Tassili Algebra:

Counting Nil in Technology

Agnes Horvath

Abstract 
This article addresses three questions. First, how did technology first appear as a plot in history? Second, what are the basic plot-components in the Mesolithic Tassili images? Third, how to identify these components as elements through which the integrity of forms can be invaded in order to multiply things? This manner of proceeding offers a novel understanding of technological knowledge by placing the accent on the fact that technology is built on systematic transgression, on the infringement of forms in the sense of incorporating emissions of altered properties and so producing something merely semi-similar to the authentic one: newly and artificially incorporating nil again into matter and so disturbing the original arrangement of the things in forms with the aim of procuring multiplication, and thus wealth and growth. The aim of the plot is therefore unlimited acquisitiveness.
Keywords: technology, liminality, masking, void, occult, virtual reality, trickster 

Introduction: On the occult craft of technology
Studies on technology can be situated on a relatively novel field of studies that relies jointly on anthropology and comparative historical sociology; an approach explored, among others, by Bruno Latour, Andrew Gell, Franz Borkenau, Lewis Mumford, Heidegger and Shapin or Schaffer. The paper is particularly close to the work of Jean-Pierre Dupuy concerning the mechanical invasion of the mind that is taking possession on thinking. This article approaches this theme from another angle, arguing that the human mind/brain itself is capable of invasion through emitting images. Such an approach to the study of technology is characterized by an attempt to bring together theoretically informed comparative anthropological and historical investigations, so that anthropological studies could become opened up to a comparative and historical perspective, while studies belonging to comparative historical sociology that often use in a taken for granted manner concepts developed from the modern world could become more powerful through the application of concepts developed by anthropologists during their field-work. This idea approaches central problems of contemporary technology indirectly, through the distance generated by anthropology (in space) and history (in time). Cybernetics, as inspired by the work of Bateson, could also offer a valuable contribution to a better understanding of virtual spaces generated by mind, the living force of the brain, that could be named ‘bio-power’, taking further Foucault’s concept, according to which power is gained by the invasive incorporation of the human body. Here the paper adds the power of images, which is derived not from the mobilisation of the body (an idea shared by Freud and Foucault), but the mobilisation of the mind to catch an external, foreign power, which can be called the ‘divine’ or the ‘superhuman’, and which in this paper, in lack of a better word, I identify with the ‘nil’. The nil is a positional number, the naked one, not having any substance on its own, but exerting a powerful impact solely by the position it occupies in a system and in this sense is a spiritual essence more than anything else. This is why this paper is entitled ‘Tassili algebra’, as it deals with the effect and the impact of the nil in the realm of forms of desert paintings, transforming reality into something virtual. Here the emission of images by the human mind has central importance, as such images are more powerful the more they deviate from reality, replacing the geometric equality of nature (Plato, Gorgias) with hybrids (the grotesque, taking Bakhtin’s terminology). They are powerful in the sense that deprivation has a negative power, building up schisms and thus producing a multiplication of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire. The significance of the concept of nil in understanding technological growth can thus be situated on this Batesonian framework of ‘cyberspace’.
According to this perspective technology is first and foremost an emission of forms, not reducible to a technical/scientific how to do; it is an art of the multiplicative image-making craft, a way of rendering forms physically visible – forms that were first collected and then merged into a hybrid, virtual construction with the void – as we hypothetically claim, in the Tassili images – in order to gain multiplication by infiltrating nil into things (the res of Heidegger, in his Origins of the Work of Art), thus creating a new, non-Euclidean cyberspace. On the multi-disciplinary basis indicated above this article explores the prehistoric Tassili paintings in order to document the genesis of occult technological knowledge. Among Tassili’s Therianthropic (being partly animal and partly human in form) and divine-human transfigurative images, where gods assumed human or animal forms, we are particularly interested in the paintings of the Round Head period that emit mainly (75%) anthropomorphic figures, invoking human images, as if converting the integrity of human embodiment into or towards the fluxional or vacuous nil. They expose human forms for the possession of nude powers that are deprived of forms, that are in void or in absence, due to a lack of form, incorporating the nil into the generative process towards multiplication, thus such activity involves an occult craft, in the sense of derivation, or deviance from reality. ‘Occult’ derives from the Latin word occultus “clandestine, hidden, secret”; it is knowledge of the hidden, more precisely that forbidden knowledge which is situated in cyberspace, because it is incommensurable in the sense of being out of touch with the world of real forms. But why this incommensurable occurs at all, the use of which results in virtuality, once activated and infused with the (particular) bio powers and capacities of the void, once the technologist puts it to use? The incommensurable is an erratic, generative transgression that breaks the “geometric equality” in nature, so this acceptance will never be happily fulfilled, which brings an abominable infinity into the technological process, the never-ending aversive openings and closures – in fact the main reason for multiplication. This fact gives a gigantic dimension to technology, leading to an infinite series of processuality in mechanical births and deaths, an immeasurable dynamic multiplication of dismemberment caused by the activation of the nil, which is a spiritual force that is deprived of a body and thus has a desire for real existence and for forms which are the conditions of possibility of being. This torment of depravity rips history open to a new system of which the Tassili pictures are both products and generators: where the endless repetitive sequence of images that are always the same constantly regenerate the same suggestion of injured, resentful eagerness for banishment – at least, this is the subliminal message. The liminal message is that technology is calm and pure growth, being sound and sober, even though it blindly penetrates underground the things, ignoring the relationship between forms, exploiting the harmony of the thing with itself, spotting weakness, paralyzing the independence from external causal relationships; it is an enslaving endeavour due to its unproductive, barren sterility, as it is an occult craft which transform existence into virtuality. 
