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@mousebot@todon.nl
Post #1992730
2026-03-31 12:29 UTC
@ephemeral i wonder how could a tool not be a technology? (i saw the etymological steigler thing in the thread, but it seems a bit wilful if you trot it out like that. tekhne means/meant "art", but not art as we mean it, which was largely invented by Romanticism and became an opposite to craft, which is precisely (also) tekhne. tehkhe means art more as in a skilled practice, rather than a creative or genius one. logos also doesn't just mean a discourse (tho that is one of its meanings), it means knowledge, here presumably the kind one has to have to do the skilled making of the thing.) a book is something one has to know how to make, but i feel that there's such a kind of knowledge behind making things like flints too. (re flints, i have leroi-gourhan in mind, he studied prehistoric societies on the highly-technical and laborious developments of flint hewing over millennia, and considers it as fundamental to humanization and in some ways as a precuror to writing...)
Replies (2)
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@mousebot I hear you and thanks for this. The Leroi-Gourhan idea is interesting, I don't know them.
Not a counter-argument to your point about flint, but an expansion: Is a spider's web a technology by this definition? They have been honed over millennia, and are fundamental to what a spider is.
As to tekhne-logos — sorry I was being playful with the shortness of a toot and cherry-picking a meaning to stoke discourse. Yes of course you are right — Stiegler also expanded on this at length.
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@ephemeral hey btw, what stiegler text do you have in mind? the leroi-gourhan i know is Le geste et la parole (trans. as Gesture and Speech). (he wrote a bunch of other stuff too...)
turns out stiegler also studies him in Technics and Time 1, TIL.
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