A study of technics limited to classifying
different types of tools and
analyzing different stages of
manufacturing processes would bear the same
relation to ethnology as
systematic zoology does to animal biology. In
such a study tools
exist only as part of the operating cycle. They provide
evidence of
the cycle because they generally carry significant traces of
it, but
no more so than a skeleton of a horse does of the swift herbivore
to
which it once belonged. Systematic technology, which forms the
subject
of the two volumes of my Evolution et techniques, is an
indispensable basis,
yet the real significance of tools is in the
gesture, which makes them
technically effective.
The
concept "tool" itself needs to be reviewed with
reference
to the animal world, for technical action is found in
invertebrates as
much as in human beings and should not be limited
exclusively to the artifacts
that are our privilege. In animals, tool
and gesture merge into a single
organ with the motor part and the
active part forming an undivided whole.
The crab's claws and jaws are
all of a piece with the operating program
through which the animal's
food acquisition behavior is expressed. The
fact that human tools are
movable and that their characteristics are not
species related but
ethnic is basically unimportant. The sociocultural
divisions that
make a particular technical operation typically New Caledonian
in
terms of both the method and the tools employed have simply taken
the
place of the psychozoological divisions that make certain
operations and
a certain physical apparatus typical of particular
species of animals.
The operational synergy of tool and
gesture presupposes the existence of
a memory in which the behavior
program is stored. With animals, this memory
forms part of organic
behavior as a whole, and the technical operation
becomes, in the
popular sense, "instinctive." We saw earlier
that in
humans, the mobility of tools and language has determined the
exteriorization
of operational programs related to
the
238
survival of the group. What we must now
do is to trace the stages that
have led to a liberation so great in
present-day societies that both tool
and gesture are now embodied in
the machine, operational memory in automatic
devices, and programming
itself in electronic equipment. Most of what needs
to be said about
tools is already to be found in earlier chapters. Gesture,
however,
has not often been considered by a method in which animal
behavior
and the deliberate motor activities of humans are viewed
from the same
perspective
The osteomuscular apparatus of
primates is similar enough to the human's
for its mechanical
properties to be considered largely equivalent to ours.
Human
movements are no doubt more finely differentiated than those of
monkeys,
but the anatomical differences are negligible compared with
those of the
neuromotor apparatus. Ordinary monkeys, anthropoid apes,
and the human
can therefore be considered to have the same anatomical
and gestural possibilities
The essential traits of human
technical gesticulation are undoubtedly connected
with grasping. We
saw earlier that grasping actions are characteristic
of a whole
category of mammals starting with rodents and carnivores, which
show
varying degrees of the same aptitudes. The distinction between
operations
in which hand actions are combined with actions of the
face, particularly
of the lips and the front teeth, and operations in
which hand actions,
bilateral or unilateral, are performed without
facial participation is
evident at different levels. We became aware
of the importance of this
distinction when we analyzed the formation
of the anterior field. To it
we must add another that is particularly
important when analyzing the technical
behavior of humans: the mode
of action peculiar to the hand. Action peculiar
to the hand consists
in the potentially wounding effect of fingernails,
in grasping
operations involving the fingers and the palm
(digitopalmar
prehension), and in grasping between the fingers
(interdigital prehension).
Since movements of transmission or
rotation determine both our manner of
holding a hand tool and the
impetus we apply to it, a fourth term descriptive
of the leverage
exercised by the forearm and the arm is needed in order
to analyze
human gestural behavior in the technical field. A full analysis
would
have to be based on the whole of the body, but here we need go
no
further than to suggest a method of ordering the main categories
of the
gestural behavior of the higher mammals and the
human.
The interest in defining the common capital of
monkeys and the human being
does not lie in finding human elements in
the monkey but in analyzing the
elements
239
of
physiological anatomy common to both. Figure 106 shows the
technical
behavior of primates and human technical capital from the
earliest beginnings
until the dawn of Homo Sapiens.
