In Defence of [Un]disciplined Gestures: The Gesture of Paradox. A Performative Presentation

This part-performance, part-presentation was given as a contribution to the closed colloquium 'Extending Gesture', organised by The University of Edinburgh. The call asked for creative and/or performance-based responses to Vilém Flusser's text 'Gesture' (1991), translation by Nancy Roth), in which he poses Gesture, as ‘a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation'. Each invited colloquium participant (of which there were 12 in total, over the course of 3 days), was given an hour in which to tease out the implications of Flusser's remarks on gesture, in terms of their own creative practice and/or concerns. My own presentation addressed 'The Gesture of Paradox', and included elements of print, dance and voice as ways of exploring difference in language, rather than emphasising language as identity. These observations included engaging with the 'impermissibility' of poetic expression as emblematic of the tension between disciplined and un-disciplined forms of language.

By working through these ‘undisciplined’ gestures, in both the written form, and as practice-based work in print/voice/dance, this work engages a larger question (a meta-linguistic question) in relation to language/gesture, and the human interface which language is.

[Un]disciplined gestures point towards an [un]common sense, one which would explode the mythical ‘common’ which orients sense in relation to the same, rather than the different. It would open a space for the truly differing, rather than the different as not-something else (an other), and it would make nonsense an attribute of, rather than a negation of, sense. Paradox would no longer be the insoluble, the unwelcome, the trivialized epiphenomenon, but evidence of true difference at work, and of multiplicity. The gestures/traces of language seen in the sensual surfaces of undifferentiated marks and sounds, would ‘name’ meaning differently. I see this as another way of talking about the ‘human’ in language, and the ways in which language frames our experience and understanding. These questions extend all the way into new technologies of language recognition/Artificial Intelligence.

Colloquium Invitation: Gesture, as defined by Vilém Flusser, is ‘a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation' (Flusser, 'Gesture', 1991, Translated by Nancy Roth). This intimate colloquium requests your presence in order to tease out such complex and unanswerable questions as: What provokes the pulsating body to dance? Or the scribbling hand to scratch? What are the urges and itches that manifest the various gestures of our being? We invite proposals (of any length or form), on the embodied nature of gesture, which may be drawn from any field of inquiry, such as: dance, visual image, architecture, writing, theatre, signing, music, and may contemplate the minutest of gestures, such as those Vilém Flusser philosophises: the gesture of planting, the gesture of searching, the gesture of photographing, the gesture of making etc.

As a ‘gesture of invitation’ and an attempt to ‘extend’ this subject, we are intent on attending to the form of our gathering, the poesis of our interaction, in order to create a space for dialogue and discussion; one that corresponds to the salon ethos of conversation and of the colloquium’s speaking together.