INGOLD, T. André Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writing

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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writ ing

In what follows I want to look more closely at what Leroi-Gourhan hasto say about writing, focusing in turn on each of the three aspects of hisaccount outlined above. First, I show how he fits the emergence of writing within a more generalised evolutionary account of the changingbalance of functions between face and hands, in the respective fields oflanguage and technicity. Secondly, I trace the argument by which he attributes writing to the same exteriorisation of operational behaviour aschat which leads from the handling of tools and materials to machineautomation. Thirdly, I review his thesis that language , conceived as adevice tuned to the requirements of communicative efficacy, has its rootsin a linearisation of thought and practice born of the institutionalisationofwriting.The balance of face and hands

It is entirely consistent with Leroi-Gourhan's approach that he shouldcommence his inquiry into the link between technics and language with asection on fish. So long as this link is conceived in Darwinian terms, as afortunate conjuncture embedded in the particular circumstances of variation and selection shaping hominid phylogeny, such a starting point seemseccentric, to say the least. However to Leroi-Gourhan, steeped as he was inthe tradition of comparative morphology established by such figures asGeorges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, it made perfect sense. I f herewas a unity to be found in the world oforganisms, he maintained, it lay notin the tree of phylogenetic connections but in the space of transformationalpossibilities framed by certain basic oppositions characteristic of life ingeneral. Evolution, in Leroi-Gourhan's conception, was the temporal exploration of these possibilities.

For all creatures that must move about in order to live, the most fundamental opposition is between front and rear. As a rule, organs involved inthe relatively complex operations of orientation, navigation and foodcapture, all of which call for an acute sensitivity to environmental perturbations, are located in the front, or anterior field of responsiveness. Theposterior field, by contrast, delivers the forces of propulsion that move theanimal along. Starting with fish, however, and running throughout the vertebrate order, we find a further opposition, within the anterior field, between the respective domains ofoperation of the head and forelimb. The primitive fish, feeding through the mouth while orienting itself by means ofthe pectoral fins; the cat, holding down its prey with its claws while biting

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with the teeth; the chimpanzee, employing its lips and teeth together withthe hands in the operations of making and using a stick to fish for ter-mites; the Palaeolithic human flint-knapper who talks as he works with thenodules of stone in his hands; the modern schoolboy, clutching a pencilbetween his fingers as he gazes intently at the paper on which he writes : allexemplify alternative ways of distributing operations proper to the anteriorfield between the head and forelimbs or, in other words, between its facialand manualpoles. This complementarity of face and hands constitutes thepoint of departure for Leroi-Gourhan's entire theory of human evolution.What it offers, in effect, is an account of the changing relations betweenfacial and manual operations in the whole suite ofactivities belonging to theanterior field of responsiveness.

These changes are traced through a series ofso-called liberations. Firstofall, of course, there is the liberation of the head, which allows it to moverelatively freely of the rest of the body to which it is connected by the neck.This is what distinguishes a reptile such as the lizard, for example, from afish. Next comes the development of erect quadrupedality, and with it thedistinction between walkers (such as ungulates), whose forelimbs arededicated to locomotion, and graspers (such as rodents, many carni-vorous mammals, and also primates), whose forelimbs are sufficientlyliberated from locomotor operations to be able to take on many of theprehensile functions previously fulfilled by the head, or more particularlythe jaws and teeth. Yet so long as the animal moves on all fours, the hands(or paws) can be only temporarily free during those periods when it is atrest. Not until the development of erect posture, in the course of humanevolution, were the hands fully liberated. No longer tied up in the mecha-nisms of locomotion and bodily support, they could take on the wholegamut of gripping and grasping operations entailed in the manipulation ofenvironmental objects, including those that could be regarded as tools, bothwhile stationary and on the move. In short, the liberation of the hands laidthe foundation for what Leroi-Gourhan calls technicity. But this also hadthe effect of liberating the face from the grasping function. Unencumberedby the massive dental apparatus needed for the direct extraction of plant oranimal food, the face was free to participate to the full in that most distinc-tive of human accomplishments, speech.