The
elementary behavior of monkeys and anthropoid apes involves
coordinated
or isolated action of the forelimb and the face against
the moving background
of the body mass in operations relating to the
acquisition and consumption
of food, to aggression or defense, and to
associative behavior through
facial or manual contact. Unlike the
rodents, which almost exclusively
seize or palpate by grasping with
the lips and teeth, primates use the
hand by preference.l6 This
reversal of the proportion between the respective
uses of the hand
and the face in a number of actions not basically different
from
those performed by rodents having a prehensile hand is in itself
sufficient
to set the primates apart from the rest of the mammals. It
marks the beginning
of human operational behavior
processes.
From primate to human being, grasping operations
do not change in nature
but develop in terms of the variety of ends
pursued and the delicacy of
execution (figure 106).
The hand's modes of action became gradually enriched during the operational
process in the course of human evolution. The manipulative action of the
primates, in which gesture and tool form a single whole, was followed in
the first anthropoids by directly motive action of the hand with the hand
tool separable from the motive gesture. In the next stage, reached possibly
before the Neolithic, gesture became annexed by the hand-operated machine,
the hand merely supplying is motor impulse by indirect mobility. In historic
times motive force itself was transferred from the human arm, and the hand
intervened only to stars the motor process in animal-operated machines
or mechanical machines such as mills. Finally, in the last stage, the hand
is used to set off a programmed process in automatic machines that not
only exteriorize tools, gestures, and mobility but whose effect also spills
over into memory and mechanical behavior.
This enmeshing of tools and gestures in organs extraneous to the human
has all the characteristics of biological evolution because, like cerebral
evolution, it develops in time through the addition of elements that improve
the operational process without eliminating one another. Earlier we saw
that the brain of Homo Sapiens sail preserves all stages acquired since
the fish stage, and that each stage, overlaid by the next, continues to
play a role even in the most sophisticated forms of human thought. Similarly
the existence and operation of an automatic machine with a complex program
implies that at every stage of is manufacture, regulation, and repair,
all categories of technical gestures from handling metals through handling
a file to coiling electric wire to assembling the machine's parts, whether
by hand or mechanically are sail present though only faintly discernible.
243
The complex operations of grasping, rotation, and transmission that characterize
handling were the first to appear and have crossed the ages without undergoing
any transposition. They still form our most common stock of gestures, the
prerogative of the human hand which is so very archaic and relatively so
unspecialized by comparison with those marvelous machines for capturing
or running that are the "hand" of the lion or the horse. The
privilege of long life which in paleontology is enjoyed by species that
are not over-specialized also attaches to operations performed by the bare
hand with which, to this day, the finest forms of architectural construction,
pottery, basketry, and weaving are connected.
Devices for grasping, transporting, and positioning objects did not become
available in assembly lines or in the form of automatic manipulators until
a highly advanced stage of industrialization had been reached. In cranes
and pulley blocks, known since ancient times, the hand intervenes only
as a hook and the machine is a simple exteriorization of the motive force.
The example of weaving too is conclusive: In the most elaborate fabrics
such as those of Peru or in oriental brocades, the hand picks up the threads
individually in order to make the desired design. Yet freeing of the fingers
was achieved quite early, perhaps as early as the Neolithic, by reducing
operations to the repeated lifting of one thread in two or three. Not until
the nineteenth century did the introduction of a punched-card system raise
mechanical weaving to the level of handling skill of which the bare hand
had been capable from the start. In both cases the development is the same:
In the first stage, the hand can perform actions that are limited in terms
of force or speed but infinitely diverse; at a later stage, that of the
pulley block or the weaving loom, a single action of the hand is isolated
and transferred to the machine; in the third stage, the programming of
movements is reconstituted through the creation of an artificial and rudimentary
nervous system.
Unlike handling, actions involving the use of the teeth or nails became
exteriorized from the very first. In these actions the hand merely serves
as a pincer at the extremity of a device that has a direct motor function
and is suitable for percussion of various kinds (see my L'Homme et la
nature).
The range of percussive actions of which Anthropoid apes are capable is
quite wide, but their main instrument is the teeth incisors for cutting
and scraping, canines for piercing and tearing, molars for crushing. The
role of the hand consists
244
above all in presenting the object to the teeth or in preparing it for
being eaten. The nails are employed only in operations involving scratching
or digging, but their action is important because of is rhythmic nature.
