Autour de l'homme: contexte et actualite d'Andre Leroi -Gourhan

Sous la direction de Franc;oi se AuoouzE et Nathan SCHLANGER

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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writing

Tim
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See, for example, Ong (1982, p. 81-3) and Coulmas (1989, p. 9).

Introduction
Writing, it is often said, is a technology of language 1. If that is so, one would have thought that writing would be a central theme in studies of the relationship between speech and tool-use. Nothing however could be further from the truth. Most discussions of this relationship, whether in anthropology, archaeology, psychology or linguistics, make no mention of writing at all2. Several reasons could be adduced for this. First, it is widely supposed that the capacities to speak and to use tools in rather complex ways are species universals that lie at the very root of human culture, whereas the capacity to write belongs to a relatively late stage of cultural development, arising in only a few of its manifold lines. Thus the origination ofspeech and tool-use, on the one hand, and of writing on the other, seem to call for different kinds of explanation, respectively evolutionary and historical. Secondly, the technical aspect of writing is above all

2.
In a recent collection of w hich I am co-editor (Gibson and Ingold 1993), stemming from a multidisciplinary conference on the connectio ns between technology, language and cognition in human evolution, not one contributor referred to w riting, w ith the singular exception of myself. Yet I was as guilty of omission as everyone else, since it was on ly at a late stage of editing the volume that it occurred to me, almost by chance, that something tremendously important had been missing from our conference deliberations.

* Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, tim.ingold@ abdn.ac.uk

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3.
Original ly published in 1964 as Le geste e t la parole, the influence of this work was long confined to the field of Francophone scholarship. Not until 1993 did it appear in English translation, superby rendered by Anna Bostock Berger. Al I page references in this article, w here not otherw ise indicated, are to the English- language version of Leroi-Gourhan's text (Leroi-Gourhan 1993).

evident in the activity itself, in the instrumentally assisted, inscriptive gesture. Yet the emphasis in the study of both technology and language has tended to be on tools and words, and on their systemic interrelations, at the expense of the gestures through which - and only through which - they become practically effective. Thirdly, scholars have been obliged to suppress questions about the emergence of writing within the conjuncture oflanguage and technology for the simple reason that the existence of writing is already implicated in the constitution of language, and of technology, as objects of scientific attention. How, after all, can one inquire into the very possibility of writing, when this possibility not only already frames the terms of the inquiry, but also furnishes the conditions under which it can proceed? Against this trend, the work of Andre Leroi-Gourhan stands out as a magnificent exception. The first part of his masterpiece, Gesture and speecl:!', explicitly devoted to the co-evolution of language and technics, concludes with a chapter on the origins and development of writing which is of quite breathtaking originality. The centrality of writing to Leroi-Gourhan's account can be traced to the very same considerations that underlie its exclusion from the work of more orthodox thinkers. For one thing, he adopts a conception of evolution that is much broader than usual, and that does not divorce human beings from the organic totality formed by their techniques and social institutions. Throughout the course of history, this totality has continued to evolve, even though in their species-specific characteristics humans have remained much as they were at the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic. For another thing, Leroi-Gourhan's emphasis is consistently on the structure of activities, or what he calls operational sequences , and the gestures by which they are realised. For him it is in the forms - bodily, artefactual, symbolic - generated in and through these sequences, and not in any preconstituted properties of individuals, that the story of human evolution unfolds. Finally, Leroi-G ourhan is fully aware of the extent to which our conceptions of both language and technology are rooted in habits of thought that stem from our own familiarity with the practices of modern print literacy. To reach a proper understanding of the nature of writing and its origin, he warns, we will have to divest ourselves of these habits, to learn to see the world as it would have been seen by people before writing. And this calls fo r a real effort of imagination.

