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Gesture, or the body without organs

of speech
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. Thus, despite (and because of) its supposed primitivism, and for
" Considered jointly with
several motives, gesture is increasingly the object of attention and interest -- speech, gestures open a
precisely in relation to the question of the 'human' -- from different directions
within the contemporary, logos-driven scene. First, the recognition that the 'window' onto the mind. ...
gestural systems used throughout the world by the deaf to commune with taking gesture into account,
each other are full-blown (visual) languages, on a par with and in some
respects superior to the (auditory) languages of human speech; one we see patterns not revealed
consequence of which is a reconfiguring of established ideas of 'language' by speech alone and see more
and communication (human and animal) and the re-emergence of theories
proclaiming the gestural affiliations and origins of speech. Second, the comprehensively how
development of audio and visual technologies of speech meanings are constructed.
recognition/simulation and motion capture that, by digitizing the body's
activities and making gestures objects of consciousness, are heralding a new, Gesture is not only a display of
post-documentist mode of re-presenting human movement, of 'writing' the
body to allow gesture to be used as a new mode of human-computer
meaning but is part of the act
interface. Third, the ongoing re-evaluation of the body itself as the site of of constructing meaning itself,
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material and discursive social-historical practices, as an object constructed at

the shifting boundaries between the bio-medical and cultural, the actual and
adding a 'material carrier' that
virtual, and the concomitant transformations taking place in how we think helps bring meaning into
of, narrate, understand, experience -- become -- what we have for so long
(blithely and for the most part without reflection) simply called the human
existence ... ." David McNeill
'body'. Certainly, whatever else it may be, gesture is a body thing; part of the
body's shape, its envelope, its presence to itself and others. And just as
certainly, a new era of the body is upon us, wherein the creative effects --
spiritual, epistemological, ecological, aesthetico-ethical, ontological -- of our
corporeal finitude are being cognized (as if for the first time). "We have just
only begun", as Gilles Deleuze paraphrasing Baruch Spinoza has it, "to
understand what the body is capable of". An era that recognizes that we
have/are embodied minds, enfleshed psyches and that our inner states --
thinking and imagining, dreaming, feeling, remembering, self-experiencing -
- cannot (except in the misinformed fantasies of certain techno-
transcendentalists) be disengaged from the body. The body-self, increasingly
assembled at different places, times and speeds according to heterogeneous
imperatives and agencies, is becoming distributed and collectivized:
corporeality, being/having a body and a self, is going plural, parallel,
simultaneous and multilevel, against old forms of being singular, linear,
unitary and sequential. (1) Difficult to conceive the status of gestures --
which are made by and make the body -- could remain the same, that one
could think gesture at the present time without re-thinking it, without being
led to construct a gesturology. I can't do that here. Nor do I wish to: it would
be premature and not appropriate; better to gesture towards it, to point to the
project by trying to say why at this moment in its history gesture might be
significant, productive, intriguing enough to deserve, at the least, an ology
devoted to it. Behind this claim for its significance is an implicit valorization
of gesture's so-called primitiveness: the fact that it is more ancient than
speech, pre- and counter-intellectual in character, the source of the imagistic-
holistic dimension of thought. Without question, gesture -- the work that it
does -- reaches deep into human sociality, to its affective and ancient core. It
is as essential to the ongoing making of the human (from the proffered breast
to the turn-taking which inducts infants into language to the maintenance of
innumerable symbolic practices), as it is inseparable from the wordless
empathy without which what sociologist Michel Mafesoli calls puissance or

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the 'will to live' would not be possible; therein -- in its primitiveness,

linguistic silence, and aboriginality -- lies its importance and value.

What do I intend by gesture? The mathematician in me insists on starting

with a definition. To that end, call any body-movement a gesture that can be
identified, repeated, and assigned a meaning in relation to at least one of the
three regimes or modes categorized as significance, function or experience.
The movement in question can be already finished: I include all supposedly
static positions, poses, postures, tableaux, attitudes since they are the frozen
endproducts of gestural movements -- striking a pose, taking an attitude or
position, assuming a posture, and so on. A gesture can be a bodily antic, an
expressive practice, a routine, a mediation, or performance; any iterable
pattern the body creates and manifests, any re-cognizable kinesis. The
following can be gestures: raising an eyebrow, blowing a kiss, puckering the
lips, shrugging, exiting in high dudgeon, any kind of dancing, playing the
violin, genuflecting, giving the finger, clenching the fists, beating a rhythm,
nodding the head, making an ASL sign, altering volume, pitch or tone of
voice, laughing, sobbing, marching, jumping on the spot, sighing,
hammering in a nail, ... , painting, drawing, scratching on a surface, daubing,
tapping on a keyboard, turning a screw, stroking a cat, slicing an apple, and
so on, and so forth. Gestures are co-extensive with bodily movement; to
examine them it is necessary to make distinctions. We can, as already
mentioned above, identify three modalities of gesture. They correspond to
three modes of embodiment or aspects of being embodied: the semiotic
(signifying body), the instrumental (functioning body), and the immersive
(experiencing body). In the semiotic, the body expresses, communicates,
speaks, gives signs, uses language or the apparatus of codes to construct,
convey or mediate meanings; in the instrumental -- pounding a nail, turning
a wheel, slicing an apple -- the body is captured by a machinic circuit, it
becomes a mechanical apparatus (more accurately part of a transduction), the
source of what Andre Leroi-Gourhan calls "technics" ; in the immersive
mode, the body enacts, presents or performs or experiences itself through
immersive and participatory activities, as in beating a rhythm or dancing or
marching. Observe that the three modes can differ according to who or what
is the source or recipient of the gesture. If one asks, for example, about the
movements, postures, and gestures of dance, or of acting, or music -- are

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they semiotic or experiential? -- the answer will depend on the agent, on the 1. See chapter 2 of The Time of the Tribes: the
viewpoint. "There are two musics", Roland Barthes, tells us, "the music one Decline of Individualism in Mass Society
listens to, the music one plays. ... Two different arts, each with its own (translated Don Smith). London: Sage
history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic". In just the Publications, 1996; and The Shadow of
same way, dance as spectacle, as an art form of bodies choreographed for an Dionysus: a Contribution to the Sociology of
audience and designed to express, signify, and encapsulate meanings and the Orgy (translated Cindy Linse and Mary
affects for observers, can hardly escape the semiotic; whereas dance for the Palmquist). Albany: State University of New
dancer immersed in these same movements and gestures and participating in York Press, 1993.
their production is within the experiential; and likewise, the same doubleness
pervades the gestures of all theatrical performance. In what follows, my
concern here will be entirely within the semiotic -- the body as meaning,
representation, and significance. The topics of the participating body
immersed in the construction of experience, and the instrumental body
captured within a machinic circuit, I leave for another occasion.

