ТЕХНОЛОГИИ В ИНФОСФЕРЕ

In what follows, I will try to offer a brief overview of the relationships between some of Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological insights on technology and some of the fundamental theoretical claims that form the general framework of structural linguistics. This hermeneutical movement runs an evident risk, which needs to be addressed and overcome: the risk of including Leroi-Gourhan’s works in the wide range of the structuralist corpus. For this reason, in the introduction I clarify what I mean by “structuralism” so that, in the subsequent sections, I can try to show the epistemological relationship between Leroi-Gourhan’s ethnology and the “structuralist turn,” as described in the introduction. To this end, I will point out the possible theoretical influence exerted by structural linguistics, and especially by the structural phonology developed within the Prague linguistic circle, on Leroi-Gourhan’s conceptual toolbox. More specifically, in the paper, I will focus on some passages of La geste et la parole (1964), which I will consider in connection with two more minor and older texts, namely Origine et diffusion de la connaissance scientifique (1953) and L’homme et la nature, an article published in 1936 in the Encyclopédie française.

The emphasis on technical artifacts is a hallmark of contemporary philosophy of technology. How can Leroi-Gourhan’s conceptualization of the technical object enrich current discussions among philosophers of technology? This article aims not to exhaustively address this question but to briefly outline how LeroiGourhan, as an ethnologist, reconfigures the concept of the technical object inherited from ethnology. The article begins by presenting Leroi-Gourhan’s ambition to revisit the central question of ethnology: what is the origin of the division of the human mass into distinct ethnic units called “peoples”, distributed across the globe? According to Leroi-Gourhan, ethnology did not divide humanity at its natural junctures, leading to inaccurate historical conclusions. For him, “peoples” are not fixed and uniform entities defined by constant, specific characteristics. Instead, they arise from the temporary convergence of traits, such as language and technology, which have their own independent existence. These traits may come together at a certain point, but beyond that, they diverge. Ethnology should focus on these traits, not on the “peoples.” In particular, technology serves as a reliable indicator of how the human mass has been divided and dispersed across space and time. However, to draw solid conclusions on this matter, it is essential to approach the extensive technical documentation with a rigorous method of classification and analysis. The article examines this method, leading Leroi-Gourhan to redefine the very concept of the technical object. The article highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s focus on the concepts of “fact” and “tendency” in his analysis of technical objects. These objects are viewed both as solutions to general human challenges in transforming matter (representing “tendencies”) and as culturally significant items with varying “degrees of fact.” Thus, Leroi-Gourhan assigned a dual nature to technical objects, but in an interestingly different way than those analytical philosophers who have been discussing the dual nature of artefacts.