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

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The balance of face and hands

It is entirely consistent with Leroi-Gourhan's approach that he should commence his inquiry into the link between technics and language with a section on fish. So long as this link is conceived in Darwinian terms, as a fortunate conjuncture embedded in the particular circumstances of variation and selection shaping hominid phylogeny, such a starting point seems eccentric, to say the least. However to Leroi-Gourhan, steeped as he was in the tradition of comparative morphology established by such figures as Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, it made perfect sense. If there was a unity to be found in the world of organisms, he maintained, it lay not in the tree of phylogenetic connections but in the space of transformational possibilities framed by certain basic oppositions characteristic of life in general. 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 in the relatively complex operations of orientation, navigation and food capture, all of which call for an acute sensitivity to environmental perturbations, are located in the front, or anterior field of responsiveness. The posterior field, by contrast, delivers the forces of propulsion that move the animal along. Starting with fish, however, and running throughout the vertebrate order, we find a further opposition, within the anterior field, between the respective domains of operation of the head and forelimb. The primitive fish, feeding through the mouth while orienting itself by means of the 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 with the hands in the operations of making and using a stick to fish for termites; the Palaeolithic human flint-knapper who talks as he works with the nodules of stone in his hands; the modern schoolboy, clutching a pencil between his fingers as he gazes intently at the paper on which he writes : all exemplify alternative ways of distributing operations proper to the anterior field between the head and forelimbs or, in other words, between its facial and manual poles. This complementarity of face and hands constitutes the point of departure for Leroi-Gourhan's entire theory of human evolution. What it offers, in effect, is an account of the changing relations between facial and manual operations in the whole suite of activities belonging to the anterior field of responsiveness. These changes are traced through a series of so-called liberations . First of all, of course, there is the liberation of the head, which allows it to move relatively 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 a fish. Next comes the development of erect quadrupedality, and with it the distinction between walkers (such as ungulates), whose forelimbs are dedicated to locomotion, and graspers (such as rodents, many carnivorous mammals, and also primates), whose forelimbs are sufficiently liberated from locomotor operations to be able to take on many of the prehensile functions previously fulfilled by the head, or more particularly the 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 at rest. Not until the development of erect posture, in the course of human evolution, were the hands fully liberated. No longer tied up in the mechanisms of locomotion and bodily support, they could take on the whole gamut of gripping and grasping operations entailed in the manipulation of environmental objects, including those that could be regarded as tools, both while stationary and on the move. In short, the liberation of the hands laid the foundation for what Leroi-Gourhan calls technicity . But this also had the effect of liberating the face from the grasping function. Unencumbered by the massive dental apparatus needed for the direct extraction of plant or animal food, the face was free to participate to the full in that most distinctive of human accomplishments, speech. Thus the entire sequence ofliberations, running all the way from fish to humans, culminates in the complementarity of speech and technicity. Andre Leroi-Gourhan was not, of course, the first to suggest an intimate connection between the dexterity and versatility of human handiwork and

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the distinctive properties of verbal communication4 Yet his approach remains unusual, perhaps even unique, in the way in which the 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 complementary foci of the anterior field. Tools for the hand, language for the face, are twin poles of the same apparatus (p. 19-20). Moreover to think of evolution in these terms allows us to encompass within the same overall framework not only those changes that established the species-specific form of humanity, but also the subsequent history of human society and its technology. For the freeing of the hands for technicity, 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 itself from the hands. At first this liberation was restricted to mercantile, religious and administrative elites in the preindustrial city who 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 consequences of mechanical operations, since this is a topic that bears directly on the theme of exteriorisation . At this point my concern is to show how what Leroi-Gourhan (p. 25 5) calls the demanualisation of technicity reconfigured the relation between hands and face in the domain of linguistic practice. In a nutshell, whereas the liberation of the hands for technicity had freed the face for full participation in speech, 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 between facial 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 in the field of technicity, now the hands could join forces with the face in the field of language. The argument is set out in the following passage, which is worth citing in full : In primates, facial and manual organs maintain equal technical activity : Monkeys work with their lips, their teeth, and their hands,

4.
Hewes (1993) reviews the earl y literature on this topic. For a discussion of more recent work on the evolutionary relationship between tool-using, toolmaking and language, see Ingold (1994).