Thus the entire sequence ofliberations, running all the way from fish tohumans, culminates in the complementarity of speech and technicity.Andre Leroi-Gourhan was not, of course, the first to suggest an intimateconnection between the dexterity and versatility of human handiwork and


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the distinctive properties of verbal communication4 Yet hisapproach remains unusual, perhaps even unique, in the way in whichthe connection is conceived : not as an adaptive novelty bridging previously disparate domains, but as the resolution of a structural opposition which, in Leroi-Gourhan's own words, is as old as the vertebrates themselves - namely between face and hand as complementaryfoci of the anterior field. Tools for the hand, language for the face, aretwin poles of the same apparatus (p. 19-20). Moreover to think ofevolution in these terms allows us to encompass within the sameoverall framework not only those changes that established thespecies-specific form of humanity, but also the subsequent history ofhuman society and its technology. For the freeing of the hands fortechnicity, and the concomitant liberation of the face for speech,marked the penultimate rather than the final chapter of the evolutionary story. What followed was the gradual liberation of technicity itselffrom the hands. At first this liberation was restricted to mercantile, religious and administrative elites in the preindustrial citywho were professionally discharged from manual work. It was subsequently generalised, however, with the advent of machine automation, the effect of which was to transfer the technically effective gesture from the human body to an artificial, extra-somatic apparatus.

I shall return in the next section to the nature and consequencesof mechanical operations, since this is a topic that bears directly onthe theme of exteriorisation. At this point my concern is to showhow what Leroi-Gourhan (p. 25 5) calls the demanualisation oftechnicity reconfigured the relation between hands and face in thedomain of linguistic practice. In a nutshell, whereas the liberation ofthe hands for technicity had freed the face for full participation inspeech, their liberation from technicity meant that they, in turn,could be coopted for a novel linguistic function, namely writing.With that, Leroi-Gourhan argues, the original co-operation betweenfacial and manual poles, disrupted with the complementary specialisations of the face for language and of the hands for tools, was reestablished. Where once, the face had worked alongside the hands inthe field of technicity, now the hands could join forces with the facein the field of language. The argument is set out in the followingpassage, which is worth citing in full :

In primates, facial and manual organs maintain equal technicalactivity : Monkeys work with their lips, their tee th, and their hands,

4.Hewes (1993)reviewsthe ea rlyli teratureon this topic.For a discussionof more recentwo rk on theevolutionaryrelationshipbetweentool-using,too lmakingand language,see Ingold(1994).

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just as modern humans speak with their lips, their teeth, and their tonguesand gesticulate or write with their hands. To this should be added, however,that humans also use the same organs for making things, but that a shift hastaken place in the relative positions of the two functions. Before writing, thehand was used principally for making and the face for language, but withthe invention ofwriting the balance of the two was restored. (p. 113).In effect, Leroi-Gourhan distinguishes three stages in the evolution of

the face-hand relationship. In the first stage, represented by non-humanprimates, technical activity is evenly balanced between manual organs(hands), and facial organs (lips, teeth). In the second, represented by pre-literate humans, technical activity has become more or less confined to thehands, while the face (lips, teeth, tongue) takes on the functions ofspeech.In the third, commencing with the advent ofwriting, technical operationsare progressively withdrawn from the hands, whose alternative involvementin written language comes to balance that of the face in speech. I haveattempted to summarise this threefold scheme in figure 1.

As a representation ofLeroi-Gourhan's views this summary is not, how-ever, entirely accurate. The problem for the reviewer of his work is thatalthough he touches again and again on the bipolarity of face and hands,

SPECIES-RELATED

Lips/teeth(Making/using)

SOCIAL

Lips/teeth/tongue(Speaking)

MECHANICAL

Lips/teeth/tongue/eyes(Speaking/reading)

TECHNICITY LANGUAGE

Hands(Making/using)

Hands and tools(Making/using)

Hands and tools(Writing)

Fig. 1. A schematic representation of Leroi-Courhan's view of the changing relationsbetween facial and manual poles of the anterior field in the transition from nonhuman to human techn icity, and - in human societies - from orality to literacy.