Gestural signs, or 1000 ways of saying nothing

Within the restriction to the semiotic, to gesture as sign, I shall further
narrow the focus by considering gesture primarily in its relation to speech.
This, it turns out, is quite enough to chew on, and is in any case how most of
us encounter gesture. And consequently disparage it: since, in relation to
speech, gesture either appears as pop psychology�s secret 'body language'
that simplistically promises to reveal all those disreputable urges hidden from
speech; or as pantomime (mimetic, impoverished, and reduced) appropriate
to those with little or no speech, such as the deaf and the dumb (in both
senses), or to children or the childlike (Italians gesture a lot); or it is
disregarded, dismissed as a vestige of a pre-human repertoire of signs
displaced by the evolution of spoken language. Body language, deaf-and-
dumb show, vestigial code: gesture appears as an inferior adjunct or trace of
pre-speech, crude bodily expression having little connection to anything as
elevated as the mind or thought or the spoken word. There have been, of
course, alternative evaluations of gesture. Rhetoric and acting manuals have
long recognized its importance in relation to the expression and concealment
of thought and feeling. For dance it is of course central, whether in the
classical Indian forms, where mudras hand gestures play an essential role, or
in various forms of movement and posture recognized in Western dance
from the Baroque to the present. In the 18th century, Condillac famously

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argued for gesture as the origin of speech (an idea currently revived as the
claim that gesture contains the origins of syntax), and a figure like John
Bulwer (inventor of the first fingerspelling alphabet) could attempt in the
17th century to construct an entire gesturology, one that
taxonomized/anatomized significant body movement in terms of a close
analysis -- a "dissection" -- of the body's muscles and argued for the
expressive adequacy (if not superiority) of gesture to speech. From a
different direction (and at a level prior to the tripartite division of gestures
embraced here), haptic gestures, those involving touch, seem especially
important; as if the possibility of contact with the body of the self or the
other (kissing, hugging, clapping, slapping the back, shaking hands,
punching, grabbing and stroking oneself, squeezing the shoulder, wringing 2. Roland Barthes Image-Music-Text (translated
one�s hands, and so on) gives such gestures a particular intensity or Stephen Heath). London: Fontana/Collins,
potency; as if the creation of a circuit of reciprocity, a doubling or folding 1977: p. 149
over to form a new inside/outside, functioned as the site of origination not
available to non-haptic gestures. Let me briefly cite two examples.
According to more than one neurological account of the mind, a form of
internal touching, a virtual auto-hapticity, is a prefiguring or rehearsal or
condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. The idea rests on the fact
that most of the brain is connected not to sensors measuring the world but to
other parts of the brain -- including parts which contain a map of the body
on the surface of neo-cortex. This makes a form of self-touching or
monitoring inside the brain possible, in which the brain, by
exciting/inhibiting regions of itself, achieves a kind of phantom or virtual
proprioception, a primitive template of the self becoming (auto)aware. And a
quite different example of haptic gesture, touching an external social other
rather than an inner neurological self, comes from the work of psychologist
Robin Dunbar, who hypothesizes that a particular form of prolonged haptic
gesture -- chimpanzee grooming -- gave rise to speech. The idea being that
when primate bands got too big, too disseminated, too complex as a group
for grooming, a surrogate for it -- gossip -- which served the social purpose
of grooming but more efficiently, was made available through the
development of spoken language. But speculations on the origins of
consciousness and the evolution of spoken language are not my concern
here. I'm interested in the relation between speech and gesture in their
present day conception, specifically in the hierarchy of speech over gesture;

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my aim is to dissolve this ranking, to deny that gesture is a mere supplement

to speech, to pull it out from the shadow of speech and re-conceive it as an
autonomous and interestingly complex attribute of the body. In a sense, what
is offered here will be a deconstruction, a working out of the two-fold
process that Derrida called the logic of the supplement, whereby a
supposedly ordered binary, a major term and a supplement to it, is inverted
and displaced. For Derrida, the principal hierarchy was that of speech over
writing: speech was primary, the site of presence to oneself, and the ground
3. The claim that syntax of spoken languages
on which the supplement of writing, seen as that which comes after speech
derives -- in evolutionary, developmental and
as a technique of notating it, operated. On the contrary, Derrida argued,
writing comes before speech in at least two ways. First, writing or graphism, ultimately conceptual terms -- from the internal
a general mode of signifying operating throughout cultural production, was organization of gestures is the principal thesis of
Gesture and the Nature of Language by David
always more and other than a device of speech inscription; in fact, speech
Armstrong, William Stokoe, Sherman Wilcox
itself relies on features -- spacing, for example -- of writing in this larger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
sense. Second, the very conception we have of the structure and constituents
of speech which are assumed to have preceded writing cannot be divorced 1995)
from its action; "The syllable�, as David Olson observes, "is as much a
product of graphic system as a prerequisite for it." (x) For us, the hierarchy
in question is speech over gesture: gesture being a semiotic supplement and 4. Pathomyotomia, or a Dissection of the
outmoded accompaniment of spoken language. We shall invert and displace Significative Muscles of the Affections of the
this in two ways. First, by observing that an extensive and important class of Minde (London,1649)
gestures, so-called emblems, far from being subordinate or epiphenomenal to
speech, exceed it and are it seems incommensurable with it. Second, by
showing that all speech has gesture folded into it: spoken words and their
accompanying gestures, so-called gesticulation, arise from gestural and
proto-gestural images. In addition, we shall remove speech's claim to any
radical distinction from gesture by observing that speech is a variety of
gesture, both in its perception no less than its production. This last will allow
us to examine the gestural content of speech -- prosody -- as that which
repeatedly overflows the resources of alphabetic writing, illustrating how
that writing is both the triumph and horizon of the business of substituting 5. Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind
words for absented bodies; a phenomenon that impinges on the endless (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1992) and
deferral of meaning that figures so powerfully in Derrida's understanding of V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
writing. Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Wm.
Morrow and Co., 1998)
Language is more and other than speech (7)