In mapping the emission of technology I will rely on a number of relevant approaches, though none of them explicitly thematised the connection between technology and its origins in the emission of forms for the nil, neither its exact functioning in copying and masking authentic forms and by doing so extracting them from their reality, transforming and altering their actuality into virtuality. These include the work of Lewis Mumford, the most important classic figure in the history of technology; Bruno Latour, whose work has an anthropological dimension, incorporating Tarde’s ideas on imitation (Latour 2001; see also Latour and Lépinay 2009) and recently turned to the question of different modes of being (Latour 2011); Heidegger’s ideas on technology, in particular concerning the reduction of beings to the status of a ‘standing reserve’, especially in connection to his work on identity and difference and the origins of works of art (Heidegger 1967, 1969, 1976); Gell on magic and incantation in technology; and Borkenau on the sociology of the mechanistic world view. From social theory the paper relies on Bernhard Giesen’s ideas concerning sacred performance (Giesen 2006), and Alessandro Pizzorno’s groundbreaking writings on mask, recognition and identity (Pizzorno 1987, 1991, 2010). In the field of the sociology and history of science and technology one should mention the works by the Edinburgh School of the sociology of science and the Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science Department, which share important points of contact, focusing on the social and public correlates of modern science (Schaffer et al. 2009, Shapin 1994, Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Another important source is Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s research concerning how is it possible to act upon the mind in order to bring about desired changes through mechanization, by leaping over reality and linking up correspondence with the vacuous in a virtual space. This article also incorporates the unique scholarship of Frances Yates, particularly relevant due to its explicit thematisation of the link between modern science and the shape shifting alchemical technology. Her books, written in association with the institution founded by Aby Warburg, another maverick figure, challenged centuries of received wisdom and are now recognised as classics (Yates 1964, 1972, 1976, 1979). The singularity of Yates’s thinking lies in establishing a direct connection between obscure Renaissance magi and the pioneers of the scientific method, reconfiguring iconic figures like Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and René Descartes on a rather strange context, saturated with alchemy, hermetic thought, or movements like the Rosicrucians, which were the breeding ground of their ideas. In doing so Yates practically rewrote our understanding of the rise of modern science and technology. Her work, especially concerning the importance of sectarianism at the background of modern science, has also close connections with the way Reinhart Koselleck (1988), in a similarly path-breaking way, explored the nexus between the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and thus modern politics, and secret societies. These approaches offer a new perspective from which the connections between secret societies, the use of masks, and the performance of occult, conjectured by figures like Frobenius but falling into disrepute, can be again brought into serious discussion concerning the emissions of forms, the emanations of nil or supernatural power that are liberated through the transgression of being, and their correlation with unanimated technological dynamism in the new craft of the occult in technology.
	While we certainly don’t know how technology escaped from its forbidden hide, at least we can perceive its emissive effect mechanism and its production of hybrid constructions. An encounter with these formations strangely brings into the mind the peculiar political formation of communism, where the borders between world and the void were similarly eroded, well documented among others in the works of Bakhtin, Bulgakov, or the Strugatskys, and analyzed by Arpad Szakolczai on liminality (2008) and Katherine Verdery (1999) on the rituals of dead bodies in the political milieu of communism. In these writings the perception about the abyss of existence writ large evokes the recognitive experience of the void. This void experience also gains a visible expression in the best Eastern European films. It is enough to mention the names of Tarr, Gothár, Mikhalkov and especially Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films are about hostile alien forces that opened up a hole inside reality. Bakhtin was not simply an academic either: he went through the communist experience of vacuity that opens up the abyss, robs reality, empties forms and dissolves borders. His sensitivity for the grotesque is very probably rooted in his living the unreal that daily existence represented under the communist political formation for dozens of years, as it is seen in filmmaking and literature of the Eastern Europeans about the vacuity that occupies any position in any relation for which a valuable self-support is given. But viewing it does not mean to describe void, which is in fact impossible –as if one could grab nothing with nothingness. This is why Bakhtin’s talent was needed for capturing it through the description of double language, like double-voiced discourses (heteroglossia), grotesque bodies or hybrid constructions: the body that swallows the void and the void that swallows the body. The transgression that the void provokes is also well documented in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, based on a novel by the Strugatskys, as the void is nude, a garmentless buff that could be anything – omnipotence and emptiness at the same time, a whole and a hole which is given value solely by the position it occupies. When invaded, the nil becomes bare wanting, the grotesque double of incommensurable asymmetry, its bloodless azoism turned into the opposite of multiplication and fertility; sterile virginity into lustful eagerness for flesh and blood, which can be rightly called as the trickster. 
In the following I offer an approach to technology through the immeasurable, where forms and the void are merged together in order to fill a missing link in the thinking of the predecessors listed above. The understanding of this phenomenon is already beyond the empiricism suggested by Bacon, Newton and Locke – a problematic approach, as it breaks down the unity of social locality and rootedness, merely representing and reifying atomization and which, combined with the mechanical (ir)rationalism of Descartes that, far from eradicating the occult from Europe (Shapin 1994, Israel 2000), quite on the contrary advanced its emissive spread under the guise of rationality. In technology forms transgress their limits and start a new hybrid life, toward the dissolving nil, well marked in politics by the development of mass democracy, made into a fairy tale by industrialized political marketing that made people overindulgent by snuggling the mass-public while deluding them. 
Secondly, the paper will advance the following proposition: if technology is the incommensurable occult, then there must be something or somebody apart of it, the one who quantifies, who is the calculating emitter. In order that the effect mechanism might be set in motion, there must be a craftsman who has the appointed art to arrive at the gods, unmaking the communion and friendship between gods and men (Plato, Gorgias 508a). The answer lies in the third component of this peculiar nil situation, the master of ceremonies, and the possibility of usurping that position of where the division is always between the trickster and the charismata. This is why I intend to incorporate the figure of the emitter who hijacks the idea of the master, the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ who is there next to the Faust already in Goethe – and where even Faust requires Mephistopheles in order to be really ‘effective’. Emitters are usurping desire, purchasing devotion and releasing admiration in exchange for influence, for custody over possession. For their purposes of altering form, they force one part to suit another and arrange everything in a certain artificial processual order. All those who are colonized by their action, deprived of their self-support, become dependent on the emitters, thus generating a deprived mass. Here the history of alchemy, this particular arch-emitter craft gives pertinent examples. Beside the already disintegrated ‘limit’ or forms and the invading ‘unlimited’ or the void always stands the alchemist, the emissary who is not simply learned and experienced but who invents crafts by which he can gain power, who has the ‘measuring equipment’ by which to provide guidance, who can generate a new form out of the formlessness: he is the well prepared one, who is poaching and indoctrinating. The emitter is a sniper imperialist who is only trained for this one thing, emitting image-forms, and thus the one who in this particular sense is ‘in the know’. Moving to the concrete subject matter of this paper, in Tassili this special, calculative knowledge is projected on the Libyan rocks with the purpose of transgressing forms, trespassing forms towards the void. This craft is the craft of lawlessness, but it enjoys much special immunity in the world of balance and objectivity due to its intimate, cosy relationship with the static principles which it transgresses. Occultism is concerned with the nature of the form-in-itself, the very reality of forms, which – in combination with the unlimited – in contained in the thing (see Plato, Philebus). This is accomplished through a direct, perceptual awareness of the craftsman to discover this very void underneath the forms. In both cases, the cohesion of the forms between the measured and the immeasurable void is neglected, their harmonious relationship thus is undermined, and this is crystallized into a disturbance known as technology, which in turn brings abundance and wealth, which seems for a while an honorable fact, but in the long run generates extermination. 