If we consider the operation behavior of the great apes, we are left with
an impression of a potential rudimentary technicity based on dental percussion,
handling, and recurrent scraping movements. Everything required to constitute
human technicity is already there, and it all comes together the moment
tools enter upon the scene.
Lacking records as we do, we find it difficult to visualize how the incisor
became a chopper how, in other words, our only organic tool capable of
cutting, worn on the projecting end of the jaw, became transferred to the
hand via the incisive action of a splintered pebble. We do know, however,
that at an extremely early stage, by the time of the Austraianthropians,
this transfer seems to have been effected. Here again, walking upright
played the decisive role. In monkeys the two operating fields (biting and
handling) are involved simultaneously when the quadruped is seated and
separately when it is walking; the dental apparatus remains the forward
point of the body and the animal's chief organ of association. With erect
posture, the hand takes over as the organ of association. Operations performed
when seated remain connected with simultaneous action of the face and hand
(food consumption and technical operations involving the teeth), but labiodental
contact is no longer dominant as in quadrupeds, nor even equivalent as
in many monkeys. In the human it continues to be important only in a few
contact and in a few technical operations where the mouth serves as an
additional claw or pincer. The transition to tools is thus functionally
justified by the transfer of the field of association to the hand.
To view the chopper as an incisor placed at the ends of our fingers or
the percussion tool as a molar brandished in the fist would be childishly
fanciful: Yet it is true that the scale of actions remained the same before
and after the transfer that took place at the hypothetical point in time
when an upright-walking primate transposed is percussive activity from
the teeth to a pebble activated by the arm. The vast number of objects
with which humans have surrounded themselves obscures the fundamental simplicity
of the tools they need for survival. The forms of the technical equipment
used by Australian aborigines are few in number: the spear and the throwing-stick
for hunting, the digging stick for gathering, the pebble crusher, the knife,
the flint chopper and scraper for the preparation and consumption of food,
the bone awl, fibers for tying, pieces of bark to serve as receptacles.
What we know of fossil humans up to and including the Palaeoanthropians
is of the same order and covers a range of dental and manual actions exactly
the same as that of the primates: The percussion tool attests to crushing
and hammering, the deer antler used as a dig-
245
ging tool, and the small scraper used on wood to scraping; cutting actions,
whether by direct application of a hand-held tool or by throwing a sharpened
weapon, are performed with sharp-edged splinters and the chopper or biface.
In the Upper Paleolithic, with Homo Sapiens, the range widens, but there
is nothing to indicate except in levers and traps that indirect motor function
had been achieved.
The ability of the hand to exercise indirect motor function reflects another
"liberation," with the motor gesture finding new freedom in the
hand-operated machine that extends or transforms it. The point in time
when this important stage was reached is very difficult to define. It does
seem, however, that by the late Paleolithic there were at least two implements
attesting to indirect motor function, the pierced stick and the spear thrower.
The former is a length of reindeer horn pierced with a hole and probably
employed as a lever for hot-straightening bone rods. With this tool both
the force and the direction of movement of the hand are transformed. This
very simple application of indirect motor function in the form of a tool
that acts upon the direction of movement is found as early as in the Aurignacian
period, some 30,000 BC Evidence of the hurling stick dates back to a later
period, the Magdalenian, around 13,000 BC This is a hooked stick that seems
to accelerate spear-throwing (see my Milieu et techniques) by adding the
mechanical value of an extra elbow and forearm to the arm of the thrower,
who holds it in his hand.
From that point onward and until the dawn of historical time, applications
of indirect motor function developed further. The transition to an agricultural-pastoral
economy caused them to become incorporated in a variety of techniques and
in many forms as springs and levers, as continuous or alternating motion
in hand operated machines such as the bow or the crossbow, in snares, pulleys,
millstones, cranes, and transmission cables. These machines, which are
discussed in my two earlier books, reflect a logical stage in human evolution.
As with hand tools the process whereby all implements came gradually to
be concentrated outside the human body is again perfectly clear: Actions
of the teeth shift to the hand, which handles the portable tool; then the
tool shifts sail further away, and a part of the gesture is transferred
from the arm to the hand-operated machine.
