The essence of gesture
I’m getting started on the relationship between writing and gesture. Like everything, it offers circles within circles, from the most subtle and intimate movements of the body to questions of expressiveness, deportment, carriage, moral fortitude, and social responsibility.
Like writing and speech, the magisterium of gesture is vast and diverse. We shake and flutter, grasp and wave, and the effects of those movements ripple with instantaneous impact throughout our social sphere. Both reason and intuition lead us to the notion that many movements of the body have natural, hardwired, primordial meanings—and yet cultural history provides ample evidence that even seemingly basic and instinctual gestures (nodding and shaking the head, slapping the thigh) partake of an essential arbitrariness. Like the sounds of speech, the gesticulatory stream is continuous and infinitely divisible. This aspect of gesture is taken as fact by linguists who accept deaf sign systems as natural languages, in which human minds have formed the plastic clay of bodily movement into flowers of meaning, evanescent and yet reproducibly precise.
But as with speech, gesture invites not only the multiplying of meaning, but of social distinction as well; its freedom-making capacities also breed division. The territory of gesture is readily carved up into cantons and commons, exclusive precincts and duty-free zones. In the West, for instance, there is an implicit distinction between gesture and gesticulation. The gesture (rude ones notwithstanding) is polite, domesticated, at once comprehensive and chastely subordinate to language. Gesticulation, by contrast, is manual noise, the nervous habit of the incoherent.
Norbert Elias concluded that control of the body was part of the “civilizing process,” and that austerity of gesture was so to speak a handmaiden of technological and cultural sophistication. Writing furthermore has been compared to gesture; it might be said that writing is frozen gesture in much the same way that architecture is frozen music. Following Elias, we might conclude that writing consists of a channeling or domesticating of the gestural impulse. And as northern cultures sought to restrict or repress gesticulation (a move discussed in the marvelous book A Cultural History of the Gesture), they sought to pare away aspects of communication rooted in the corporeal, organic lifeworld of the spoken word—in a sense, making even speech more like the austere, angular, and rationalized written language.
But I’m resistant to such rigid, teleological explanations. Certainly writing partakes of some of the possibilities of gesture. The arabesques of calligraphy, the variety of weights and spacings available to the typographer, all seem resonant with the emphatic, framing power of gesture. And writing’s origins in the graphic impulse—the drive to mark and inscribe pattern, to create visible and durable sub-worlds of significance—likely indicate some primordial move towards making gestures visible and durable. Humans seem compelled to animate the inanimate and to freeze the fleeting—desires that likely originate in the predatory impulse, but which make a foundation for religion and art as well. There’s no necessary movement towards, or away from, gesture and gesticulation—no movement that’s inscribed in genes or prescribed by the angel of history. It’s proliferative, a flourishing of the signifying drive that precedes and pervades meaning.
Gesture’s magisterium is shaped by circles beyond these. Roland Barthes called a writer’s work his or her “essential gesture as a social being.” There is here the implicit notion that in whatever work one does, as a social being one presents oneself—carries oneself—into the company of others. By doing work we throw ourselves into life, to borrow a notion from Heidegger—we recapitulate the “throwing-in” that characterizes our very arrival in the world, an arrival that reorients and recreates everything. This is why work is world-making—a sub-creative power made visible in the writing of stories, in the making of verbal inventions.
But if streams of sound, symbol, and gesture are equally pregnant with possibility, the vessels into which they flow, the channels and canyons they cut, are hardly congruent and symmetrical. Considering Barthes’s assertion, Nadine Gordimer observed that the gestures demanded of one set of writers will vary from those demanded of others. Some may gesticulate with abandon; others risk all to do so. “Ours is a period,” she asserted in her 1985 Tanner Lectures, “when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities.” Responsibility and freedom impose their possibilities on the magisterium of writing as much as noun and verb, line and point, black and white.
Freedom evolves. But in place of a telos, it offers only a texture—the fabric of being, the human qualities. In the case of gesture as with oral language, it’s the continuous and endlessly divisible medium of bodily movement, like the stream of speech sounds (which are themselves movements of the body), which is the thing that evolved. Human bodies evolved to preserve the spasmodic and uncoordinated movements of the immature organism—which exhibit a flexibility and comprehensiveness that the mature body lacks—while human cognition evolved to exercise its power of manipulation over them. It’s the capacities, and not the forms, that evolve. There is no great chain of gesture and gesticulation, of carriage and habit (at a deeper level, of course, the capacities are forms, as much as the pigeon’s wing or the porpoise’s tail). As with so much else that is human, there is only the endlessly unfolding principle of possibility, the dance of freedom and responsibility.