This is the way in which the maker of hybrid constructions can artificially craft what is missing in the interwoven texture of reality, and so making quasi forms that suffer from their own formlessness, devoid of their self-support, in abomination, as the harmony ceased to exist; artificial creatures like the homunculus in Goethe’s Faust that desperately crave for being real. A shame for one’s lost corporality and the nausea due to one’s own mutant condition pave the way towards technology, thus endlessly converting harmony into a hypothetical quasi-reality without the texture of real life. Technicalised hybrid forms proliferate their own like that can survive without integrity, as they possess a dominating materiality. Taking the Tassili images from the Mesolithic Round Head period, they contain 77 horned figures on 26 sites, masked figures on 16 sites, and penis attributed to humans on 11 sites (Soukopova, 2012: 162-163). In every possible location anthropomorphic figures appear with body painting, horned, holding sticks or a bow, having a bracelet, masked or T-shaped, half moon or circles and ovals, painted hands or worshippers or triangular attribute: they are all receptacles, which was famously considered by Plato as the main attribute of the limit-unlimited relationship, where a third essential property appears from their mixture, which bears productivity, a material substratum, a kind of spatial field (‘place’ or khóra): “What essential property, then, are we to conceive it to possess? This in particular,—that it should be the receptacle, and as it were the nurse, of all Becoming” (Plato, Timaeus 49a). These hybrids combine forms in the manner of hieros gamos, added together and divided by other entities, thus creating a double that resemble only themselves, not their parents, subjecting things, politics, events and beings with acquisitive zeal but without conscience. Through this peculiar equalization process, where the fabric of life is digested and dissolved slowly into decay, one by one grows the voracious receptacle, the ‘third thing’ of Plato’s Timaeus. Everything in this process points with striking clarity to sexual union, but to a grotesque one: “the most typical form of the animal tales depicted ((ZZZvalami missing)) to undulate them away from their natural closure”, as a scholar noted in his surprise at watching the Tassili images (Graziosi, 2005:17). Open female genitals and erect male organs are frequently depicted on the images, which also often show copulation between humans or between humans and animals, or even between humans and animal faced humanoids, in all possible locations and postures (Hachid, 1998: 265-269, Gauthier, 1996: 116-123, 130, 127, 126). There are also subliminal messages about man-animal union, with the man’s hand on the back of the animal: “It is remarkable that all the human beings accompanying herds on the rocks of Tassili are shown in the same attitude”; in the overwhelming mania for the erotic engravings: the forearms, the spirals, the hands, the sticks, the tulip forms; the obscene abstract or figurative forms that are everywhere (Lajoux, 1962: 68, 86, 116, 119); the stone circles and womblike edifices, bags engravings around holes, cupules, kettles in relation with water, suggesting fecundation (Gauthier, 1996: 134-135; Soukopova, 2012: 138-143; Hachid, 1998: 122-126, 160; Frobenius, 1973: 82-87). The whole landscape as if repeats this, with phallic pinnacle-form rocks, pillars and columns and beehive shelters, curved, natural amphitheatres, cave-like niches, all these circus ring forms that suggest bowls, enclosures, the closed cups of conception (Lhote 1959: 17, 40; Barth, 1965: 109; Dubief, 1999: 315). 

The Tassili desert paintings, or the transgression of forms in the genealogy of technology
Taking the idea of emission further, and in a direction not explored previously, I will argue that emission by itself transgresses forms, as forms exist only in themselves, belong only to themselves – this is the reason for the impossibility, mentioned by Plato, of adding anything to them without committing an offence against the unity of existence (Plato, Theaetetus, 202a). With the Tassili images the new concept of receptacle was born, that incommensurable which has no real relationship either with the forms or the unlimited, similar to the case of the diagonal, a mathematical length that has no rational relationship to the sides. The diagonal belongs to the incomprehensible world of the occult, at least for the ancient Greek mathematicians who considered the diagonal as an arrheton, a forbidden knowledge, which transgresses order, being an offense against the law, breaking virtue and the cohesion of the kinship innate in nature, that geometrical equality that for Plato was holding the human and the divine together: ‘heaven and earth and Gods and men are held together by communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance, and justice; and that is the reason, my friend, why they call the whole of this world by the name of order (kosmos), not of disorder or dissoluteness. Now you, as it seems to me, do not give proper attention to this, for all your cleverness, but have failed to observe the great power of geometrical equality amongst both Gods and men’ (Plato, Gorgias 507e-508a). The arrheton breaks down this geometrical ratio between man and God, this is why its emitters are in the position of outsiders or criminals – in the position of illegality, gathering in secrecy, as their craft is blocking and closing the open flow of life. Their activity dries up the land, causing desertification, resulting in an apocalyptic geo-cide, as it is hunting down reality, wanting always more and more due to its permanent state of rabid depravity. Technology is a cold game messing up forms and raising up sensory perceptions but never fulfilling desires, swallowing instead its subjects with relentless grabbing. 
Still, the idea of pairing technology with a hyperactive intoxication with blood and flesh matters requires some additional explanation, if we would like to understand why cyberspace, this virtual area, has such a desire for real: flesh and blood matters.