The evolution continued with muscular impetus itself becoming separated
from the human body through the harnessing of the motor function of animals
and of wind and water. It is a singular property of the human species that
by confining itself to engendering action, it periodically eludes the organic
specialization that
246
would definitively tie it down. If the hand of the earliest anthropoid
had become a tool by adaptation, the result would have been a group of
mammals particularly well equipped to perform a restrained series of actions:
It would not have been the human being. Our significant genetic trait is
precisely physical (and mental) nonadaptation: a tortoise when we retire
beneath a roof, a crab when we hold out a pair of pliers, a horse when
we bestride a mount. We are again and again available for new forms of
action, our memory transferred to books, our strength multiplied in the
ox, our fist improved in the hammer.
The freeing of motor function is the decisive stage, perhaps not for the
individual but for human society collectively in possession of each member's
means of anion. The phenomenon is a very recent one. The adoption of animal
traction and of machines activated by water or wind are reported in ancient
history; moreover it was confined to a few Eurasian civilizations whose
technoeconomic supremacy continued to be founded upon it until the eighteenth
century. Generally regarded as historical phenomena of technical significance,
the invention of the four-wheeled carriage, the plough, the windmill, the
sailing ship, must also be viewed as biological ones as mutations of that
external organism which, in the human, substitutes itself for the physiological
body.
The animal machine requires a good deal of muscular participation. Motor
function is "deflected" to drive the animal motor, but it remains
considerable. Moreover the efficiency of the animal-driven machine became
stabilized very early on and at a rather low level: The number of horses
does not increase the speed of the vehicle nor, within certain limits,
their resistance to fatigue.
The relationship between humans and their exteriorized force is altogether
different in the automotive machine, including even the simplest water-driven
pile driver or mill. Having set the process in motion, the hand no longer
intervenes except to feed or to stop the machine. The operator can increase
the machine's power or distribute it among machine tools which will perform
all the operations for which human intelligence has designed them.
The conquest of water and wind was accomplished in antiquity-early in historic
time-but for many centuries they remained the only sources of automotive
power. Not until the nineteenth century was the decisive step taken with
the harnessing of steam pressure.
The momentous nature of the change in scale of the relations between the
human and the natural world was clearly perceived at once. The initial
conquest of metals had been a triumph of the hand: the conquest of steam
definitively confirmed the exteriorization of muscle power.
247
However, human participation was still considerable, and the Age of Steam
was also the age of the cruelest enslavement of the manual worker. The
automotive machine of the nineteenth century possessed neither a brain
nor a hand. Its nervous system was extremely rudimentary, consisting simply
of speed and pressure regulators discharging a constant but blind force.
The worker operating the machine provided the brain that made that force
useful and the hand that stoked the fire, fed raw material to the machine,
and oriented and rectified in action.
Nevertheless, if we are agreed that biological change affects both the
physical organization and the behavior of the organisms concerned, the
birth of automotive force was a crucial biological stage. The fact that
the organs involved are extraneous to the body matters little if the change
creates a new living reality. We have seen that human evolution from Homo
Sapiens onward has been a story of more and more radical separation between
the rate of change affecting the body sail governed by the geological time
scale and that of change affecting tools, which now occurs with every generation.
If the species was to survive, some accommodation was necessary, and this
accommodation was bound not only to affect our technical habis but also
to involve thoroughgoing changes in the laws according to which individuals
group themselves together. Of course the parallel with the zoological world
cannot be maintained except by way of paradox, but we cannot completely
dismiss the thought that some species change takes place whenever humankind
replaces both in tools and in institutions. Although peculiar to humans,
the changes that affect the entire structure of our collective organism
hang together in much the same way as changes that affect all the individuals
in a group of animals. From the moment when the exteriorization of motive
force became unlimited, social relations assumed a new character; a nonhuman
observer unfamiliar with the explanations to which philosophy and history
have accustomed us would separate the eighteenth-century human from the
human of the tenth century as we separate the lion from the tiger or the
wolf from the dog.