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First, by way of introducing gesture, let's observe that contrary to etymology

(lingua = tongue) and general use, and against the assumptions of linguists
until recently, one cannot identify languaging with speaking. The most 6. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of
deeply maintained form of anti-gesturalism occurs where speech is absent, in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
the history of the deaf and the suppression by their educators of Sign, the University Press, 1996)
gesture-based system used by the deaf to communicate. A history and
antagonism far from over: various universities in the United States currently
are blocking the proposal to study ASL (American Sign Language) in
fulfillment of foreign language requirements with three objections: ASL
lacks a written form; ASL is not a 'real' language; ASL is not a 'foreign'
language. Behind these objections lies the last remnants of oralism, a
phonecentric educational philosophy which succeeded in 1880, at the
international conference of deaf educators in Milan, in banning all use of
Sign (from European and American schools) in favour of enforced voicing
and lip-reading by the deaf. "Gesture", as the organizers put it, "is not the
true language of man ... Gesture, instead of addressing the mind, addresses
the imagination and the senses. Thus, for us, it is an absolute necessity to
prohibit that language and to replace it with living speech, the only
instrument of human thought." This phonocentric -- phonoimperialist --
eradication of gesture had gender support (imagination, senses, female) in
favor of speech (mind, thought, man) and was aided implicitly by the
pathologization (and even criminalization) of deafness. The oralists
campaigned against the use of Sign on the grounds that it isolated the deaf
from normal -- speaking -- society, threatening to promote what Alexander
Graham Bell fearfully characterized as "a deaf variety of the human race".
Thus, the recognition of the linguistic power of Sign, evidenced in Bell's
fears (as well as in numerous accounts of the deaf since the 17th century
acknowledging the educational efficacy of Sign), became a contributory
reason for banishing it; which in turn erased this very recognition by
allowing the prevailing caricature of Sign as pantomime to go unchallenged.
In the 1960s the wall of hostility to gesture with its simplistic derogation of
Sign exhibited its first crack. William Stokoe, a young professor at Gallaudet
University, found it impossible to accede to the picture of Sign as
exaggerated gestures, imitative movements lacking organization, regularity
or internal structure. He observed that on the contrary, the gestures his
students made were abstract not primarily mimetic or iconic, and were

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internally composite: made of distinct hand configurations, definite positions

of hands in relation to the body, identifiable movements in space; they were
also regular and predictable and appeared to form a language-like system in
which gestures and meanings were sytematically paired. The result was the
publication of a Dictionary of ASL in 1966 followed by a study of ASL in
1972 by Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi that established beyond doubt
that ASL had all the properties linguists expected in a language -- lexicon,
grammar, syntax and morphological rules -- and appeared as expressive and
capacious a medium as any spoken language. Since then, other varieties of
Sign (British, Australian, Chinese, Danish, and many more) have likewise
been shown to be fully-fledged languages. These varieties of Sign, though
very different from each other, appear to exhibit certain similarities; they
tend, for example, to avoid the accusative/nominative case distinction in
favour of the ergative/absolute, a structure found in certain spoken languages
such as Georgian. More widely, they are independent of the spoken
language (but obviously not the effects of the culture, some of which are 7. Of course, this is hardly a new proposition
linguistic) surrounding them; American Sign Language, for example, is not and has been asserted more than once by
signed English (ASL signs with English syntax and word order), but its own linguists and others this century. For a brief
thing with a grammar and morphology quite different from that of English. commentary on this, see Ernst von Glaserfeld
More radically, all varieties of Sign exhibit a feature separating them from all �Lingistic Communication: Theory and
spoken languages, namely their use of space and time compared to just the Definition� in Duane M. Rumbaugh (editor).
one dimension of time available to speech. This means not only a vastly Language Learning by a Chimpanzee . New
richer capacity for depiction as opposed to verbal description (the world, for York: Academic Press 1977
humans at least, is more visual and spatial than aural), but that at all levels --
grammar, syntax, lexicon, morphology -- what is necessarily one at a time,
linear and sequential in speech can be simultaneous, parallel and multi-
layered in Sign. The complex topological sequences of Sign�s gestural
choreography, "language in four dimensions", as Stokoe has described
ASL, thus exhibits possibilities of articulation and expression (and perhaps
conceptualization) that are tantalizingly different from those of speech. The
obverse side of Sign's spatial and dynamic complexity is that (as its
detractors in the academy object) it has, at least so far, no accepted written
form and hence no literature (literally: no body of art recorded in letters); a
point I'll return to below. The challenge Sign poses to phonocentric
linguistics has cultural and phenomenological correlates. Culturally (and
politically), Sign enables the deaf to de-medicalize themselves, to de-signate 8. Quoted in Harlan Lane What the Mind
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themselves as deaf [small 'd'] and re-signate themselves as Deaf [capital 'd']; Hears: A History of the Deaf New York:
as, in other words, a linguistic group who use Sign (no differently from any Random House, 1984), p. 391
other group defined/constituted by their language) and not as people who are
speech/hearing deficient. Experientially, those born deaf can by definition
have no voice-in-the-head so familiar to the hearing in its role as monitor,
author, vehicle and evidence of consciousness; instead all these functions are 9. Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf
discharged gesturally: those who Sign have internal kinesis, ghost Variety of the Human Race (New Haven:
movements not ghost voices, sights not sounds in the head. This raises the National Academy of Science, 1883)
intriguing possibility of a parallelist self, an internally 'seen/felt' creation of a
psyche different in certain phenomenological and cognitive directions, from
the internally 'heard/voiced' linear self-consciousness of the hearing familiar
to most of us. (A possibility that offers a new, not easily accommodated slant
on the Lacanian thesis of the unconscious being structured like a language;
insofar as that thesis assumes 'language' is speech). Finally, Sign -- a gestural
alternative to speech whose structure, genesis and practices are independent
of spoken languages and which unlike them such has no accepted written
form -- poses an interesting roadblock to Derrida's totalization of 'writing',
his conception of archewriting. For insofar as archewriting includes gesture,
as much of his talk of spatializing would indicate, then it suffers the same
metaphysical iniquities he attributes to speech, since Sign -- for the point in
question-- is speech.Put differently, ASL separates (in fact opposes) the
effect of presence-to-oneself from phonocentrism, whereas of course they
are conjoined and theoretically inseparable in Derrida's oeuvre.