In Tassili, where the first emission of human forms in painted form occurred in the Mesolithic, this event has meet with a frenetic response, so strong that the place is still considered a haunted one and locals never camp under these images. Tassili, this huge gallery contains several thousand images set on natural rock formations that resemble animals, houses, cities: a moving labyrinth of emotions; virtual fantasies of the fluctuant. Here the one became something else, the form became independent, separate from its bearers, as it was opened up for fulfilment by another, different existence, of which we know practically nothing, as it is the nothing, the void itself. The kinship of forms became broken between human and human, human and animal, human and gods, animal and gods, and finally between the two types of superhumans, the divine and the diabolical, with one common structure of “gaze, blood, sex” (Frobenius, 1973: 56-76): towards one common denominator of acquisitiveness; towards their destiny of becoming a receptacle. All these images: the ram-man, the vulture-man, the fox-man, those mixtures of identities, where the original confines of forms were overcome, their meaning being lost, they became open for interchange and for any orientation, as if the bovine’s depiction, linked to a placenta by a rope, could be realized in conceptive Tassili alone. As Sansoni noted, “The most important cultic centre of the whole period was Sefar in Tassili” (Sansoni, as cited by Gauthier, 1996:122; see also Soukopova, m2012: 108). In Plato’s perspective, this otherness could be anything, “itself” or “that” or “each” or “alone” or “this” or “many”: terms that express the transgression of the limit into the unlimited, which makes things enter into the stage of the liminal nil, where transition can take place from one state to another, an undesirable consequence of the loss of self-support and self-belonging of forms (Plato, Theaetetus 202a). 
Thus, we should now rephrase the guiding hypothesis of our investigation in that the precondition of any technology is a prior transgression of form, the dissolution of the integrity of forms; only in this way can one comprehend its rabid expansionism, its invasion of forms and what they contain: flesh and blood. Acquisitiveness is eager to conquer the ownership of bodies by a gaze on their blood and sex, as also discussed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the Vol.1. of History of Sexuality, extending its logic to governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991), and further introducing the word “biopower” for the acquisition of bodies by an unlimited power that wants to obtain their very resources, closed inside their intactness. This special gaze, characteristic of ‘pastoral power’, attends to every individual, all their possessions, and is eager to grasp it tightly through the techniques of government. However, not even Foucault’s scrutiny captured another characteristic of bio-power: that it could be extended to the supernatural as well, catching and channeling the power of the nil (or the unlimited, the Greek apeiron) for human purposes, as it is demonstrated in Tassili. The question now is to capture the nature of this power, and guess the reasons why it made such an impressive appearance exactly in Tassili.
Tassili is a 1200-1500 m high plateau composed of sandstone and surrounded by sandy desert. Its paintings were discovered by Heinrich Barth and Henri Duveyrier in 1850-60, documented and recorded repeatedly (Neukom-Tschudi 1956; Lhote 1959; Frobenius, 1973; Mori, 2000; Sansoni, 1994; Lajoux, 1963; Hachid, 1998; Gautier, 1935: 124, 131; Barth, 1965, Ch.IX.). At the height of 1500 m there are ‘cities of stone’, agglomerations of rock shelters divided by corridors that form a real labyrinth where it is easy to get lost, containing the paintings, mostly in the secrecy of shelters, facing the wadies. Once water had a special meaning here, as the trace of waterfall, often together with cupules (and kettles) and grooves, other times mouflons facing to waterfall (Soukopova, 2012:140), represented invisible powers equipped with wisdom, sharp eyes, sure-footedness, and keen ears: the invisible power of the nil with an animal-sharp totality of senses – more than just the gaze, but a stare without eyes. There is also an interpretation, first proposed by Lhote (Lhote, 1959), according which all these animal representations, like elephant, giraffe, wild oxen, mouflon, lion, birds are associated with female principles, a statement that gains support from a strange source, as the Hungarian word for woman, “nő”, also means something that grows, develops, has a quantitative enlargement. Tassili approached the theme of growth with a special inclination for its automatic aspects, as expressed by water flows or mechanical turning wheels (Lajoux, 1963: 126), that point to the watermill or the electrical whirlwind of our time. 
The area of Tassili covers 350000 square km-s, thus more than half the area of France, stretching from Sourthern Algeria to Libya, North of Niger, but is accessible only by few passes through a huge, 600-meter high barrier, which means that this plateau is practically unapproachable, existing in complete enclosure and secrecy. Tassili is a weird entity with agonizing altercations of the high and the low, the mountain peaks and the bowels of the valley-wadies. It at once generates and takes away through an ob-scenic and grotesque, sublime and nightmarish visual representation of terror in the form of a gigantic mountain mass. The name itself is Tuareg (Lhote, 1959: 40), meaning a plateau of rivers, not because any memory could preserve the presence of water here – we are in the very centre of the Algerian Sahara; but because of its fierce cleavages that run into one and the same direction both from North to South, eroded or scored, as if worked by strong, powerful currents of water. All this results in domelike forms and circuits rounded with colonnades, as if this were a ruined city, frozen in stone with squares and highways and secondary streets; at least, that was the impression of its rare visitors. Here one should emphasize that the images of sudden flows of water, as if coming out of the open walls, should be conceived of as an enactment, something that is so familiar from the hagiography of saints or similar spiritual undertakings, that caused a fissure, a disjunctive opening into pieces, a separation into two by divine interference. In Tassili even the landscape bears this schism, tear or split; it is the stone itself that becomes as if transformed into cities, with sculptures, gates, holes and cupules, but also animals (see Mori, 2000, on animal-like rocks; also Soukopova, 2012: 126), evoking abominating associations, as this force evidently wants to decompose every integrity, dissolving and swallowing every element, and recomposing them in a different manner. However, not only the rifting landscape, but the weather as well is an atrocity. Tassili lives under the invasion of the elements, its icy winds voraciously tearing down stable forms and eating up anyone’s resources, physical and spiritual. All the elements present: the sun and the wind, extreme heat and cold, and the barren earth are as if oriented to breaking down the resistance of all those who happen there, in this intemperate atrocity against solid bodies. In Tassili, in this out-of-place loophole its discoverers catalogued some 27000 images, probably representing the biggest such collection in Africa. The images were classified by age, methods of execution and motives in various ways, falling between the Mesolithic and the Iron Age: the phallic, diabolic figures are the earliest depictions perhaps already before 9.800BP but certainly from around 7.000BP, or the Kel Essuf style; while the Pastoral, the Cuballine, and the Cameline are existing superimpositions on the three previous (Soukopova, 2012: 35; Mori, 2000; Muzzolini, 2003; Scurtu and Le Quellec, 2002; Barnett et al., 2003; Mattingly, 2003). The emissions, from the very start of the small, phallic, diabolic figurines up to the dummy Round Head period, which is earlier than the Pastoral style and continuing up to the advent of domestication, or the Camelin period, represent a mixture of identities, and also a mixture between reality and a fantasy world, where acquisitive attention is materialized and effectively causes material growth. Such examples include the Round Head period mouflon, which is often located next to masked or decorated anthropomorphic figures as in Aouarhet in Tassili; the Bovidian cattle and human figure with a dismembered leg in Jabbera (Lhote 1959, picture 29); the Antelope with Elephant body from the same Jabberan site (Lhote 1959: 64); the Man-antilope hybrid from Sefar; from the same Sefar the man with hooves; from the Jabberan site the “Judges”, or the monkey faced humans (Lhote, pict. 30), or the riding monkey-man (Lhote, pict.27). But one could mention from the post-Bovidian Aouarhet site the image of the swimming woman, with her breast on her back (Lhote picture 36), or the Negro Mask from the Round head period (Lhote, pict. 36), as explicit examples for the receptacle meaning of the Tassili images, of gaining the third component of creation, which merge meanings and forms with the nil, producing a hybrid abstraction in order to obtain resources (wealth). This is strange enough, as the formation of species and identities is by and l.arge completed in nature, following a timeless pattern, so why then rivalising with it? Tassili has an answer: the more one destroys, lashes out and banishes, the more one gains power, both material and spiritual, so the logic of technology, its long-stated ambition for breaking and acquiring is relentless.

