Abstract
In proposing ‘to write the history of a modernity that, in forever reinventing prehistory, constantly invents itself’, Maria Stavrinaki set herself the goal of ‘immersing’ herself in the ‘structuring themes’ and ‘revelatory moments’ constitutive of Modernism’s own complicated historicity (p. 17). An historicity constituted by contradictory polarities that have refused to yield to clean dialectical sublations: progress and regression, doubt and certainty, deceleration and acceleration, the longue durée and histoire événementielle, and so on (p. 18). Speaking art-historically, this historicity has unearthed the significance of some hitherto neglected or misunderstood element, which henceforth provided a putative skeleton key for unlocking the hidden motivations and problems of our shared and disorienting aesthetic past in the West. Conversely, Stavrinaki’s text marks a singular occurrence in recent attempts to grapple with the complicated temporal structure of prehistory and its ab/uses in artistic, art-historical, and theoretical production (see Foster, 2020; Rasula, 2020).
This is how prehistory is explored by Stavrinaki. As an innovation–invention in three disparate fields of knowledge-production (geological, anthropological, and aesthetic), with each tracing an unfolding of a single multiplicity of modernity’s becoming. The figures presented to us by Stavrinaki, from Bataille and Jünger to Dubuffet and Smithson, embody an active mode of response to the intrusion of prehistory. Held in its ‘grasp’ and ‘transfixed’ by the disruption of prehistory’s interruptive arrival, these artists and theoreticians engaged in (‘grasped onto’ in turn) an outside of history in order to meet the present’s demands – ultimately passing on to posterity a mode of visual memory allowing us to recollect and rethink our own experience of time and art in preparation for the demands of our present. What is transmitted to us through Stavrinaki’s recasting of these figures, however, is not merely the opportunity to recite or reproduce their efforts (this would be an algorithmic and anemic brute repetition of the past); but, rather, a repetition of their encounter (repetition as difference without a concept, to borrow Deleuze’s definition) with an outside whose potential remains as anarchic and open for us as it was for them (see Emerling, 2023). Returning to prehistory on this score is not a quest after the meaning or significance surrounding a particular discovery, but rather an invitation to read prehistory itself as indexing an indefinite becoming-otherwise. Transfixed by Prehistory is Stavrinaki’s own return to prehistory, performatively enacting the power of such returns for an art history to come.
At first glance, the quote from Stavrinaki’s text that I have presented above seems to be merely another installment in the now troubled history of quests for such all-telling signifiers or fixed points of origin long pursued by contextualists and historicists alike. Yet what sets Stavrinaki’s inquiry apart is both a distinctive methodological deployment of her would-be skeleton key (prehistory) and an ambitious insight (evinced by her methodology) into the open-ended structural reciprocity between past and future. Her work here effectively steers clear of treating these two terms as discrete and unrelated phenomena (past/future), but rather highlights their coextension and intermingling – their breaching and folding back onto one another. Divergent histories emerge through encounters with prehistory (a past–future linkage). Prehistory is constructed here (as it was for the figures Stavrinaki presents to us) as an innovating limit-experience: an outside of the confines of history (tradition, teleology, projection) that avoids the perils of simply lapsing into another nostalgic or utopian ‘end of history’ narrative. Stavrinaki renders this outside heterotopic and interstitial. Following an implicit Foucauldian thread, Stavrinaki approaches prehistory as archaeological open-work, that is, as an ‘enigma’ in need of ‘interpretation’ in terms of the present’s ever-changing needs rather than a search for a diachronic ‘origin’ or archē (Foucault, 1971, 1972). Thus Stavrinaki complicates Modernism’s invention(s) of itself as conditioned by the ever-renewing call (the plurality of re-invention) or return to an enigmatic synchronic anteriority: a horizon that appeared at a particular moment in historical time and yet persists in the present otherwise.