The Automatic Machine Nineteenth-century machinery was sail a long way
from the ideal mutation whereby exterior to the human there would be another,
wholly artificial human acting with unlimited rapidity, precision, and
force: a long way from the moment when everything tool, gesture, strength,
and thought would be transposed to a perfect twin image of the social ideal.
The gradual establishment of a social organism wherein the individual increasingly
plays the role of a specialized cell makes it more and more clear how inadequate
the human being is the flesh-and-bone human, a living fossil, immutable
on the historical scale, per-
248
fectly adapted to external conditions at the time the human species was
triumphing over the mammoth but already overtaken by them when required
to use muscle to operate the trireme. Our constant search for more powerful
and more precise implements has inevitably led to the biological paradox
of the robot, a creature which, in the form of the automaton, has haunted
the human mind for centuries. The ape-ancestor image evoked in chapter
1, the expression of a nostalgic retreat into the past, has is counterpart,
not in the spiritual image of the angel or the physical one of a perfect
human body, but in the image of the perfectly made machine, the Anthropoid's
mechanical twin Tarzan, the astronaut, and the robot gravitating like a
constellation around the human of flesh and blood.
Many of the mechanical monsters produced in the nineteenth century sail
survive today machines without a nervous system of their own, constantly
requiring the assistance of a human partner. Developments in the use of
electricity, and above all the rise of electronics, taking place less than
a century after the mutation that produced automotive machines, have triggered
another mutation that leaves but little in the human organism sail to be
exteriorized. Machines have changed radically as a result of the development
of small-scale motors, photosensitive cells, transistors, and miniaturized
devices of all kinds. This disparate arsenal is supplying the parts for
a composite body strangely similar to the biological one. Whereas nineteenth
century machines with their voluminous energy sources conducted a single
force to blindly acting organs via extensive transmission systems, today's
machinery with is multiple sources of energy is leading to something like
a real muscular system, controlled by a real nervous system, performing
complex operating programs through is connections with something like a
real sensory-motor brain.
Mechanical automation, from the mechanical brontosaurus of the nineteenth
century rolling mill to the automatic pilot of today, represent the penultimate
possible stage of the process begun by the Australanthrope armed with a
chopper. The freeing of the areas of the motor cortex of the brain, definitively
accomplished with erect posture, will be complete when we succeed in exteriorizing
the human motor brain. Beyond that, hardly anything more can be imagined
other than the exteriorization of intellectual thought through the development
of machines capable not only of exercising judgment (that stage is already
here) but also of injecting affectivity into their judgment, taking sides,
waxing enthusiastic, or being plunged into despair at the immensity of
their task. Once Homo Sapiens had equipped such machines with the mechanical
ability to reproduce themselves, there would be nothing left for the human
to do but withdraw into the paleontological twilight. In point of fact,
the
249
chance of machines equipped with a brain taking our place on earth is slight;
the threat lies within the zoological species itself, not directly in the
exteriorized organs. The nightmare picture of robots pursuing human beings
in a forest of mechanical tubes will come true only to the extent that
other human beings will have regulated the robots' automatic system. What
is to be feared if only slightly is that in a thousand years' time Homo
Sapiens, having exhausted the possibilities of self-exteriorization, will
come to feel encumbered by the archaic osteomuscular apparatus inherited
from the Paleolithic.
The development of automatic programs represents a peak in human history,
comparable in importance with the emergence of the chopper or the rise
of agriculture. Because it has occurred so recently, it can provide us
with some insight into the mechanism of great technical mutations in general.
The idea that a series of technical gestures might be performed mechanically
evolved very slowly in historical time. Automatic machines capable of performing
a single gesture, like the water-driven pile driver, were developed in
Mediterranean or Chinese antiquity, but the idea of mechanical programming
was technically unrealizable until the Middle Ages. The first means of
programming by purely mechanical processes were found in clock making.
A technical confraternity specialized in giving material expression to
the concept of time provided a favorable environment for innovation. The
medieval clock maker, a specialist in progression and animation, learned
to use pinions and cams and to combine circular with rectilinear motion
in order to devise the simple program of the first animated clocks and
automata.