‘Gaze, blood, sex’
The Tassili frescoes in Sefar, with their ‘Martian’ types, are arguably the first emissions of human forms on large-scale wall paintings in prehistory, dated to the Mesolithic, before the rise of civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but after the long millennia of Paleolithic cave paintings, where only the Magdalenian Shaft scene of the Lascaux cave contained a painted humanlike figure. Though this single precedent has a particular importance, and I discussed it extensively previously (see Horvath 2013, Ch.1), now I would like to introduce the Tassili emissions called Round Head figures, which are the closest to the Lascaux image in time, focusing especially on the so called “Great God of Sefar” which got its name from Lhote, who conjectured the following dating: “it must have been a very, very long time ago, for these round head figures are, as far as we could make out, among the oldest in the Tassili!” (Lhote, 1959: 69). These images are also named as ‘Martian’, due to their alien outward features: a kind of fungus form, with arms, legs, huge heads and generative organs attached to a human-like shape, though it has no face, nose, eyes or ears. Instead, the enormous figures bear the resemblance of sensitive organs, or fangs, on their head, in the front, indicating that they feel, smell and sense the world, having a kind of bio-sensitivity without clear consciousness, recalling the mouflons – images so abundant around Tassili - that have such a fine smell that it is very difficult to capture them. That their properties are different from ours is shown not only by this facelessness, but by their huge size as compared to the human form and the peculiar fungus-like heads (this is why its name Martian, expressing the dummy; a kind of moulage which is even transparent in his body, the ‘Abominable Sand Man’, as it was also called (see Lhote, 1959: 120). However, from the perspective of Bakhtin these images could be called grotesque rather than anything else, as they add strange protuberances to the bodies, undermining the grotesque character of the image, while ignoring all the individualizing body features, like face, hands and eyes (see Bakhtin 1984). These grotesque giants are in flight form the human world, but their hazy body outlines and their receptivity which obtains its meaning from the relationship with other receptors imply links to man and gods equally. The homunculus brings deformity by not allowing life to acquire any definite quality, as it continuously interferes with every activity, cannot allow any definite form to exist, and with its unique sense of smell finds everything, thus nothing can escape of its control. It has an unquenchable desire for contact, an eternal lust after the form that it can never attain, as only one thing can generate form, virtue and charisma, but this is dissolved under its impact. Its growth undermines properties, as it depicts the vital, dynamic and real designs of finite units through excrescences: some kind of ulcers, tulips, sprouts and buds that protuberate out of their heads, arms and other bodily places. These sensing machines have huge, “Martian” heads, implying that their properties are different from our space, possessing a mechanical power of sensuality and receptivity, a hungry appetite for contact, in order to influence and to alter. Their enormous genital organs and the peculiar pregnant shape on the phallic like horned animal is a quite expressive indication of the erotic type of contact they long for. One must be very careful here, as ‘erotic’ is a word that needs to be explained, due to the nature of the desire to trespass its own self, generating life that flows freely out of this basic, evident and inevitable source. Therefore it is our task to master it, which is a great courage to us, to master this gift of life, channelling it into the rightful order. The fundamental role played by virtue here is captured particularly well in Hungarian, where the word for virtue (derék) coincides with the word for right angle (derékszög), which gets its special, rational meaning if we counter it with the incommensurable and irrational diagonal, that constitutes an arrheton, an occult trespass between the two, which is better to avoid, as it brings uncontrollable irrationality. This is why desire, if is not cared for but lashed out for calculative purposes, causes harm by undermining and breaking the firmness of forms. 

Desire weighs down the soul, but provides an essential membership in the community of “good man” if it is accompanied by self-confidence and a life that is free of blame, thus if it is mastered with careful merit. It is such strength gained by the self-control of desire that could give an individual that charm and personal authority that is rightly called charisma. The Tassili images, on the contrary, elicit desire in order to denominate/break the form, to corrupt and rearrange the static principles of virtue, those principles that secure a rational, measured and harmonious living. Scenes of fight (Lhote, 1982: 92, 124; Frobenius, 1973: 79), aggressive animals with teeth (Gauthier, 1996: 56, 60, 114, 133), images of stealing and robbing (Gauthier, 1996: 128; Hachid, 1998: 269); animals with violent gaze (Gauthier, 1996: 59; Frobenius 1973: 78) fighting hominoids (Barth, 1965: 174); animals caught, falling into a hoop or killed (Barth, 1965: 180; Frobenius, 1973: 15); fierce animal attacks (from the Eastern desert; see Morrow, 2010: 61); animals escaping (Lajoux, 1963: 110); hurt, injured animals (see especially plates 318 and 419 in Hachid, 1998: 213, 268) animals fighting (Lhote, 1959: 168); human fights (Lhote, 1959: 120); demonic figures (Frobenius, 1973: 85, 90) – all these are instances when the limit defining the law or the conditions of orderly living is injured. Even the niceties of showing careful, precise treatment (Lhote, 1959: 79, 80, 98), or the delicacy of characters (Hachid, 1998: 248-249) are undermined by the general frivolity of the images, as these elegant or refined figures kill, attack and destroy (plate 372 in Hachid, 1998: 245). A subtle, distinct etiquette emanates from the figures of Sefar or the Qan Mellen dancers (Lajoux, 1963: 176, 193), but their heads are missing or just drawn symbolically with an awkward tulip form; their importance for living, the integrity of the forms are over in the virtual cyberspace.