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each time he does so it is expressed a bi t differently, and with cavalier disregard for consistency. At one point, for example, Leroi-Gourhan explainsthat the birth of writing brought two languages into existence at the twinpoles, facial and manual, of the operating field. The face speaks, the handwrites : each has its language, respectively of hearing and sight (p. 195,210). But only a few pages earlier, he had claimed that in the new relationship between the operating poles, the language of sight was already dominant, and that the role of the face was not so much to speak as to read(p. 188). There is no less ambiguity in the intermediate stage. Beforewriting, Leroi-Gourhan tells us, the hands were preoccupied with makingand using tools. Yet in the passage cited above, and at many points elsewhere, he stresses the importance ofmanual gesticulation as an expressiveaccompaniment to speech. Thus well before the invention of writingproper, the gesture interprets the word (p. 210) - an admission that fliesin the face of the neat division of function between manual and facial poles.From the start, it seems, the hands have doubled in both a technical and acommunicative capacity. Conversely, the face has never entirely relinquished its technical function: for many operations, particularly involvingthe use of long fibrous strands such as in sewing or basketry, the lips andteeth have remained indispensable. Finally, studies of non-human primateshave amply confirmed the communicative role of both vocalisation, facialexpression and manual gesture. In short, while the precise character of theoperations has undoubtedly changed, there is nothing to suggest thatthroughout the entire course of human evolution, the manual and facialpoles of the anterior field have not been equally involved in communicativeas well as technical functions.The exteriorisation of language

Returning to the scheme depicted in figure 1, the progression from thefirst ro the second stage corresponds in Leroi-Gourhan's terms to a transition from automatic to mechanical operations (p. 230-231).Auromatic operations have their source in what he calls species-relatedmemory, that is in the evolved biological specifications that every creature receives from its predecessors as a genetic endowment. Mechanical operations, by contrast, flow from a memory-source that Leroi-Gourhan callssocial (or ethnic): that corpus of traditional knowledge pertaining tothe collectivity by which, with the emergence of full humanity, the socialgroup transcends the species. As automatic operations gave way to

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mechanical ones, the social group - with its institutional forms and collectively held traditions - took over from the species as the primary locus ofhuman being. But the evolutionary process continued, albeit on anethnic rather than a phyletic level (p. 269), and in domains ever further removed from the human body.

Leroi-Gourhan refers to this removal of the socio technical grounding ofoperational behaviour from the physiological substrate of human being bymeans of the key concept of exteriorisation . In the field of technicity,exteriorisation entails a transition from direct manipulation, in which thepractitioner works with bare hands or by means of a simple manual tool, tomachine automation, in which the role of the hand is merely to initiate amovement that is prescribed in the construction and setting of a complexartificial apparatus. This leads Leroi-Gourhan to posit a third kind ofmemory besides the species-related and the social, namely mechanicalmemory, consisting ofoperational programmes that - while originating inlucid consciousness - have been fed into the machine by a humanbeing (p. 275-278) . Thus as social memory gives way to mechanicalmemory, so technicity is divorced from the hand and transferred to thewor-kings ofextra-somatic devices. This transference marks the progression fromthe second to the third stage in figure 1.The evident inconsistencies in Lero i-Gourhan's terminology reveal acrucial ambivalence in his approach. On the one hand, any operation issuingfrom social memory is mechanical, on the other hand mechanical memoryis distinguished from social memory on the grounds of its externality- of itsdisplacement from the immediate contexts ofhuman perception and action.This ambivalence comes to a head over the question of what it means tohandle a tool. Are the operations of handling fundamentally like , or un-like, those in which the tool is moved by an artificial machine? Ostensibly,Leroi-Gourhan argues for the former view. From Palaeolithic hunting andgathering to the era ofmechanisation, operational behaviour may have beenenriched in scope and content, but its nature has not changed (p. 253) . Inthe activities of handling, the body functions to all intents and purposes likea machine, in the sense that the movements or gestures that it executes followthe specifications ofa pre-established programme. Conversely, the workingsof the machine effectively mimic those of the living body, of which it isanimproved artificial copy (p. 269). In both cases, ofhandling and machineperformance, the underlying programmes are of human authorship,designed with the aid of language, rather than genetically fixed, as in theautomatic, species-related operations of non-human animals.


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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writing