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just as modern humans speak with their lips, their teeth, and their tongues and 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 has taken place in the relative positions of the two functions. Before writing, the hand was used principally for making and the face for language, but with the invention of writing 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-human primates, technical activity is evenly balanced between manual organs (hands), and facial organs (lips, teeth). In the second, represented by preliterate humans, technical activity has become more or less confined to the hands, while the face (lips, teeth, tongue) takes on the functions of speech. In the third, commencing with the advent of writing, technical operations are progressively withdrawn from the hands, whose alternative involvement in written language comes to balance that of the face in speech. I have attempted to summarise this threefold scheme in figure 1. As a representation of Leroi-Gourhan's views this summary is not, however, entirely accurate. The problem for the reviewer of his work is that although he touches again and again on the bipolarity of face and hands,

SPECIES-RELATED

SOCIAL

MECHANICAL

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Lips/teeth/tongue (Speaking)

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

TECHNIC ITY

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 relations between facial and manual poles of the anterior field in the transition from non human to human technicity, and - in human societies - from orality to literacy.

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each time he does so it is expressed a bit differently, and with cavalier disregard for consistency. At one point, for example, Leroi-Gourhan explains that the birth of writing brought two languages into existence at the twin poles, facial and manual, of the operating field. The face speaks, the hand writes : 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. Before writing, Leroi-Gourhan tells us, the hands were preoccupied with making and using tools. Yet in the passage cited above, and at many points elsewhere, he stresses the importance of manual gesticulation as an expressive accompaniment to speech. Thus well before the invention of writing proper, the gesture interprets the word (p. 210) - an admission that flies in 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 a communicative capacity. Conversely, the face has never entirely relinquished its technical function: for many operations, particularly involving the use of long fibrous strands such as in sewing or basketry, the lips and teeth have remained indispensable. Finally, studies of non-human primates have amply confirmed the communicative role of both vocalisation, facial expression and manual gesture. In short, while the precise character of the operations has undoubtedly changed, there is nothing to suggest that throughout the entire course of human evolution, the manual and facial poles of the anterior field have not been equally involved in communicative as well as technical functions.
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Returning to the scheme depicted in figure 1, the progression from the first 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-related memory, 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 calls social (or ethnic): that corpus of traditional knowledge pertaining to the collectivity by which, with the emergence of full humanity, the social group 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 of human being. But the evolutionary process continued, albeit on an ethnic 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 of operational behaviour from the physiological substrate of human being by means of the key concept of exteriorisation . In the field of technicity, exteriorisation entails a transition from direct manipulation, in which the practitioner works with bare hands or by means of a simple manual tool, to machine automation, in which the role of the hand is merely to initiate a movement that is prescribed in the construction and setting of a complex artificial apparatus. This leads Leroi-Gourhan to posit a third kind of memory besides the species-related and the social, namely mechanical memory, consisting of operational programmes that - while originating in lucid consciousness - have been fed into the machine by a human being (p. 275-278) . Thus as social memory gives way to mechanical memory, so technicity is divorced from the hand and transferred to the workings of extra-somatic devices. This transference marks the progression from the second to the third stage in figure 1. The evident inconsistencies in Leroi-Gourhan's terminology reveal a crucial ambivalence in his approach. On the one hand, any operation issuing from social memory is mechanical, on the other hand mechanical memory is distinguished from social memory on the grounds of its externality- of its displacement from the immediate contexts of human perception and action. T his ambivalence comes to a head over the question of what it means to handle a tool. Are the operations of handling fundamentally like, or unlike, those in which the tool is moved by an artificial machine? Ostensibly, Leroi-Gourhan argues for the former view. From Palaeolithic hunting and gathering to the era of mechanisation, operational behaviour may have been enriched in scope and content, but its nature has not changed (p. 253). In the activities of handling, the body functions to all intents and purposes like a machine, in the sense that the movements or gestures that it executes follow the specifications of a pre-established programme. Conversely, the workings of the machine effectively mimic those of the living body, of which it is an improved artificial copy (p. 269). In both cases, of handling and machine performance, the underlying programmes are of human authorship, designed with the aid of language, rather than genetically fixed, as in the automatic, species-related operations of non-human animals.