What is really striking is the artistic quality of the Tassili’s Round Head images, as they are very powerful, and use techniques that express an astonishing (sur)realism. This is especially true of the oldest paintings, as they are more doubled, complicated, expressive, overall executed better than the schematic and mediocre more recent images from the Caballin or Camelin period, recalling the similar situation in Göbekli Tepe. Impressive and modern in their suggestive flight from reality, there is even a unique pictorial narrative with images around and through the body of the Great God of Sefar (Hachid, 1998: 164, 192-196), as a horned animal brings a pregnant female on his back, behind the Great God, in a kind of transparent distance, with two praying females oriented towards facing the Great God, showing adoration and – with their cup-like closed hands –alluding to conceiving power. In this Tassili painting the female figure lying on the horned animal is particularly ugly – asymmetrical, bizarre – in the already shocking painting. All in all these dreamy, swollen, expanded forms suggest illusionality, a badly formed, disjoint dream, where a morbid fantasy is giving signs of life, exploring the fertile, bodily depth of erotic sensuality. The praying figures are especially astonishing, as their raised arms, showing even their fingers communicate to us the first visual appearance of the idea of ‘conception’: the etymological links between touching, keeping, biting and conceiving. The link between the activity of hands and conception is only comprehensible through Hungarian, where the word for teeth, holding, grabbing and conception is the same (fog, megfog, megfogan). One of Frobenius’s stories is particularly important here, where he described a Pigmy ceremony staged to catch both an animal and the power of the sun by connecting the idea of killing with the first rays of the sun by drawing an image of the animal with the women praying with their clutched hands while the men were shooting arrows. They could grab an idea – quite an impossible task, in the sense of materialization – by conceptualizing the desire to kill and forming or devising the idea when this catching action itself is conceiving, at least according to Hungarian, as indicated above. Thus the second image in the Tassili scene, beyond the deity, shows a deformed pregnancy, with open genitals and legs, indicating the dangerous offspring of this malformed marriage between the forms and the void. The dangerous offspring look unlike their parents, will be neither a form nor the void, but in between. The homunculus or the anthroparion has a mixed attitude to life, combining hatred and lust: it is an artificial being with a complete corporal human representation, except that it hates: it hates reality, as it lacks the full possession of forms, so in its desperation it is even eager to grab and catch it; thus it could not be anything other than lustful, with an unquenchable urge for domination, for acting upon forms and qualities, destroying reality, wishing apocalypse instead.
Let me now pose two simple questions: why is the human shape so desired, and why is the nil? Given that Palaeolithic images lacked the representation of full-bodied humans, how could this be suddenly desirable now, in the Mesolithic? The second question is easier to answer; we only need to recall the special qualities of the nil in algebra. Nil in the form of zero has the special quality of being unbreakable (in the sense that it cannot be divided, through fractioning, into numbers smaller than itself), and is also closely connected to infinity (thus, for e.g. any number divided by nil yields infinity). And both nil and infinity have a special meaning concerning the occult. Given that the geometric equality between gods and men is held together by communion and friendship (Meier, 2011), by orderliness, temperance and justice, a mentality of governing through qualities and ratio mentioned by Plato, while the discovery of the occult is that the same result of infinity and unbreakability can easily be obtained by physical and not mental equality (which is based on shared virtue). Here we finally get a response to our question, as this is how human bodies got included into the picture. In order to influence and accommodate the nil a morbid constitution or design was anchored on the rocks of Tassili, a wilful alienation from reality: re-shaping human bodily forms by the nil. For this action no quality is required, only submissiveness, a giving up of the geometric equality between man and God: form, measure and communion, friendship. The emitters of the Tassili paintings captured this new knowledge accurately: it is horrific, disgusting and disappointing. However, they had a particular zeal for gaining unlimited profit: repositioning reality, forms, measure and harmony into infinity, through robotic obedience; a parasitic logic of artificial production/insemination, and a terroristic logic to devour forms. Their invention of the ‘bio-robot’ required, first, that delirious state of enthusiasm indicated by the female prayers; and second, the equalization process between forms and the nil which is shown by the pregnant female on the back of the mythical animal. The offspring of their activities is the new canon, which can be called technology, and which first made its appearance in the ‘Shaft scene’ of Lascaux, the infinite incommensurable that carries the new seeds of life, as shown here by the large scrotum of the Great God, altering the mentality of the world, interrupting the circle between the divine and the human that nurtures virtue and produces forms. The hieros gamos between human bodies and the nil is undertaken with a cynical endeavour – and with strong and aggressive intentionality. The central idea is quite similar to alchemy, as it stresses the assimilation of elements not only with each other but also with cosmic forces (Maxwell-Stuart, 2012; Powers, 2012) For this purpose it makes various abstractions: it emits images of fire, earth, water, or air in order to capture the divine force by luring it into bodies, oscillating between the cosmic, incommensurable, unlimited sources and the fixed and limited bodily forms, stressing their mutual assimilation into each other’s nil. Whenever the nil is present, either the operation itself loses its meaning, or the numbers cannot be assimilated with the operation. The required unity of reconciliation of the elements is not taking place even in multiplication, where as a result only the nil is coming out, annihilating the number by itself. The nil is unbreakable, in a sense that it is able to dissolve, breaking and taking away the identity of any rational number, which is probably the key to the success of alchemical operations, as alchemy with various projections of the limited and unlimited elements merges them together, where the unlimited nil is always used for dissolving the limited one. This has two consequences: first, the limited is less and less prominent; and second, the unlimited nil gains an ever greater importance, or continues to grow. If we add to this the previously discussed infinity element, which is derived from the denominator character of the nil (see 2/0=infinity), the result is the Bakhtinian cosmic grotesque, which is immeasurable and infinitely powerful, the frightening and terroristic fluxional, a swallowing bacchanalia of projections, which uses doubles as receptacle for erotic images of the jaws of Hell (an opening), as it is in Tassili. The nil constructs and denominates (fractions) without losing its non-character; it is pure becoming without being, the passive receptor but at the same time also the hunter that violates the borders (intactness, integrity) of others. The nil even has its own architecture, as seen in Tassili, being able to make a triangle or an arch out of three dots and a continuous filigree from its own motion; the nil is able to conjure up an emerging organism of universal hatred and apocalyptic destruction.