Emblems: symbolic gestures against speech

Like spoken words, ASL gestures are coded entirely by a linguistic system.
Distinct from these, not captured by a code, forming only a "partial code" of
gestures situated between the two linguistic systems, is the field of so-called
emblems: self-contained gestures with fixed form and meanings such as
kissing the fingertips, slapping the forehead, giving the finger, hailing,
saluting, thumbs up, thumb down, winking, bowing the head, nodding the
head, tossing the head, jerking the forearm, touching the lips, shrugging
shoulders, sighing, tapping the foot, clasping hands, touching the nose,
displaying a palm, bending an ear, pointing, holding up a fist, averting the
face, wagging a finger, beckoning, genuflecting, kneeling, chopping the air,
crossing the fingers, flicking the teeth, baring the breast, and other flexings,

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stretchings, knockings, clutchings, and strikings of poses it would be absurd

to even consider typing out as combinations of alphabetic letters.

According to studies of gesture by Adam Kendon and David McNeill, (10)

emblems are gestures whose principal function is to carry out certain social
activities: "Emblems". McNeill writes, "are complete speech acts in
themselves, but the speech acts they perform are restricted to a certain range
of functions. They regulate and comment on behavior of others, reveal one's
own emotional states, make promises, swear oaths, etc. They are used to
salute, command, request, reply to some challenge, insult, threaten, seek
protection, express contempt or fear." (64)

Emblems, then, are social, experiential and interpersonal; put there to make
something happen, to impinge on the behaviour of the self and others;
they're not really interested in making statements, asking questions, or
conveying facts and propositions. They are in short performatives and,
according to McNeill, discharge the functions carried out by speech acts.
But unlike speech they do not combine via a syntax as part of a language.
And they differ from words in that their meanings are neither explicitly
defined nor (outside instruction in rhetoric or acting) are they intentionally
learned or studied, but rather picked up, absorbed, and (perhaps for this
reason) remain stable in form and import over long periods of time despite
linguistic changes in the communities of their users. These features suggest
that emblems might operate according to a different dynamic and logic, and
might accomplish different ends from that of speech. Calling them 'speech'
acts, assumes them to be individually interchangeable with or translatable
into speech, as well as assuming that they operate, as a system, in the same
ways and for the same purposes as speech. But is this so? Are emblems
always translatable into spoken language? What, for example, is the speech
equivalent of a wink? Or, for that matter, a shrug? a slap on the back?
folding one's arms? hands clasped in prayer? And does their mode of
operation resemble speech? If so, why do we bother with them?

The great range, robustness, and persistent use of emblems, their way of
refusing and displacing speech, calls for an explanation. McNeill offers one
in relation to the concept of 'word magic'. "Spoken words are special and
carry with them the responsibility for being articulated. However, conveying
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the same meaning in gesture form avoids the articulatory act and, thanks to
word magic, this lessened responsibility for speaking transfers to the speech
act itself." (65) Doubtless, there is truth in the idea that gesturing rather than
talking removes one from the net of justifications, arguments, questions,
deceptions, and interpretive qualifications and recriminations that speech
immediately introduces. But how many gestures admit of a translation into
speech? What, absent any such reified abstraction does "having the 'same'
meaning" mean? How convincingly can speech render an emblem? Giving
the finger, for example, certainly carries a different charge from saying "up
yours" or "fuck you" or the very different anatomical procedure invoked by
"go screw/fuck yourself", and so on (the plurality of inequivalent
verbalizations suggests emblems generate meanings by their very exclusion
of speech). But, in any event, is the difference between gesturing and
voicing the 'same' meanings one of lessened responsibility?

What of other deployments of emblems: their extensive, deeply embedded

and seemingly indispensable use in ritual and religious practice, for example.
Here something very different from lessened responsibility, almost the
opposite seems to be operating; as if words are insufficiently responsible, not
binding enough, too fleeting and precise at the same time, and only bodily
action can fulfil the relevant devotional/liturgical purposes; as if gestures are
able to create and stabilize belief, induce as well as express religious
feelings, moods, and forms of consciousness more radically and with more
appropriate affect than the specialized precision of speech. In this context,
what Leroi-Gourhan says about speech's (and writing's) inferiority to art vis
a vis religion, "that graphic expression restores to language the dimension of
the inexpressible -- the possibility of multiplying the dimensions of a fact in
instantly accessible visual symbols" (200), carries over from graphic 10. Adam Kendon Sign Languages of
Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic and
symbols to visual gestures. The same point, but not tied to religious
Communicative Perspectives (Cambridge:
expressivity, threads through the word/image opposition insofar as this
Cambridge University Press, 1988) and many
embraces the preference for visual emblems -- badges, logos, flags, insignia,
earlier papers cited there; David McNeill Hand
etc -- over written words. Evidently emblems, as silent gesture acts able to
say nothing through the displacement, substitution, suppression, or exclusion and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about
Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
of speech, are a major corporeal semiotic whose relation to spoken language
1992)
poses an essential question for any kind of gesturology.

