Language as Technogenesis: From Gesture to Algorithm

This paper explores how language emerged through the co-evolution of tools, gestures, and cortical development, rather than from an enlarged brain that then produced tools. Drawing on André Leroi-Gourhan's groundbreaking palaeoanthropological work showing that tool use and language share common origins in rhythmic gestural sequences, we trace how human communication has continuously transformed through technical mediation. Through Augustine of Hippo's puzzlement at witnessing silent reading in 397 CE, the Irish scribal innovation of word separation in the 7th-8th centuries, and contemporary digital transformations, we demonstrate that our relationship with language continuously co-evolves with technical systems. The paper integrates perspectives from multiple disciplines: Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technology and his concept of "tertiary retention" (technical memory), Gilbert Simondon's theory of transindividuation (how humans and technics mutually constitute each other), and Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games (showing how different technical mediations enable different forms of life). Through detailed historical analysis of reading practices, we show how each technological transformation, from flint-knapping to alphabetic writing to digital media, fundamentally reconstitutes what language is and how humans engage with it, alongside merely recording linguistic content. Understanding language as technogenesis reveals that communication has always been a hybrid human-technical phenomenon, continuously transforming through the interplay of biological and technological evolution.