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Modernism/modernity 11.1 (2004) 161-163



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Response to Carrie Noland

Victor Buchli


Noland here provides a meditation upon the tangle of images encountered and generated by the Lascaux caves in Bataille's work. She displaces it out of the realm of Euro-American aesthetics and early twentieth-century anthropology and into contemporary Paleolithic archaeology and the cognitive aspects of image-making. Noland's intervention represents yet another shifted superimposition over these celebrated "palimpsests" of images. Putting aside the vexed issue of meaning, she not only suggests what these images might have been doing in prehistory and in the early twentieth century, but right now as well. Noland offers an insight into the "agency" of these images, both prehistoric, modern and late modern, while additionally commenting on Bataille's own intervention and constitution of these images as an operation—an enactment I would suggest—of the "informe" or "formless." Though Noland is at pains to distance the notion of the "informe" and its associated transgressive qualities, it nonetheless functions here operationally in terms of the movements it engenders, the transgressive being one of many. "[F]ormless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. . . . In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape." 1

What Noland has shown is that Bataille quite consciously renounced the requirement that "each thing have its form"—working against Breuil's, Windels's and Luquet's attempts to form and order the images in terms of chronological palimpsests and the chronologies of Western art history in general, as well as any other attempt to penetrate the interiority of these images and read their meanings and disentangle them "for academic men [End Page 161] to be happy." Thus Bataille anticipates a "methodological philistinism" familiar in the anthropology of art proposed by Alfred Gell. Noland traces how figures such as Breuil moved the paintings from their contexts among ethnographers and historians of religion and into the aesthetics of modernism—plotting the pulsations generated by these images while asserting the significance of their movements as part of their overall effect. This operation is facilitated by placing the embodied observer, Bataille himself, within the caves, such that "Ce qui est sensible à Lascaux, ce qui nous touche, est ce qui bouge." Thus an argument is made for the agency of these images echoing recent attempts in Alfred Gell's Art and Agency and the works of Bruno Latour. 2 Bataille's meditation here is shown by Noland as a brilliant displacement or "embrouillement," further extended by Noland herself—an additional articulation of the movement of these images that has transfixed and baffled prehistorians. Furthermore, the publication of Lascaux by Bataille for a general public, albeit bourgeois, extends the political scope of Bataille's operation of the "informe," "bringing things down in the world" out of the rarefied sphere of academic discourse. The publication of these images for the first time as color photographs displaces their effects, attenuating them horizontally and democratically within the public realm and further amplifying the surfeit of visual information engendered by these confusing images. This is a displacement true to those "performed" by the images themselves—obscuring each previous apperception in every instance they are beheld, whether through the lived and embodied encounter with the site, the encounter within the academy, or in its attenuated form with the general public—and further in every increasing encounter. This is done not by obscuring a meaning that was never there to obscure, but by the productive power of the aggregative effects that the displacement of these images facilitates. Thus as the images "move" as on the sloping surfaces of the cave itself, they also move, shift pace and syncopation through the infinite acts of reading by the general public: erupting forth with every turning of the page in every unpredictable setting. Such an operation suggests the possibility of the fusion of perceptive horizons through the operation of the "informe," "bringing things down" and engaging directly...

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