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Gesticulation and the uttering of words

A casual look at everyday conversation and story-telling shows verbal
utterance to have two aspects: spoken words which are accompanied by
gesticulation -- the fleeting, often barely discernible, idiosyncratic, and
seemingly indefinite gestures of the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, face that
appear, in some way, to be connected or not unconnected to what is being
said. These gesticulatory movements are far from consciously produced;
they are involuntary, spontaneous, and mostly unnoticed. What is their
function? Any role they play in spoken discourse must, it would seem, be
limited, since their absence, though not without its effects, is not disabling in
common practice: blind people understand speech, we converse on the
telephone and listen to recorded messages, we hear speech on the radio,
without apparently registering too much disturbance at the non presence of
accompanying gestures. More than other kinds of gesture, gesticulation
seems a superfluous addendum to utterance, an echo of some ancient pre-
intellectual form of communication -- chimp discourse perhaps -- having
little to do with the articulation of thought in words.

Empirical investigations of verbal narration within cognitive psychology

over the past two decades suggest otherwise. If gesticulation is primitive,
ancient or chimp-like, then so is human thought. Not only is gesticulation
neither unconnected to thought nor a surface phenomenon, but on the
contrary is a deep component of utterance having to do with the semantics,
pragmatics and discursive aspects of speech. Specifically, gesticulation
embraces at least four distinct kinds of gesture -- icons, metaphors, beats,
deictics -- which appear designed to accomplish specific semiotic tasks at
different levels of speech. Iconics illustrate the semantic content of speech (a
twisting finger accompanying the words "spiral staircase"); metaphorics
mark an abstraction introduced in speech (cupped hands -- the container
metaphor for abstract entities in Western culture -- when narration jumps out
of the story being told and refers abstractly to its 'genre'; beats, brief on/off
gestures marking the word they accompany as significant "not for its own
semantic content, but for its discourse-pragmatic content"(a hand flick when
a new character or theme or a metalingual gloss is introduced into a story);
deictics point to places or times spoken about (pointing down at the ground
when asking an interlocutor "where did you come from?").

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Plainly, gesticulations (notwithstanding their dispensability in various

contexts) are linked to words at non-trivial levels of speech, contrary to any
phonocentrism that would have them as marginal or epiphenomenal to
speech. The possibility is nevertheless left open of a phonocentric
interpretations of their function and genesis. One could, for example, attempt
to explain them by arguing that gesticulation and speech share a covert
verbal plan, or that gesticulation translates a prior sentence, or that
gesticulatory movements are created to illustrate, amplify or gloss speech as
the latter is produced. That such explanations (which give causal or
conceptual priority to speech) are not feasible is a consequence of the tight
temporal binding, accurate to fractions of a second discovered to operate
between gesticulation and speech. Any gesture has a preparatory phase, a
stroke phase in which the gesture proper occurs, and a withdrawal. In
gesticulation, the preparation precedes the word it relates to whilst the
gesture itself coincides exactly at the height of its stroke phase with the word
in question, after which they disperse together; an anticipation, coincidence,
and dispersal only possible if gesture and word are produced together from
something preceding both of them; only if there were some earlier linkage
between the two. For McNeill this consists of a dialectic of opposed modes
of representation: gestural (imagistic, holistic and synthetic) and verbal
(linear, segmental and analytic); the final utterance being the result of an
interaction between a relatively unconstrained, individual gestural impulse
and the socially constrained demands of a linguistic system. In short
thinking, of the everyday kind that eventuates in speech, has its origins in
pre-verbal visuo-kinetic images which then become gesticulated and
verbalized to form an utterance. Shorter still, spoken thought starts life as a
yet-to-be-realized gesture. One might note in this connection the work of
Wallace Chafe whose analysis of verbal utterance finds it composed of 'idea
units' which correspond to single 'thoughts'; the duration of each unit being
about two seconds -- roughly the time for a complete gesture to take place.
(11) More abstractly, support for McNeill's conclusion comes from cognitive
science's contributions to the construction of the corporeal paradigm or era
of the body mentioned earlier, according to which thought, not least abstract,
rational thought such as mathematical and philosophical thinking, rests on
metaphors derived from repeated and deeply layered patterns of body
movement.(12)

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Speech as gesture - a dual system

Speech is produced by sytematic and repeatable movements of the body --
the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, glottis, vocal chords, larynx, diaphragm --
suggesting that speech might be regarded as a species of gesture; auditory
rather than visible gesture, but gestural nonetheless. Research in phonetics
and artificial speech synthesis over the past two decades has indicated that it
is precisely as a gestural system that the complex kinematics of speech are
best comprehended. (In this connection, it is interesting that certain purely
phonetic features of speech, such as co-articulation, also operate within a
purely gestural context like fingerspelling.Specifically, task-dynamical
models of the type developed originally for describing the skeleto-muscular
organization of the body during walking have proved ideal for modeling the
dynamics of the lips, tongue, etc during speech production.(13) Moreover,
not only is the production of speech gestural, but so it turns out, less to be
expected, is its perception: "Surprisingly", as evolutionary neurologist
Terrence Deacon finds himself saying, "auditory processing of speech
sounds does not appear to be based on extracting basic acoustic parameters
of the signal, as a scientist might design a computer to do, before mapping
them onto speech sounds. Speech analysis appears designed instead to
predict which oral-vocal movements produced them and ignore the rest."
(14) We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such but to what they signal
about the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens
between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses,
holds, accelerations, and completions; the very features of gestures we attend
to when perceiving them. It's as if we listen to speech as symptoms of
gestures, in much the same way as a physician listens to the sound of a
patient's heart to detect its underlying patterns of movement.

