Prehistoric aesthetics: an ontology of Stone Age art from the Lower Palaeolithic until the Neolithic

Within this thesis I examine how the phenomenon of ‘prehistoric art’ can be defined. The difficulty is situated within the fact that the concept of ‘art’ cannot be understood apart from the autonomy of art and the aesthetic within Western modernity. This would mean that the condition of art is contradictory to the active role of ‘prehistoric art’ in the constitution of the social. I argue that this apparent opposition is incorrect, as it is precisely the autonomous dimension of art and the aesthetic that allows understanding art’s capacity for social agency. ‘Autonomy’ should not be understood in terms of detachment from the everyday, but in terms of a universal principle. The universal principle of the aesthetic is situated within its capacity to operate as a form of plateau-constitution or world creation. Within the first part of the thesis I examine how the autonomy of art and the aesthetic can be reworked for animism through an analysis of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno. This theoretical examination provides the basis for the second part of the thesis, in which I theorize three different types of aesthetic experience for three different prehistoric periods: the Early Palaeolithic, the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic. Whereas it is necessary to understand the universal principle of art and the aesthetic, it is equally necessary to understand that this principle can only take up a particular form and therefore can be modified in different ways. By theorizing three different modifications of aesthetic experience across prehistory, I argue that one develops insight into the way prehistoric art takes up different forms through time. I construct a definition of prehistoric art by examining whether one can detect continuity across the three different types of aesthetic experience that I propose