The evolution of animation depended on that of the source of motive power
employed. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, clockwork mechanisms
were operated by rectilinear traction using a weight, a system that considerably
restrained their possibilities. From the fifteenth century on, the use
of a spiral spring provided a means of reducing the size of the automatic
device and making it portable. Improvements to the mechanism led to the
eighteenth-century automata, which represent the peak of what could be
achieved in programming with clock making devices. The nineteenth century
saw a change in the scale of the pinions and cams employed and the invention
of steam-operated machines capable of simple gestures. Like the automata
that preceded them, these machines represent a fascinating stage of technical
evolution not without parallels in animal evolution.
250
Mechanical automata are programmed to perform a sequence of simple gestures
in an order prescribed within the mechanical organs themselves. The operating
memory is situated at the level of the cams, a little to the back of the
machine's active part; there is no nervous system and no coordination network
other than the transmission mechanism. Jacques de Vaucansson's automata
are to electronic devices what the earthworm is to the mammal. In other
words, they are like living organisms with a segmental memory stored in
each of their active elements, cams being distributed to each part to be
animated like the chain ganglions that animate each of the annelid's joins.
By a completely different path, automatism entered weaving techniques at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Joseph Jacquard invented a loom
for patterned fabrics using a set of punched cards which determine what
threads should be picked for each run. A complex pattern can thus be executed
by wholly automatic means. Barrel organs using perforated bands of paper,
which operate on a similar principle, made their appearance at about the
same time. The Jacquard loom and the barrel organ can be described as a
pair of automatic machines which, in terms of their principle, are opposable
to the pair formed by the automaton and the music box. Perforated card
machines are equipped with a centralized memory separate from the execution
organs, to which it transmits a real message corresponding to a program
capable of a large number of modifications. Like the tune of the music
box or the bird organ, the program that activates an automaton's finger
comprises a set of cogwheels. It is invariable for a specific mechanical
situation and can be modified only by adopting a different mechanical formula,
just as the progression of the annelid consists in coordinating the simple
movements of a series of joins endowed with an invariable motor function.
The program of the Jacquard loom is external to the organs of execution
it is "intelligent" by comparison with a mechanical device. Furthermore,
by changing the set of perforated cards the machine can be made, without
any mechanical modification, to perform a different set of operations.
A "nervous system" proper is not yet there, but everything that
the nineteenth-century technical environment could contribute toward developing
a memory machine is already in place.
Not until the last twenty years* has the mimicry of living matter by artificial
matter achieved a reasonably high standard. A century of familiarization
with electricity and, later, with electronics was needed before this became
possible. The resulting
*Translator's note: Again, it may be useful to remind the reader that this
book was first published in 1964.
251
machine represents a synthesis of all previous stages. Mechanical organs
of execution, actuated by as many energy sources as efficient articulation
may require, are set in motion by a program that, at one stage at least,
is recorded on tape. The essential difference lies in the presence of what
amounts to a real nervous system through which the central organs transmit
commands and monitor their execution. The sequence of mechanical gestures
is prescribed by a transformable memory. The physical health of the machine
is checked by organs that regulate the speed, temperature, and humidity
of each organ. The texture and form of the substance being processed is
examined by ponderal, tactile, thermosensitive, or photosensitive organs
that transmit their findings to automatic regulating centers, and the machine
can orient, correct, or suspend is actions in response to messages it receives
from is "sensory" organs. A biologist will find it hard to resist
comparing the mechanisms of animals whose evolution is already completed
with these organisms which, in the last analysis, constitute a parallel
living world.
For these reasons there may be some benefit in adopting and sustaining
the same attitude toward the whole of human evolution. Proceeding from
the very general biological phenomenon of evolution employing earlier stages
to serve as the active substratum for new, innovative ones, we have considered
the evolution of the nervous system in terms of the addition of new cortical
areas that led to the simultaneous emergence of technical motor function
and of language and, later, to technicity controlled by mental processes
and to figurative thought. It is already clear at the paleontological stage
that erect posture and the general osteomuscular structure, once they have
achieved human form in the Australanthrope, are no longer decisive. The
hand, already formed in the monkey, stops changing (except for purposes
of neuromotor adaptation) from the moment it begins to hold a tool. The
decisive evolution of primitive anthropoids lies in the neuromotor equipment
of the manual and facial cortex. From the osteomuscular point of view,
nothing more takes place except adaptation accompanied by minor variations.