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There are passages, however, in which Leroi-Gourhan argues just as forcefully for the opposite view. These occur particularly in his discussion of the regression of the hand in the process of mechanisation. From the Upper 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 the carpenter, for example, continually feel 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 his tools. But the hand of the industrial operative - such as in a sawmill or furniture factory- functions merely as a claw for feeding in raw material, or its fingers as prods for button-pushing. The tools are now governed in their movements by an automatic machine that is itself indifferent to its surroundings and answerable only to instructions fed into it in advance. What is lost here, according to Leroi-Gourhan, is nothing less than a critical component of our own intelligence, and thus of our very humanity. The auromation of productive processes leaves us with no option than that of ceasing to be sapiens (p. 254). The missing component of intelligence, however, belongs not to a mind that, aloof from the world, is equipped with a language-based facility for the design of programmes which the body (or its mechanical substitute) is expected to execute. It rather pertains to a form of consciousness that is immanent in practical perceptual activity, in the immediate 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 - with Leroi-Gourhan - whether it is possible to trace, in the course of human social evolution, a movement of exteriorisation in the linguistic domain equivalent to that which, in the domain of technicity, leads from the skilled handling of tools to machine automation. More particularly, could the counterpart of the transference of bodily gesture to the machine be the representation of speech in writing? This is indeed the hypothesis that Leroi-Gourhan proposes : namely, that tools and words developed into machines and writing by similar stages and more or less simultaneously (p. 275). A direct transfer of the argument from the domain of technicity to that oflanguage is complicated, however, by two related factors. One lies in Leroi-Gourhan's ambivalence, discussed above, concerning the nature of mechanical operations; the other is that for much of its history, writing remained as a handicraft, the practice of scribes. Thus we are led to pose the following question : How can the demanualisation of technicity

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associated with the rise of the machine be reconciled with che m anualisation of language associated with the advent of writing? If we were to rake the view, for which Ler:oi-Gourhan ostensibly argues, char any operat ion serving to implement social memory is mechanical regardless of whether rhe armarure of implemenrarion is bodily or exrrasomacic, then the question is quire simply answered. By offloading at lease some of their technical functions onco external machinery, the hands are freed co take on other casks. To shift from manual tool-use ro writing is merely to substirute one kind of mechanical operation for another. But if, on rhe other hand, we were co follow the counter-argument in LeroiGourhan's text - namely, that rhe mechanisation of operations is a function of the regression of the hand, and the consequent transformatio n of the relations between operator, tool and material - then it is difficult co see how the advent of wri ting, which actually opened up a new sphere of activity fo r the hand, could be regarded as a movement in the same direction. To find the linguistic equivalent of the demanualisarion of technicity, we would surely have to look not to the emergence of writing itself, but to the subsequent development of print rechnology, whereby the casting of graphic elements in type replaced their forma tion by hand upon the tablet or the page. In the substitution of the printed or typed text for the manuscript, the hand was withdrawn from writing, just as in the mechanisation of handicraft it was withdrawn from making. The typist's hands feed paper into the m achine, and push the keys on che keyboard, but they do not, strictly spealcing write ac all. Having said that, it might still be possible to defend Leroi-Gourhan's t hesis that writing, even by hand, has something of the character of a m echanical operation. We may reasonably agree - a nd Leroi-Gourhan would nor demur - that as soon as humans were speaking in some recognisable sense their speech was accompan ied and amplified in its expressive force by manual gesture. fro m gesture, in turn, ic is bur a shore seep to graph ic inscription - that is, co che production of more or less durable traces upon some material surface. Graphism, as Leroi-Gourhan calls this kind of inscriptive p ractice, could therefore be as old as speech (p. J 87). It is quite essential, if \ve are to follow Leroi-Gourhan's train of thought, co distinguish between graphism and writing proper. Like manual gesture, graphism does noc represent speech bur rather comments upon ic, even as it - in turn - is commented upon by speech (p. 210). Each, in other words, plays its part in the delineation of the concext from which the other draws its meaning. In true writing, by contrast, the practices of graphic inscription are wholly