There are passages, however, in which Leroi-Gourhan argues just asforcefully for the opposite view. These occur particularly in his discussionof the regression of the hand in the process of mechanisation. From theUpper Palaeolithic to the nineteenth century the hand has enjoyed an uninterrupted heyday as the ever-skillful servant of human technical intelligence (p. 255). The skilled hands of he carpenter, for example, continuallyfeel and respond to the quality of the wood - to grain, texture and knots -even as they work upon it. It is these hands that guide the movement of histools. But the hand of the industrial operative - such as in a sawmill orfurniture factory- functions merely as a claw for feeding in raw material, orits fingers as prods for button-pushing. The tools are now governed in theirmovements by an automatic machine that is itself indifferent to its surroundings and answerable only to instructions fed into it in advance. Whatis lost here, according to Leroi-Gourhan, is nothing less than a criticalcomponent of our own intelligence, and thus of our very humanity. Theauromation of productive processes leaves us with no option than that ofceasing to be sapiens (p. 254). The missing component of intelligence,however, belongs not to a mind that, aloof from the world, is equipped witha language-based facility for the design of programmes which the body (oritsmechanical substitute) is expected to execute. It rather pertains to a formof consciousness that is immanent in practical perceptual activity, in theimmediate sensuous involvement of the skilled practitioner with the material in the conduct of a craft.In the light of the intimate link, already discussed in the previous section, between technicity and language, we are naturally led to ask - withLeroi-Gourhan - whether it is possible to trace, in the course of humansocial evolution, a movement of exteriorisation in the linguistic domainequivalent to that which, in the domain of technicity, leads from the skilledhandling of tools to machine automation. More particularly, could thecounterpart of the transference of bodily gesture to the machine be therepresentation of speech in writing? This is indeed the hypothesis thatLeroi-Gourhan proposes : namely, that tools and words developed intomachines and writing by similar stages and more or less simultaneously(p. 275). A direct transfer of the argument from the domain of technicityto that oflanguage is complicated, however, by two related factors. One liesin Leroi-Gourhan's ambivalence, discussed above, concerning the nature ofmechanical operations; the other is that for much of its history, writingremained as a handicraft, the practice ofscribes. Thus we are led to pose thefollowing question : How can the demanualisation of technicity

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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evo lu t ion of writ ing

subordinated to the special requirements of representing speech. The movements of the hand, in this case, no longer respond to the practitioner'songoing perceptual monitoring of his or her surroundings, but are broughtunder the control of an objective system of rules and representations for theproduction of well-formed verbal compositions. This system, of course, iswhat we are used to calling language.

Whether there could have existed such a thing as language, in thissense, prior to the advent of writing is a matter to which I turn below. Toconclude the present section I merely offer the suggestion that the shiftfrom graphism to handwriting did indeed entail a movement of exteriorisation, in so far as the inscriptive gesture was divorced from the immediatecontexts of human sensory engagement with the environment. A parallelshift could perhaps be identified in the field of technicity from skilledcraftsmanship to pre-industrial manufacture, where again the work,although carried out by hand, was subject to the dictates of an externallyimposed regime. But the linguistic counterpart of industrial mechanisation was not writing per se; it was rather the technology of print. The transition from the manual tool to the machine marked not the birth but thedeath of writing, conceived as the ar t of the scribe. From then on, writersceased to write - although the illusion that they do is preserved by meansof the archaic designation of their original, typed or printed works asmanuscripts . For the author, ensconced before a typewriter or wordprocessor, the activity of writing embraces many things, from headscratching, nail-biting and coffee-drinking to (occasionally) pressing thekeys on the machine. The one thing he or she does not do, however, is tocombine the tool and the manual gesture in the activity of nscribing wordsupon a material surface.

The triumph of the lineI should now like to return to Leroi-Gourhan's notion of graphism.

I have already stressed the importance of the distinction between graphismand writing proper. Would we do better, then, to regard graphism as an instance ofdrawing? This question, as Leroi-Gourhan shows, is misconceived.We are accustomed, nowadays, to separate drawing as a genre of ar t fromwriting as a technology of language. But this distinction between art andtechnology is of modern provenance, a consequence of the very exteriorisation that transferred the technically effective aspect ofgesture from the fieldof human sensibility to the impersonal machine, leaving to the field of art

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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of wri t ing

invariably reflects the impact on indigenous peoples of coloniserswho brought writing with them. That is why, in Leroi-Gourhan'sopinion, pictography cannot be understood as an instance of writing in its "infancy" (p. 194-195).

There is, however, a catch in the argument that reflects a fundamental inconsistency not unlike that which we have already encountered in the discussion of manual technicity. In this latter case, theissue was whether we can regard handling as the mechanical execution, by the body, of a language-based programme. Now we haveexactly the same problem with regard to speaking. Basically, twoviews are available to us. The first would regard speaking, likewise, asthe mechanical execution ofsound sequences generated by an objective system of rules and representations, a language, stored in themind along with the other contents of social memory. The second,by contrast, would treat speech as the phonic component of a comprehensive system of skilled and sensuous bodily movement, at oncevocal and manual, by which human beings effect their presence inthe world6. Leroi-Gourhan, true to form, never states explicitly whathe means by either language or speech but shifts from one implicitview to the other as his argument proceeds.