The main thrust of evolution is massively oriented toward tools.
The actions performed by tools are relatively simple and few in number.
The gestures of hammering, cutting, and piercing, which remain the stock-in-trade
of hand manufacturing to this day, are quickly acquired. Evolution therefore
became focused entirely on materials and forms of motion. The evolution
of motion determined the freeing of motor function. Ever since the earliest
agricultural societies, the
252
conquest of force together with the conquest of new materials has been
the dominant pursuit: conversion of rectilinear into circular motion, conversion
of force through transmission, transfer of driving force from human to
animal and, later, to the motor. The orientation to yard new materials
affected both the tool itself and the force that actuates it. Initially
confined to metals, over the course of history it gradually created the
problem of fuels directly or indirectly employed to drive machinery. Between
the Bronze Age and the eighteenth century, advanced techniques evolved
very slowly and with great difficulty, confronted with the problem of imparting
more powerful motion to tools made of more resistant materials. With the
solution offered by iron founding, motion and materials merged into a single
cycle and everything became a matter of coal and steam. The prodigious
leap forward of the nineteenth century was due to the fact that coal not
only meets the requirements of iron founding and steelmaking but also provides
the motive energy needed for mining and for operating machine tools. It
thus fulfilled the conditions for a tremendous advance toward the freeing
of force and, as a corollary to this, challenged the whole inner structure
of humankind. The consequences of coal for our way of life have been as
important as a rapid transformation of the dental and digestive apparatus
would be for an animal lineage. Railways and the emergence of a proletarian
working class, to name only two of the immediate consequences of the freeing
of driving power, have had a direct effect on the entire organization of
our species. The adjustment of human individuals, whose brain and physical
frame are sail those of Cro-Magnon man, to the new conditions has involved
an ever-increasing degree of distortion.
Today the process of adaptation is not yet complete. Evolution has entered
upon a new stage, that of the exteriorization of the brain, and from a
strictly technological point of view the mutation has already been achieved.
From a more general point of view, the distance between ourselves the descendants
of reindeer hunters and the intelligent machines we have created is greater
than ever. The compression of time and distance, accelerated rates of activity,
nonadaptation to carbon monoxide and industrial toxins, permeability by
radiation all these facts raise the curious problem of our physical compatibility
with the environment in which we must now live. The conclusion to be drawn
may well be that progress is beneficial only to society, while the individual
human being is already an outdated organism, useful like the cerebellum
or the rhinencephalon, like the foot and the hand, but already receding
into the background to become the mere infrastructure of humankind in which
"evolution" will henceforth be more interested than in the individual
253
human being. Indeed, that would only confirm the identity of the human
species with animal species, whose progress as a species is alone worthy
of consideration.
Technical liberation unquestionably reduces the technical freedom of the
individual. From the Australanthrope to the age of mechanization, the operational
behavior of individual has progressively become richer, but is nature has
not changed. The technical life of the hunter, and later of the farmer
and the artisan, involves a large number of sequences that correspond to
the many actions needed for their material survival. These sequences are
empirical, borrowed from a collective tradition that one generation passes
down to the next. Their principal trait, for all the unity of their broad
outlines and their extension over vast polyethnic territories, is their
strongly marked local and individual character. Everything humans make
tools, gestures, and products alike is impregnated by group aesthetics
and has an ethnic personality which even the most superficial visit to
an ethnographical museum will reveal. Individuals introduce their personal
variations into the traditional framework and, safe in the knowledge of
belonging to the group, draw some of their sense of existing as individual
from the margin of freedom allowed them.
With the passage to industrial motor function, the situation changed thoroughly.
The purpose of operational sequences was now to fill the gaps still very
wide in the behavior of the machine. The worker was required to perform
parts of sequences measured at the rhythm of the machine, series of gestures
that excluded the worker as an individual. Complete "technical deculturation"
took place, while at the same time the individual ceased to belong to a
group of marked personality and comfortable size.