It is certainly interesting that speech is a gestural system. More interesting, or

more significant from the perspective of a nascent gesturology, is the
division of speech into two distinct gestural systems: speech as discrete
sequences of separate phonemic units, rapid gestures of the lips and tongue
forming word-strings governed by syntax, and speech as much slower
gestural waves made by the diaphragm and larynx patterned by the prosodic
features of tone, emphasis, volume, rhythm, and pitch. The division into two
systems and their unified co-presence in speech has deep anatomical and

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functional roots organized around a vertical axis of phylogenetic age and a

horizontal axis of hemispheric separation. Roughly speaking, the face,
tongue, lip, and jaw muscles responsible for the rapid production of
individual phenemes and words are more directly controlled by the
(evolutionary recent) cortex, as opposed to the lungs, diaphragm and larynx
responsible for the slower and more extendxed prosodic dynamics
influenced by the ancient limbic and midbrain structures. The two systems,
deeply and multiply folded into each other. Their functions, as Deacon puts
it, are "parallel and complementary", brought together in a manner
"analogous to the way a sound wave can be superimposed on a much faster
carrier wave in a radio transmission." (365) This joining of the phonemic
and syntactical systems in the final production of speech necessitates, it
seems, a horizontal division of labor within the brain. Like the background
context of speech, the prosodic dynamics of words "compete" with the
foreground processing of individual words "for recruitment of the same
brain structures" (314). The brain avoids potential conflicts by dividing tasks
hemispherically; handling the intra-sentential, speed-optimized tasks --
syntax -- on the left side and the inter-sentential, large time domain features -
- prosody -- on the right.

In certain respects, prosody's relation to the phonemic echoes that of

emblems and gesticulation to spoken language. Each type of gesture
generates a mode of saying nothing, producing a linguistic silence inhabiting
the speech they are associated with. Thus, discourse is comprised of spoken
utterance that is heard plus emblems, contra-oral gestures, that say nothing
through a performed alterneity/alterity to speech. Spoken utterance, in turn,
splits into speech proper and the silent component of gesticulation, co-oral
11. .Literacy, Language, and Learning,
gestures of complicity or collusion, that say nothing by agreeing or never
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985
disagreeing. Whilst speech proper, as we see, splits into the purely
phonemic-syntactical stream of words and prosodic gestures that say nothing
by being a condition for the speakable. Gestures, one can say, manufacture
non-speech, pre-speech, un-speech, counter-speech; holes inside and outside 12. For a recent work on this last, see George
speech that are sites of emergence; from them come the antics, ecstasies and Lakoff�s and Mark Johnson�s Philosophy in
travails of the body without speech. the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its
Challenge to Western Thought (New York:
Of course, prosodic gestures though they say nothing are anything but silent; Basic Books, 1998). For a list of earlier works,

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they pre-interpret speech by being part of the sound which constitutes it, see note 4 of my �Exuberant Materiality: De-
determining thereby how it is to be taken, the spin or angle its words carry, Minding the Store�, Configurations 2, 257-
the degree of belief, seriousness, irony, kind of intention, agenda or 274, 1994
motivation they have, and so on. Descriptive linguistics parses the division
between the syntactic-phonemic and the prosodic as the difference between
what is said and how what is said is to be taken (15); a difference that, in
terms of the contribution of prosody to speech's social, affective and
interactional meanings, is crucial: in the absence of tone, for example, the
differences between speech being gentle, withering, questioning, 13. See the various works cited on pp. 8 - 11 of
threatening, seductive, flattering, menacing, pleading, sardonic, gleeful, sad, Gesture and the Nature of Language
encouraging, and countless other affects mediated by connections to our
limbic brains, disappear. A disappearance that as we shall see is central to
the metaphysical work accomplished by alphabetic writing.

Writing speech
Though alphabetic writing is not confined to the writing down of speech, it
is in this that writing's horizon, its nemesis even, is to be found, since it is the 14. The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of
body, through its gestures, that haunts writing. Confronted by the semiotic
Language and the Brain (New York: Norton,
effects of the body -- the prosodic gestures lodged intimately inside speech,
1997), 359.
the gesticulatory ones tightly accompanying it, the emblem gestures that
displace speech whose functions range from explicit signifying to the
creation of implicit silences -- writing offers notations, inscriptions, traces, an
organized system of marks constituting an algorithm; a code which the
reader of these marks must decode in order to retrieve or reconstruct the
original body effects.

Unlike writing in general, alphabetic writing is never free of speech, but is

always within the domain of the readable, the sayable, the pronouncable.
This is certainly not the case with non-alphabetic forms such as, for
example, mathematical writing which, though it can be 'read' aloud if desired
by the reading of names attached to its signs, is semiotically different and
other than written speech. It was precisely the need for readability that
punctuation -- everything from periods, commas, question marks to
parentheses, dashes, ellipses, colons, quote marks, and other orthographic
items -- was invented to satisfy. But all these items, though they make the
more rudimentary speech meanings available to the reader, don't touch the
dimensions of pitch, stress, volume, dynamics, and tone of voice through
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which the bulk of prosodic effects occur, and for which there are (outside
musical notation) no accepted devices. This should be qualified: it is not true
to say there are no devices for writing to convey prosodic effects. In the
interests of brevity and directness, I am talking about writing insofar as it is
'printed', 'naked', and 'pure': printed, and hence omitting the ways
handwriting can make certain prosodically mediated meanings and effects
available; naked, in that the text has not been priorly processed and
annotated up by one of the various mark-up languages or style sheets now
being developed precisely in order to facilitate the reading of texts aloud by
machines (though their ability to code prosodic effects is at present very
limited); pure, in that the text is printed in a 'neutral' font, thus omitting the
effects, most of which are prosodic, achievable through the use of different
type-faces; a resource powerfully used in advertising and comic art. But
these restrictions and exceptions do not disable the general point here,
namely, that alphabetic writing deals with prosody -- insofar as it does --
through the addition of words, through description that leads to textual
augmentation. Faced with prosodic effects, writing is obliged to deal with
the information supplied by prosody by introducing more words --
descriptions, parses, glosses, amplifying locutions -- that function like stage
directions.Thus, in addition to alphabetically notating (necessarily de-
prosodized) words, writing has to supply a further coding of the missing
gestures -- the manner of the words' saying -- by the addition of words about
these words detailing how they are to be taken. Each time this happens, each
time prosody is projected onto syntax, the text becomes longer, more wordy,
more open to further augmenation, than the speech it is coding, since what
was before a co-occurrence, a simultaneity of words-with-prosody, becomes
sequential and linearized.(16) And so it goes on, text without end; always
the edge of writing is occupied by an incomplete coding of prosody and
always the recovery of some full -- prosodically complete -- meaning, affect,
significance or purpose is deferred; a potential infinity of deferrence. In
theory. In practice, one stops at some point of sufficient prosodic
recuperation long before death by excessive length and unreadability
intervene. Derrida's message of endless deferral of meaning (which, by his
practice, is confined to alphabetic writing and which, by his insistence, is
necessarily indifferent philosophically to any such extra-textual intervention
or external source of closure) is thus an effect of alphabetic writing, built into