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subordinated to the special requirements of representing speech. The movements of the hand, in this case, no longer respond to the practitioner's ongoing perceptual monitoring of his or her surroundings, but are brought under the control of an objective system of rules and representations for the production of well-formed verbal compositions. This system, of course, is what we are used to calling language. Whether there could have existed such a thing as language, in this sense, prior to the advent of writing is a matter to which I turn below. To conclude the present section I merely offer the suggestion that the shift from graphism to handwriting did indeed entail a movement of exteriorisation, in so far as the inscriptive gesture was divorced from the immediate contexts of human sensory engagement with the environment. A parallel shift could perhaps be identified in the field of technicity from skilled craftsmanship to pre-industrial manufacture, where again the work, although carried out by hand, was subject to the dictates of an externally imposed 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 the death of writing, conceived as the art of the scribe. From then on, writers ceased to write - although the illusion that they do is preserved by means of the archaic designation of their original, typed or printed works as manuscripts . 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 the keys on the machine. The one thing he or she does not do, however, is to combine the tool and the manual gesture in the activity of inscribing words upon a material surface.

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I should now like to return to Leroi-Gourhan's notion of graphism. I have already stressed the importance of the distinction between graphism and writing proper. Would we do better, then, to regard graphism as an instance of drawing? This question, as Leroi-Gourhan shows, is misconceived. We are accustomed, nowadays, to separate drawing as a genre of art from writing as a technology of language. But this distinction between art and technology is of modern provenance, a consequence of the very exteriorisation that transferred the technically effective aspect of gesture from the field of human sensibility to the impersonal machine, leaving to the field of art

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For further discussion of the distinction between art
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its residually expressive or aesthetic aspecr5. It cam1ot, therefore, be retrojected onro the practices of ancient societies. The challenge, rather, is to recapture the figurative attitude of people in these societies, who did not - as we do - divide graphs chat are expressive in themselves from those chat serve only to represent spoken language in a visual medium (p. 192) . We have ro recognise, says LeroiGourhan, that graphism is nor representational : it does nor aim to produce a realistic depiction of objects or events in the environment (p. 190). Rather, every graph is the congelarion in a solid medium of a dextrous manual movement. As such, it embodies the rhythmicity characteristic of all movements of rhis kind (p. 195). Following from this, the basic geometry of graphism is radial, like rhe body of the sea urchin or the starfish (p. 211), reflecting the experience of a cosmos rhar stretches out towards the horizon, where sky and earth are perceived co meet, from a focus of dwelling within (p. 327-328). Just as every concept is pinned down ro a focal point, from which emanates a halo of associations (p. 209), so every graph spirals our from a centre, its rhythm ically repeated elements arranged in concentric rings. Writing, by contrast, is fundamentally linear - each graphic element follmving the next as do rhe sow1ds of speech to which they correspond - and where writing dominates the linguistic awareness of a society this linearicy inevitably imposes itself upon other aspects of experience. For this reason people in modern literate societies, where life is molded by the pract ice of a language whose sounds are recorded in an associated system of writing , find che idea of radial expression practically inconceivable . Bur in early societies it was the norm, one deeply embedded in a primarily oral context (p. 196). Andre Leroi-Gourhan is quick to observe chat it is precisely in the contrast between radial and linear organisation that myth differs from hiscorical narrative. In just the same way, the mythography of oral societies could be concrasted with rhe writing ofliterate ones (p. 195-196). Hence, too, mythography should not be confused wir:h picrography. In picrography, representational graphic elements (picrograms) are strung out in sequence to correspond with the linear organisation of spoken words. In mythography, nonrepresenrational graphic elements (ideograms) are laid our in rings to correspond to the radial organisation of the perceived cosmos or lifeworld. Where we find pictography in the ethnographic record ic

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invariably reflects the impact on indigenous peoples of colonisers who brought writing with them. That is why, in Leroi-Gourhan's opinion, 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, the issue was whether we can regard handling as the mechanical execution, by the body, of a language-based programme. Now we have exactly the same problem with regard to speaking. Basically, two views are available to us. The first would regard speaking, likewise, as the mechanical execution of sound sequences generated by an objective system of rules and representations, a language, stored in the mind 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 once vocal and manual, by which human beings effect their presence in the world6 . Leroi-Gourhan, true to form, never states explicitly what he means by either language or speech but shifts from one implicit view 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, stringing words together for utterance in syntagmatic chains. There was, therefore, an original dualism between the linearity of vocal expression and the radiality of graphic expression, which was only resolved with the advent of linear graphism - that is, writing proper - wherein the spatial arrangement of graphic elements was finally brought into line with the temporal sequence of speech sounds (p. 210). Yet, on the other hand, the notion of such a dualism directly contradicts Leroi-Gourhan's thesis that the graphism of ancient societies was the visible trace of an orality that was essentially non-linear. Only by placing speech within the context of a total system of bodily gesture, as in the second view outlined above, can it be claimed that phonation and graphic expression were paired , or rhythmically linked, from the outset (p. 192)7. Furthermore, had speaking always been governed by a linear logic, it is hard to see why this logic should not have impressed itself upon the awareness of its speakers prior to its realisation in writing, or how it could have coexisted for so long within an oral context that was organised on quite the opposite principle.