However, such transgression could not be completed without incorporating the most important force behind the senses, desire. Only desire could propel the nil into action, which is what we have found in the Round Head period Great God of Sefar painting. However, this desire impoverished and ridiculous because of its senselessness, the mechaniota Trickster figure in anthropology also well captures this point of a being in flux. We should not forget that the nil desires things about which we do not even have concepts and so does the trickster, who is lurking with full innocence inside the extremes of nothingness and lures the incautious down there. Needs grow out of the nil, as nil itself is the territorial expansion, the long stated ambition for possession that ferociously attacks and annihilates when mixed with forms, exactly because of its growing deprivation from the fullness of reality. 

Joking with Desire 
Given that the subject matter of this paper is unusual for the social sciences, and thus presents  particular difficulties, both in terms of finding a proper field into which it can be inserted and the manner in which such an understanding can be realized, its feasibility and relevance needs to be discussed. With Tassili we are in the Mesolithic where human representations are offered in order to catch the attention of something alien by their unfamiliar properties, with the intention of inviting the formless powers of the void into human affairs; catching the nil by re-voiding the human. Such invitation includes the emission of human contours, a considerable difference as compared to the Palaeolithic cave paintings in the Spanish and French sites, where only animals were pictured and humans were only implicitly part of them – sometimes indicated by the human-looking eyes in animals, but never with a complete human image. But now in Tassili during the Round Head period human images are the overwhelming majority of representations – though very special kinds of humans, as they rarely have eyes, thus indicating their unconscious, mindless character; they are without qualities, thus indicating a new type of world vision as compared with the Palaeolithic. A new canon is established in Tassili, an organized mental universe, with a fixed structure where everything has its own unchangeable and unmistakable (non-)existence, where a new kinship of forms established on mixture, abrogation and transgression. According to this new canon one does not have to show in-depth understanding about the divine, the nature of desire, or even a human shape, the emphasis being on the power of emotions like love, death, fear, horror, or the terror to shake up – but even this is just a fraud, given that everything is turned into a great game of acquisition, hunting down, raiding and flirting, thus into a joking with desire, a fun-ful buffoonery characteristic of the dismembered legs of the Bovidian period (Lhote, picture 29), the ‘taurokathapsia caprice’ motive from the Round Head period from the Afarh shelter (this image indicates acrobatic games with a bull, reminiscent of the famous Minoan bull leaping scenes); or the Great ‘Martian’ God towering over the observer (from the Round Head period, see Lhote, picture 21). The effect of monkeyshine is even reinforced by the monkey-faced human figures considered as ‘judges’, or the dog-faced figures, demons copulating with humans or with masked figures (theriomorphs) (Hachad, 2000: 265, 266, 268). 
This mummery-kind link was fabricated in order to correspond with the nil, as seen in the gigantic Great God of Sefar images. The laborious procedure that was involved in one of the strangest figures in the whole pantheon of Tassili images is well known. The most astonishing is the 760x360cm fresco of white-and-yellow pigmented outlines which is lavishly decorated and comprises a dramaturgy of several figures. In the middle stands the God himself, his 3.25m high shape towering over the head of the observer; on his left there are worshippers, female figures with outstretched arms in a gesture of prayer, and a particularly impressive figure is a woman-like creature with open legs, but no feet; her arms are raised and has a cylindrical body as if being pregnant. She is accompanied by two mouflons, one being white while the other black, and she is just between the two. The figures on the right are similarly weird, with a mouflon stretched out and another having a fantastic, unreal shape. The woman who is lying on her back is partly covered by the figure of the Great God, but her position and her swollen abdomen suggest that she is about to give birth. The purpose of the emission, seemingly, is to gain benefit from a receptacle assuring growth through pregnancy. But this is just a crude joke, as only a part of the statement is true, and the depicters were quite conscious about this. While desire is explicitly shown by the Great God’s testicles and his phallic form, the desired outcome is also present, shown by the manner in which the forms lack self-confidence and cohesion. They are rather accepting the blame for their own malformed ridiculousness. The emitters assign responsibility for the fault or error that they caused – not that they feel guilty, rather they express their homonoia or equivalence with the malformations. The acknowledgment of error is presented here by the mass of unshaped and ridiculous figures that divide and grow uncontrollably, invading every part of the whole with deprivation and eagerness, where understanding or comprehension becomes impossible. A twisted animal figure in the background illustrates well this point. Its four legs are on the ground, but its stomach is turned up towards the sky, showing that a gruesome alienation is taking place that breaks every being into two and then turns it upside down. Such antagonistic bipolarization is shown by the black and white colored mouflons which encircle the pregnant figure: the feeling of repentance for what one has done and failed to correct or master. They are failures who regret their past conduct but unable to change aspects of their own self, their softness and weakness. Those who have become the slaves not of others but of their own shameful conduct cause laughter and merit ridicule.
This surrealistic humor is not unique in Tassili. In another site, in Aouarhet, a post-Bovidian fresco exposes a swimming woman with her breasts on her back who with elongated arms pulls a man by his hair, as witnessed by another man in a snake form with a red cap, rather resembling an aquatic larva (Lhote, 1959: 90). Understanding is over, the presence of error evacuated meaning, and the message of these Mesolithic depictions is that we have no idea what is interwoven with us and what blended us together.