Early industrialization was followed by a process whereby the worker was
gradually adapted to the machine without the latter's losing any of its
preeminence. The "Taylorization" of gestures was accompanied
by the standardization of tools and products, intensive adaptation to continuous
circular motion (of rotary tools, lathes, spindles), and undifferentiated
processing of different materials. Then mechanical automatism gradually
came in, the worker's activity becoming confined to supervising the input
of feedstock, executing the program, and delivering the finished product.
There cannot be any value judgments made about an evolutive process. We
may think that the gigantism of dinosaurs in the Mesozoic era was "bad"
because the
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dinosaur vanished while the crocodile survived, but we know nothing about
the future of whatever it is that will replace Homo Sapiens. What we can
do, being far enough advanced in the present stage of evolution, is measure
those things that have already changed beyond retrieval. From Pithecanthropus
to the nineteenth-century carpenter, operational sequences remained essentially
the same: Workers considered the materials they were to process, drew on
traditional knowledge to select a certain series of gestures, and then
manufactured and possibly rectified the products of which they were the
authors. Throughout the process, their expenditures of muscular effort
and of thought were in balance. However mechanical their behavior, it involved
the "outcropping" of images and concepts and the presence however
shadowy of language. For several hundreds of thousands of years, the human
species-determined operational behavior was total, integrated in an immediately
significant collective context and inseparable from the quality of humanness.
The possibility of feeding wood into a machine without paying any attention
to the grain or knots and obtaining a standard piece of parquet flooring
that will then be automatically packaged undoubtedly represents a very
important social advance. But the only option it leaves to us is that of
ceasing to be Sapiens and becoming something else, something that may perhaps
be better but will certainly be different. When we consider the ways open
to us if we are to have some sense of existing other than the satisfaction
of being a depersonalized cell within an organism (however admirably planetized
that organism may be), we should remember that it takes more than a century
or two for the zoological human to change.
The same facts can be verified from a different perspective that brings
out another aspect of the mutation the human species has undergone. In
preindustrial societies the individual level of technicity was relatively
high: Putting it more precisely, the lives of all individuals were filled
with manual activities of many kinds and of a quality at least sufficient
for survival. The group made use of individuals of below-average ability
as stopgaps, while virtuosos led in every field, offering a stimulating
image to the rest of society: Artisans, musicians, or rich farmers, each
little group had is share of models and maintained itself through contact
with them. At the stage we have now reached, the redo has changed very
considerably, with vast masses of average and below-average people confronting
an ever-diminishing number of models. Participation still exists, but it
is exercised via the press or the audiovisual media: The following of the
macrocollective model, whether astronaut, hero
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of labor, or Iranian princess, has no common measure with that of the master
of the wolf hunt, the village blacksmith, or the local bartender, but the
savor of proximity has gone, and the model's only value is as a purveyor
of illusions.
The situation is quite similar if we consider the human hand. Originally
it was a claw or pincer for holding stones; the human triumph was to turn
it into the ever-skillful servant of human technical intelligence. From
the Upper Paleolithic to the nineteenth century, the hand enjoyed what
seemed like an interminable heyday. It still plays an essential role in
industry, a few skilled toolmakers producing the operative parts of machines
to be operated by crowds of workers requiring no more than a five-fingered
claw to feed in the material or simply an index finger to push the buttons.
But ours is still a transitional stage, and there can be no doubt that
the nonmechanized phases of industrial processes are being gradually eliminated.
The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would
not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove
that is activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with
which it is connected. "Being useless with one's fingers," "being
ham-fisted," is not a very alarming thing at the level of the species
as a whole: A good number of millennia will pass before so old an organ
of our neuromotor apparatus actually regresses. But at the individual level
the situation is very different. Not having to "think with one's fingers"
is equivalent to lacking a part of one's normally, phylogenetically human
mind. Thus the problem of regression of the hand already exists today at
the individual if not the species level. I shall revert to this question
in part III in order to show that manual imbalance has already partially
destroyed the link that used to exist between language and the aesthetic
image of reality. It is not a matter of pure coincidence, as we shall see,
that nonfigurative art is flourishing at the same time as "demanualized"
technicity.