Leroi-Gourhan's Le Geste et la parole: The Evolution of Technology

Abstract

This article looks at André Leroi-Gourhan's work on prehistory in the two volumes of Le Geste et la parole (1964), considering it as a continuation of his wider project of a comparative technology. The first volume concentrates on the interaction between body and brain in human evolution. In contrast to interpretations of evolution that focus on the development of the brain as a primary factor, Leroi-Gourhan insists that its evolution is entirely dependent on the adaptive possibilities of body structure. Although cybernetics is never explicitly referenced in this work, its influence on his conceptualization of the evolution and history of technology is clear. For example, he draws on a cybernetically-inflected vocabulary of command and control to describe the coupling of nervous system and body in vertebrae evolution. In the second volume of Le Geste, the conceptual input of cybernetics becomes still more apparent as the focus of analysis is on the question of memory and technics. Leroi-Gourhan argues that the evolution of technology imitates the evolution of living systems, and that the historical development of human society is like the growth of an organism. The influence of cybernetics is evident in the fact that the difference between animal forms is conceived in terms of relative degrees of ‘programming’. Leroi-Gourhan proposes in this way a modelling of biological systems which is typical of cybernetics, drawing attention to the functional similarities between animal and mechanical systems. While not teleological, Leroi-Gourhan's history of technology is deterministic to the extent that the sequence of externalizations is not an arbitrary development but the necessary product of the intersection of the human organism and the material world.