This oppressive grotesque has various emissions on the Tassili walls, including most of the numerous scenes showing copulation between men and gods, according to the life of catamites (Plato, Gorgias, 494e) and all variations of phallic animal-human images, the depiction of the womb and its fertilisation by mutilated hands, the caprice of an exaggerated adoration shown by two women, the mischief of hanging a mask on a white Round Head figure (Lhote, picture 37), or the general indulgence in excesses of animals and other goods, as if representing a cornucopia. Joking with desire is signaling the new canon of trickful bio-energy that emerged out of this union or hieros gamos with the nil. The picture emissions serve to define and control the chain of incantation, the absurd, grotesque marriage with the nil, which is ridiculous, enslaving and denuding in its quirkness, as it does not possess any form, but is also invasive, possessive and dangerous exactly because of this. The danger of the void is that it dissolves and digests anything and anyone whom it managed to approach, touch and influence, while at the same time got fertilized by itself – which in a fact is the same. When the main figure (the Great God of Sefar) is depicted from behind (alluding to a communication with itself, in itself), with a huge hanging ball between his legs and surrounded by various figures, in these sloppily sketched schemes of absurdity the emitters already killed themselves in themselves. They decided to kill human qualities by extracting and repositioning their human form into such dummies, giving themselves up for satisfying their appetite. The God of Sefar in particular does not capture one single expression, but a sad submission and a vigorous resurrection at the same time; fear and admiration, but also a sense of ridicule and mocking about this grotesque complex of erotic machinery with its eternal struggles, its milling boredom. This is shown with particular clarity by the omnipresence of circular symbols, never-before-seen, brutish animal figures, whether hunting or killing or fighting, loving or fertilizing, signalling the accelerated movement in a world where otherwise nothing ever happens. They even depicted themselves in a personage out of any measure, with a bald head but with long hair grown close to his neck, looking up dreamily to the sky through a leopard mask, wearing a skirt, the uniform of the receptacle, holding a bow and baton-stick in his relaxed arms. Ecce homo, in Sefar: the spoiled child of the earth (Hachid, 1998: 284), who knows no limits and despises both nature and the gods, pretending to have grown over them. 

Conclusion
Technology is thus revealed in its opening, in its origin and truth as an error, as it cannot lead to satisfaction and fulfilment; it only results in an infinite annihilation. It came into being through a fracturing, and it can never eliminate and overcome this origin, because neither man can divinize itself nor the opposite is possible in such a simple manner, hence technology is an ontological error. There is no other equality of forms, equality being an alchemical concept (Calasso 1983), only the equity of virtue that links the human to the divine. Therefore the guiding hypothesis of this paper was that acquisitiveness by definition is one’s overwhelming desire for more than its due, leaping over the integral possession into a transgression of another property. While error itself is the synonym of transgression, which breaks and violates forms in abomination, our investigation here concerned the claim that the precondition of any technology is a prior transgression of the propriety of forms, the dissolution of their mutual affection. This paper approached this problem is two steps: the first was to define the nature of this desire to trespass its own self-ownership, and the second to define this intemperance as technology, as an erratic, occult craft. However, the most important condition is still missing, which allows for transgressing integrities, and it is the violation of forms, which contain them, and which could not be happen without an assistance of powers bereft of form, which we identified with the nil, although indispensable ingredients of every existence. So technology is first and foremost an emission of forms that were first gathered and then merged into hybrid constructions with the assistance of the only then existing efficient kind of animation (painting). This leads to a question that still awaits for an answer, which we sought to find in the prehistoric Tassili paintings: only the forms participate in this peculiar hybridization, or is there another participant, unnamed and unformed beside the formed and limited ones, the unlimited liminal one, the nil, without whom the transgression is not possible at all? Here in the peculiar cyberspace of Tassili, in the Libyan desert, generated through the awakening of the nil, in a time distance going back to 10 000 years, we could witness the process of merging form with the unformed void, done through a conscious man-made act, by the emission of human forms to be occupied by nil. This acquisitiveness at the same time woke up the nil and broke the authenticity of the form’s original arrangements. Meaning has been taken away from both, resulting in an emptiness that could give a gigantic dimension to technology. This article captures the resulting infinite series of violent processuality through mechanical births and deaths, an immeasurable dynamic multiplication of dismemberment – following the logic of an error. Tassili contains 27000 images, a dramatic memory of the genesis of technology, which is vacating the meaning of forms by acquisitioning them and merging them with other properties. By way of transgression technology invalidates the right for existence, though without giving another aim to it, instead pushing things into infinite fissure and opening, generating the hybrid grotesque, which is captured by the word ‘error’. This term expresses technology’s erroneous essence, its engendering by sudden and violent crashes, without any end, meaning or conclusion, but leading to intemperate growth and profit. 
This paper focused on the manner in which artificially induced emissions can facilitate seeing things that don’t exist. It is interested in emissions that could cause the splitting of integrities and their conversion into a different, doubled identity. The paper presented this theme through the example of the Tassili rock paintings. Tassili, however, is not an isolated case: similar areas exist anywhere where the familiar world is turned out of its angles (See Graziosi, 1973, on Italian Neolithic caves, like Grotta dell’Addaura, Gotta Romanelli, Riparo del Romito, Grotte de Caviglione, Grotte di Porto Badisco and others where humans reduced to insect-like forms, forms to fusi-forms and vulvas, various cryptograms give signs of unity and adoration or terror but already without a clear design of humanity at all), where the unreal takes hold of the real and presents an alternative world without the possibility of a normal living, without resources necessary for meaningful life, suggesting terror and a fear of existence. 
The genealogy of technology, being an exercise in self-understanding and an effort to alter the way in which we look at our world is of direct relevance for the analysis of transgressions that intend to produce effects. This takes place in three steps: first, to affect the form, to manipulate its integrity; second, to trick with illusions about its omnipotence; and third, to gain a knowledge of the nil. The first serves to manipulate the resistance of the form, urging it to give up its solidity to its will, through circling around the beings that possess integrity with delirious enthusiasm, or inflame them with hatred and destructiveness. The second transgresses conventional principles and knowledge about the rational and moral boundaries of integrity, forcing beings to give up all that they learned about themselves, making them believe that this nil is greater than their own cohesion. The third aim is to demonstrate that the knowledge obtained about the nil is useful enough to enslave the gods themselves, channelling their spirits for humans to use, through technology. Technology assures multiplication and – transmuting itself endlessly – converts every form to its own hybrid essence. Nil is present throughout the transformation, from its very beginning up to the end of conversion, culminating in an apocalyptic scenario, the self-fulfilling prophecy of technology, when all forms dissolve into the flux through the reiterated cycle of dissolution and coagulation.