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This is the view taken by M erl eau-Ponty, w ho argues that the intelligence of speech I ies in the vocal gesture itself. It cannot be said of speech either that it is an "operation of intelligence", or that it is a "motor phenomenon" : it is w ho lly mobility and wholly i ntel Iigence (M erl eau-Ponty 1962, p. 194).

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If speech had always been li near, and if graphism had always been coupled to the rhythms of speech, then we would have to conclude that graphism, too, has been linear from the outset. This is w hat leads Foster, starting from the reasonable presumpti on that graphic inscription is as o ld as speech, to advance the hypothesis - which she herself admits seems quite fantastic, and is quite contrary to the conventional w isdom - that alphabetic w riting may have already existed in the Upper Palaeolithic (Foster 1990).

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8.

Ong observes that redundancy is much more natural to thought and speech than what he calls sparse linearity. Sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech is an artificial creatio n, structured by the technology of writing" (1982, p. 40).

9.
Just such a view has been put forward by Roy Harris (1980, p. 618). More recently, David Olson has likewise argued that awareness of linguistic structure is a product of a writing system not a precondition for its development" (Olson 1994, p. 68).

It seems, indeed, that Leroi-Gourhan has fallen into the very trap that he warns us against: of retrojecting onto the orality of the past a linearisation born of writing, so as to make writing appear as the subordination of graphic expression to the pre-existing linearity of spoken language. To avoid this trap, and to recover the original unity of speech, gesture and inscription, we need - as Derrida has pointed out - to de-sediment from our minds the deposit of four millennia oflinear thinking (Derrida 1976, p. 86). With acknowledgement to Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida describes the hegemony of linearisation as the outcome of a struggle in which non-linear graphism was eventually defeated, splitting apart the elements of technics, art, religion and economy that had coexisted in the mythogram. Could it be, then, that writing, far from confirming a principle of phonetic linearization already built into the structure of language, was actually instrumental in its establishment ?8 Or to put it another way, is language-as-we-know-it - conceived as a domain of human intelligence dedicated to the production of well-formed verbal sequences - an artefact of the codification of speech in writing, of the attempt to represent skilled vocal gesture as the mechanical output of a rulegoverned system ?9 Admittedly, as Leroi-Gourhan recognises, not all scripts were linearised to the same degree. In some, such as Chinese, the linear component of phonetic transcription was held in balance with an ideographic component (p. 209). It was in the establishment of alphabetic writing that linear graphism was taken to its fullest extent. With that, writing was finally severed from graphic art. Just as the mechanisation of manual gesture removed the technical act from the context of immediate sensory participation, so the phonetic recording of speech lent to words a reality and an objective force wholly independent of the contexts of utterance. Where bodily operations were exteriorised in the functioning of machines, so the contents of social memory were exteriorised in printed texts, and subsequently in the card index - which is nothing less than a real exteriorized cerebral cortex (p. 261, 263). Eventually the typewriter and keyboard, as we have already seen, turned writing itself into a mechanical operation, separating the dextrous work of the hand from the formation of letters on the page. In all these ways and more, the development of modern print literacy - or what Ong calls the technologising of the word - was

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Andre Leroi-Gourhan and the evolution of writing

part of the overall movement by which society was drawn ever further outside the natural world, establishing thereby the conditions for human mastery over it (p. 211). With this, the rounded cosmos of human dwelling was pierced, as Leroi-Gourhan vividly puts it, by an intellectual process which 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 were rendered inexpressible within its formal conventions, and to restore human beings to their true place at the centre of a multidimensional lifeworld.

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