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the alphabet's asymptotic relation to the capture of prosody, an inevitable 15. I take this formulation from David Olson's
consequence of its inability to code the gestures inside de-gestured words The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge
except by the addition of more (de-gestured) words. University Press, 1994) where it is explicated in
terms of the theory of speech acts put forward
This failure, or rather the disjunction of words from their prosody that by J. L. Austin, according to which, what is
prompts it, which allowed a separation of 'speech' (i.e. speech virtualized as communicated by prosody is the "illocutionary
alphabetic inscription) from its embodied production, was of course writing's force" of an utterance. Much of this valuable,
spectacular achievement. It allowed the alphabet to cut the word loose from but I do not use that description here since I
the place, time, context, circumstances, voice, gestures, presence, and don't think the term 'communication'
mortality of the one who utters it. But this separation has a neurological (understood as a process external to what is
correlate, namely, that such virtualized speech issues from -- gives rise to, communicated ) underlying the theory of
allows to come into being, gives autonomy to -- a dis-embodied cortex; for it speech acts is ultimately a helpful way to think
is precisely the cortex's connection to the midbrain and so-called limbic about the relation between speech and gesture
regions that produces the words-plus-prosody amalgam; a loop which the
autonomous presence of the de-prosodized alphabetically written word cuts.
More sharply, one can locate the connection from the limbic to the cortical
brain as routed through the prefrontal lobes and understand its severance as
an orthographic equivalent of a pre-frontal lobotomy: certainly, descriptions
of the speech of recipients of this procedure -- "In their words or attitudes,
no traces of affection could be detected." -- resonate in an uncanny way with
how we perceive words emptied of prosody. (17) Taken in the reverse
direction, the correspondence allows this writing -- in its relation to speech --
to enact a transcendental escape from the body: the de-prosodized word
issuing from a dis-embodied cortex forming one side of an equation the
other side of which is a marginalized/occluded body whose horizon, its
'highest' achievement, is that of mere limbic gesturing. (18) Alphabetic
writing thus contributes to the ontology of an abstract, invisible God, not by
inventing it as an object of thought, but by operating as a vehicle or machine
for the dissemination of an invisible, transcendental difference without
which no such God can be understood to exist. The alphabet in other words
furnishes the presence of a divine absence, not by representing or alluding to
it as subject matter (though it does that endlessly) or invoking it within itself
(though it does that too: "... The word was with God, the word was God"),
but through direct performance: constantly transcending the midbrain which,
in the terms of the metaphor here, functions as nothing less than the neo-
cortex's body.(19)

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Writing gestures
Alphabetic writing's relation to prosody is symptomatic of a general problem
inherent in notating a performed action -- spoken word, musical phrase,
dance step, body movement, gesture -- with a predetermined signifier of
some system, since the system projects its own shape onto its subject-matter.
In other words, the action notated never escapes from a mirroring of the
separation into discrete, quasi-algebraic signifiers or 'notes' notating it.
Certainly, within the algebra of alphabetic inscription, the effects of prosody
-- geometric, topological, continuous, spread over a phrase or clause --
cannot, as we've seen, be represented as characteristics of separate words.
The attempt to recoup these effects producing, instead, the familiar
proliferation of ever-different interpretations, readings, and deferred
meanings set in train by a recuperation with no pre-assignable boundary.
Outside the notation of speech, the effects are more various. There is a
plethora of different systems that have been invented (each with its own
adherents, successful transcriptions and limitations) for notating dance -- a
multiplicity that in itself suggests certain intrinsic difficulties at work -- but
no single one works for all dances in the way that the alphabet does for all
spoken languages. Likewise, efforts to notate gesture run up against limits to
the feasability of taxonomizing and writing down the body's movements that
seem to reflect an intrinsic limitation of 'writing', of the medium of paper
itself, rather than any failure of method or imagination; and explanations for
the absence of an accepted writing system for ASL do not challenge this.
(20)

But writing's success was to sever (the words of) speech from its production,
to create a form of virtual speech. And speech, as we've seen, is made from
gestures; if writing could virtualize the products of these gestures, might not
something similar be possible on the visual/kinetic products of gesture in
general? What if the whole operation could in some way be repeated; if
three millennia after spoken words were virtualized, it became possible to do
something akin for other signifying productions of the body? What if
gestures could be brought into consciousness, made into discrete objects of
awareness, examined; made as identifiable, repeatable, portable, studiable, as
free-standing, iterable and quotable as words? Would it possible, is my

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question, for there to be a medium that did for gestures what writing marks
on paper did for the words of speech?

