmer’s prayer which twice has felt the sun and twice the frost; from it boundless harvests burst the granaries. And ere our iron cleaves an unknown plain, be it first our care to learn the winds and the wavering moods of the sky, the wonted tillage and nature of the ground, what each clime yields and what each disowns. Here corn, there grapes spring more luxuriantly; elsewhere young trees shoot up, and grasses unbidden. See you not, how Tmolus sends us saffron fragrance, India her ivory, the soft Sabaeans their frankincense; but the naked Chalybes give us iron, Pontus the strong-smelling beaver’s oil, and Epirus the Olympian victories of her mares? From the first, Nature laid these laws and eternal covenants on certain lands, even from the day when Deucalion threw stones into the empty world, whence sprang men, a stony race. Come then, and where the earth’s soil is rich, let your stout oxen upturn it straightway, in the year’s first months, and let the clods lie for dusty summer to bake with her ripening suns; but should the land not be fruitful, it will suffice, on the eve of Arcturus’ rising, to raise it lightly with shallow furrow – in the one case, that weeds may not choke the gladsome corn; in the other, that the scant moisture may not desert the barren sand.

 Georgics Book III [440] Diseases, too, their causes and tokens, I will teach you. Foul scab attacks sheep, when chilly rain and winter, bristling with hoar frost, have sunk deep into the quick, or when the sweat, unwashed, clings to the shorn flock, and prickly briars tear the flesh. Therefore the keepers bathe the whole flock in fresh streams; the ram is plunged in the pool with his dripping fleece, and let loose to float down the current. Or, after shearing, they smear the body with bitter oil lees, blending sliver scum and native sulphur with pitch from Ida and richly oiled wax, squill, strong hellebore, and black bitumen. Yet no help for their ills is of more avail than when one has dared to cut open with steel the ulcer’s head; the mischief thrives and lives by concealment, while the shepherd refuses to lay healing hands on the wounds, and sits idle, calling upon the gods for happier omens. Nay more, when the pain runs to the very marrow of the bleating victims, there to rage, and when the parching fever preys on the limbs, it is well to turn aside the fiery heat, and within the hoof to lance a vein, throbbing with blood, even as he Bisaltae are wont to do, and the keen Gelonian, when he flees to Rhodope and the wilds of the Getae, and there drinks milk curdled with horses’ blood. Should you see a sheep oft withdraw afar into the soft shade, or listlessly nibble the top of the grass, lagging in the rear, or sink while grazing in the midst of the field and retire, late and lonely, before night’s advance, straightway with the knife check the offence, ere the dread taint spreads through the unwary throng. Not so thick with driving gales sweeps a whirlwind from the sea, as scourges swarm among cattle. Not single victims do diseases seize, but a whole summer’s fold in one stroke, the flock and the hope of the flock, and the whole race, root and branch. Of this may one be witness, should he see – even now, so long after – the towering Alps and the forest of the Noric hills, and the fields of Illyrian Timavus and the shepherds’ realm derelict, and their glades far and wide untenanted.

 Georgics Book III [515] But lo, the bull, smoking under the ploughshare’s weight, falls; from his mouth he spurts blood, mingled with foam, and heaves his dying groans. Sadly goes the ploughman, unyokes the steer that sorrows for his brother’s death, and amid its half-done task leaves the share rooted fast. No shades of deep woods, no soft meadows can touch his heart, no stream purer than amber, rolling over the rocks in its course towards the plain; but his flanks are unstrung throughout, numbness weighs upon his languid eyes, and his neck sinks with drooping weight to earth. Of what avail is his toil or his services? What avails it, that he turned with the share the heavy clod? And yet no Massic gifts of Bacchus, no feasts, oft renewed, did harm to him and his. They feed on leaves and simply grass; their cups are clear spring and rivers racing in their course, and no care breaks their healthful slumbers.

Werner Herzog

PART 1

That George Murphy and Fred Astraire danced and sang their hearts out in the Cole Porter “Broadway Melody of 1940“. If you get a chance to see it on the big screen, do it!

That Werner Herzog is a human enthusiast, a champion of the raw psyche, condensed emotionality, “Fever Dreams“, and the “Ecstatic Truth“. Thus being said, he is the prime candidate to direct opera. Documenting the Wodabee tribes of the Sahara provides Herzog with the opportunity to explore a dramatic dialectic. He seizes the moment to pair footage of the tribesmen, highly decorated, dressed in transvestite finery, flashing the whites of their eyes and teeth (regarded as extremely appealing to the opposite sex) with the only recorded castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, his solo ‘Ave Maria’ by Gounod, recorded in 1904 in the Vatican. The synchronicity is arresting and makes for a most memorable operatic moment.