The gestural body

If, more than any other single topic or theme, that of the body has come to dominate discourses in the humanities, in the arts, and in technoscience where the relation between humans and machines is of overriding interest, it is because the body we knew and had, or thought we knew and had, is gone.

As Michel Foucault and a generation of thinkers after him has demonstrated, the body is not a given, not a 'natural' object, but a bio-cultural assemblage, constructed within discursive practices, interlocking social, cultural and historical matrices and the facilitations/impositions of an evolutionary past.The body's status, then, as an object, as well as the ecological, philosophical and aesthetico-ethical meaning of its finitude, constitute a vast, and not at all unified, field of study.

One anciently acknowledged aspect of the body -- part of its semiotic envelope -- is its capacity and practice of gesture.

"For most people, gesture refers to a primitive, non-intellectual expression of feeling, a rudimentary and not too important kind of communication. The very idea of humans pointing and waving parts of their bodies at each other, themselves, or their gods, appears atavistic, a return to a time before speech; to the origin of the species, to simian chatter or cavemen grunts, to modes of sociality and sensemaking overtaken by the development of language. In relation to the spoken word and the visual image, gesture is a poor, unsophisticated third; pre-rational and retrograde, belonging with certain ceremonies, rituals of the body, ancient dance practices, festivals, sacrifices to the gods; offering little to contemporary discourse beyond a minor anthropological and perhaps artistic interest.

But gesture, it seems, is being re-evaluated, re-cognized and in some sense, reclaimed ..." Gesture, or the body without organs of speech