This point places her work in an interesting tension with Quentin Meillassoux’s (2012: 10) concept of the arche-fossil. Where Stavrinaki’s thesis comes into friction with Meillassoux is in her assessment of the nominal–inventional character of prehistory. Namely, that its objects are not necessary objects but possible ones eliminates the static (stable qua factual) character requisite for real mathematical descriptions – such as the case in Meillassoux’s arche-fossil. Stavrinaki dissolves and replaces Meillassoux’s conception of the outside with a framework open to perpetual (contradictory) transformations. In other words, the tension here is between the rational representation of the prehistorical model qua factual entity (i.e. absolutely contingent and yet necessarily serial within a given set) and the incompossible framework(s) by which such a model is created.
Qua invention, prehistory is a purely nominal concept, a proper name without a static or clearly delimited epistemological field. Stated otherwise, prehistory is itself a constructed marker for an abyssal yet discrete field of possible objects whose sense is registered primarily as indexing the insignificance and indeterminacy of ‘the human all too human’ drama we call historical time. Insignificant should not here be understood as pessimistically oriented towards a nihilistic disavowal of practical engagement; on the contrary, the insignificance of historical time is part and parcel of a radical openness that avails itself once the category ‘human’ is relieved of any presupposed archē that grounds a teleologically determined unfolding of its being in the world. Prehistory was, is, and will continue to be an un-grounding of anthropocentricism inasmuch as it dispenses with a would-be authentic ‘origin’ and teleology of humanity. Origination and destination are always irrevocably other. And the exigencies of our shared historical memory now run aground on the shores of such a vertiginously distance-inducing intimacy.
Prehistory is therefore rendered as an indefinite opening into a future that we, in the present, receive from an irretrievable and un-isolatable point in the past: anarchic feedback from the irreversibility of historical time’s apparent linearity. Thus prehistory remains, retrospectively, forever open and available for creative returns (reinventions), which both prompt continual re-encounters in the immediacy of a perpetual moment and promote alterations of that very moment as the products and consequences of these returns. This sense of the past is deeply paradoxical precisely because of its being futural – that is, amorphous and formless in its very being-for-us in the hic et nunc. Much like modernity itself, prehistory has been invented and yet remains as a work ‘to be done’ (p. 26).
This then is the insight guiding Stavrinaki’s method: ‘Prehistory is no doubt the only land that remains for us to discover . . . we are left with the terra incognita of time, a boundless, uncharted, interior land’ (p. 335). The remaining of this ‘land’ bespeaks the very indeterminacy of insignificance that announces the formlessness of Stavrinaki’s past–future characterization of prehistory. And it is this remaining that we ought to take as the inexhaustible potential of reinvention that surges upward, inward, and downward (passages) as it conditions the endless re-invention(s) of modernity. The inextinguishable potential of possible reinventions is indicative of a logic that outstrips that dialectical logic of recognition (with its desired sublation), which presupposes the omnipotent power of judgment: the IS that definitively demarcates the beginning and end (archē-telos) of an entity’s breadth, range, and depth. Contra such ontological models which privilege static determinacy (substance, object, fact, etc.), Stavrinaki’s account of prehistory’s indissoluble and dynamic openness resonates with a Deleuzian model of ontological becoming, a logic of AND. As Deleuze and Parnet (1987: 34–35) tell us:
It is probable that a multiplicity is not defined by the number of its terms. We can always add a 3rd to 2, a 4th to 3, etc., we do not escape dualism in this way, since the elements of any set whatever can be related to a succession of choices which are themselves binary. It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND – stammering. And even if there are only two terms, there is an AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity.
And it is the disjunctive synthetic power of the AND that elaborates the interiority of the ‘land’ that is the heterotopic and interstitial outsideness of prehistory within historicity itself. Its resolute character as past–future means that prehistory remains non-localizable in neither prehistorical facts nor historiographic (or artistic) inventions from them. Prehistory moves between these reinventions as that connective tissue which ‘subtends’ all of these innovative relations (p. 57).
Prehistory, thus, will have been the site for futural and aleatory becomings that we cannot anticipate but whose anarchic potential demands we reinvent ‘prehistory’ as so many open-ended returns that are not yet but will have been the means of our discovery of this interior land, this terra incognita in-between Modernism’s invention(s) of itself.