ABSTRACT
I contribute to a prehistory of rhetoric by exploring early rhetorical practices in the Paleolithic era. Using new materialist methodologies (Karen Barad, Andy Clark), I theorize how humans are constitutively entangled with material environments and objects. I also emphasize a materialist historiographic method that seeks bottom-up, emergent explanations for cultural innovations. I propose two rhetorical forms in the Paleolithic: first, rhetoric as an emergent development stemming from increased sociomaterial complexity, performed via plaques, beads, pigments, and spatial arrangement; and second, rhetoric as integrated into mysterious cave rituals, which are given lasting inscription in the famous cave images. Contemporary theories argue that some of the cave imagery stems from visions achieved through altered states, but we might well understand such states as something environed—a capacity of human beings elevated to a techne and performed via the material affordances of cave properties. These cave rituals show that rhetoric recruited from other cultural developments, including magic and religion, a point that can help differently illuminate Greek rhetoric as well. My overall goal is to help forge a materialist-oriented prehistory that demonstrates rhetoric to be fundamentally entwined with the emergence of modern humans.