On the one hand, adopting the first view, he tells us that language, by its very nature, observes a linear sentential logic, stringingwords together for utterance in syntagmatic chains. There was, therefore , an original dualism between the linearity of vocal expressionand the radiality ofgraphic expression, which was only resolved withthe advent of linear graphism - that is, writing proper - whereinthe spatial arrangement of graphic elements was finally brought intoline with the temporal sequence of speech sounds (p. 210). Yet, onthe other hand, the notion of such a dualism directly contradictsLeroi-Gourhan's thesis that the graphism of ancient societies was thevisible trace ofan orality that was essentially non-linear. Only by placing speech within the context of a total system of bodily gesture, asin the second view outlined above, can it be claimed that phonationand graphic expression were paired , or rhythmically linked, fromthe outset (p. 192)7. Furthermore, had speaking always been governed by a linear logic, it is hard to see why this logic should not haveimpressed itself upon the awareness of its speakers prior to its realisation in writing, or how it could have coexisted for so long withinan oral context that was organised on quite the opposite principle.


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8.Ong observes

that redundancyis much more natural

to thought and speechthan what he calls sparselinearity. Sparse ly linear

or analytic thoughtand speech is an artificialcreation, structuredby the technology

of writing" (1982, p. 40).9.

Just such a viewhas been put forwardby Roy Harris (1980, p. 6-

18). More recently,David Olson has likewiseargued that awaren ess

of linguistic structureis a product of a writing

system not a preconditionfor its development"(Olson 1994, p. 68).

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I t seems, indeed, that Leroi-Gourhan has fallen into the very trapthat he warns us against: of retrojecting onto the orality of the pasta linearisation born of writing, so as to make writing appear as thesubordination of graphic expression to the pre-existing linearity ofspoken language. To avoid this trap, and to recover the original unityofspeech, gesture and inscription, we need - as Derrida has pointedout - to de-sediment from our minds the deposit of four millennia oflinear thinking (Derrida 1976, p. 86). With acknowledgementto Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida describes the hegemony of linearisationas the outcome ofa struggle in which non-linear graphism was even-tually defeated, splitting apart the elements of technics, art, religionand economy that had coexisted in the mythogram. Could it be,then, that writing, far from confirming a principle of phoneticlinearization already built into the structure of language, wasactually instrumental in its establishment ?8 Or to put it anotherway,is language-as-we-know-it - conceived as a domain of human intelligence dedicated to the production ofwell-formed verbal sequences- an artefact of the codification of speech in writing, of the attemptto represent skilled vocal gesture as the mechanical output of a rule-governed system ?9Admittedly, as Leroi-Gourhan recognises, not all scripts werelinearised to the same degree. In some, such as Chinese, the linearcomponent of phonetic transcription was held in balance with anideographic component (p. 209). It was in the establishment ofalphabetic writing that linear graphism was taken to its fullest extent.With that, writing was finally severed from graphic art. Just as themechanisation ofmanual gesture removed the technical act from thecontext of immediate sensory participation, so the phonetic recording of speech lent to words a reality and an objective force whollyindependent of the contexts of utterance. Where bodily operationswere exteriorised in the functioning of machines, so the contents ofsocial memory were exteriorised in printed texts, and subsequentlyin the card index - which is nothing less than a real exteriorized cere-bral cortex (p. 261, 263). Eventually the typewriter and keyboard,as we have already seen, turned writing itself into a mechanical ope-ration, separating the dextrous work of the hand from the formationof letters on the page.In all these ways and more, the development of modern printliteracy - or what Ong calls the technologising of the word - was


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part of the overall movement by which society was drawn ever further outside the natural world, establishing thereby the conditions for humanmastery over it (p. 211). With this, the rounded cosmos ofhuman dwellingwas pierced, as Leroi-Gourhan vividly puts it, by an intellectual processwhich letters have strung out in a needle-sharp, but also needle-thin, line (p. 200) . Now subordinated to the demands of communicative efficiency,written language spearheaded the transition from cosmology to technology.It was left to art, closely allied to religion, to compensate for the constriction of thought and imagery induced by the rationalisation of language(p. 212), to express the rhythmic qualities of experience which wererendered inexpressible within its formal conventions, and to restore humanbeings to their true place at the centre of a multidimensional lifeworld.

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INGOLD, T. André Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writing

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