Notating speech rescues it from oblivion, captures it in a form that allows the
original utterance to be (partially) reconstructed. Contemporary digital
technology offers a technique -- appropriately named motion capture -- that
promises to do precisely this for gesture and indeed any kind of physical
movement, meaningful of otherwise. Before describing it, it as well to place
it in the context of other and older meanings evoked by the idea of capturing
gesture and movement; meanings corresponding to different interpretations
of the term 'to capture', namely to mimic, to transduce, to record, to
incorporate, and to sample.

Mimicry is the most primitive, least mediated form of gesture capture; as old
as acting and dancing, mime uses the performer's body itself as the
instrument for capturing the movement of another body. Transduction
corresponds to the instrumental mode of gesture identified earlier, in which a
human movement is captured within a machinic circuit where it is converted
into other movements or regimes of action; winding up a clockwork
mechanism or turning the handle of a pulley wheel are traditional examples. 16. See Ad Infinitum for more on this in
Recording movement is what film and video are normally credited with relation to the potential infinity built into the
achieving; they capture movement (in relation to photography's freezing of definition of a Turing machine as its
it) not by way of a direct connection to its kinesis or production as a physical specification of an infinite tape. Without this,
process, but as an appearence, in the highly mediated form of a two- Turing machines would not be universal; not
dimensional visual representation. Incorporating movement occurs in able to reproduce the input/output workings of
calligraphy or various kinds of art production, for example, playing a violin any purely mechanical device -- since, like the
or guitar, the hand gestures responsible for a line drawing, or the brushstokes doomed attempt of alphabetic writing to
that constitute a painting, or their digital versions. In such cases, what is incorporate prosodic effects, the machine needs
captured enters directly and significantly into the created object. James unlimited (i.e. unbounded) sequential space to
Elkins talks of oil painting as making a cast of a painter's movements, of incorporate effects not given originally in
functioning to "preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the sequential form.
quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures." (x) What
Painting Is, p.5. Finally, sampling movement is what takes place within the
digital technology of motion capture. One attaches sensors (these can be
responsive to visual, magnetic, aural, or inertial tracking technologies) to
chosen points on the body (of an animal, machine, human) and takes
periodic readings, i.e. digitized samples, of where in space these sensors are
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as the body moves. The resulting data-set contains the information needed to
reproduce the original motion of the chosen aspects of the body in a
potentially unlimited series of contexts. Unlike a film or video, the readings
are raw data not a representation, they effect a de-territorialization of the
original motion, cutting it free from the place, time, context, circumstances,
physical form, and presence of its performance; in which form it can be re-
territorialized able, for example, to drive an animation -- become the motion 17. Julio Rocha do Amaral and Jorge Martins
of an automaton, puppet, robot, cartoon figure, a virtual reality avatar. de Oliveira Limbic System: The Center of
Captured gestures are already being used in art objects, computer games, Emotions.
virtual choreography, animated films, chat rooms and virtual places, different
kinds of electronic installations, and various attempts at virtual theatre. Like
any digitized object, captured gestures can be stored, instantly replicated,
18. Mathematical ideograms are a form of
posted on the internet, and multiply processed. Capture technology, then,
writing that constitute the most extreme
offers gestures the same kinds of mobility, dislocation and freedom from the development of cortical autonomy. The fact that
contexts of their production as the notational system of alphabetic writing mathematical languages exclude gesture, are
allowed speech. devoid of any reference to an I, or to an other
Observe, from what has been said, that the question here is no longer one of or to a listener, addressee, or signee, and are at
marks on paper, of notation understood as inscription readable by the the same time the ur-site of an abstract,
unaided eye. Digital technology has already changed the terms here, transcendental ontology -- platonism -- should
not, therefore, be surprising; at least not from a
building into 'notation' the digital means by which what is notated can be
semiotic point of view.
read and produced; notation, in other words, embraces simulation. In light of
this, one can juxtapose motion capture and notation. The alphabet notates
sounds on paper, digital technology captures movement as stored data;
notation is algorithmic (the letter sequence a-l-p-h-a-b-e-t is an instruction to 19. For a different neurological take on the
a reader for reproducing a certain sound) and is limited by the pre-set deleterious effects of alphabetic writing within
identifications built into its symbols; capture is documentary and is limited Western culture in terms of its left-brained
by sensor resolution and sampling rate. Notation is metaphoric and requires exclusion/repression of the right-brained,
interpretation, capture is metonymic and delivers fidelity. In capture the life feminine-biased visual image, see Leonard
of a movement, in our case the significant dynamic of a gesture, is sealed on Shlain The Alphabet v The Goddess (London:
the inside at creation; in notation the life is applied, with all the ambiguity, Allen Lane, 1999).
creative augmentation and loss this entails, to the skeleton by the interpreter.

The practical effects and theoretical consequences of these differences are

yet to be worked out. In the meantime, one is left with the question: Could
motion capture be about to effect a transformation as radical and far-reaching
for the body's gestural semiotics as writing accomplished for speech? Could
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bringing (a newly digitized and objectified) gesture out from under the
shadow of the spoken word install a new order of body signification?
Without claiming (which would be absurd) that gesture could rival speech, it
is undeniable that it is on the ascendancy, that in some sense (which I've
tried to outline), certain kinds of silence and the saying of nothing,
achievements of a newly valorized but once marginalized and despised
body, are poised to come into prominence, have already arrived.

Or better, are in a constant state of arriving, since the saying of nothing,

becoming mute, is a never-ending business of creating a wordless interior to
speech. To achieve the body without organs of speech, it is necessary first to 20. This is the stance adopted by Jerome Schein
dumb the body, de-organize it, divest it of speech, silence it, so that, no and David Stuart Language in Motion.
Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 1995
longer governed by the sayable, it may become the field of other
who observe, for example, that
productions, other desires, be alive to other semiotics -- here the gestural --
that speech together (with its transcendentally troped alphabetically written �Unfortunately, the limits of print frustrate
form) is only too pleased to elide. Becoming mute is becoming infant, part of attempts to portray ASL�s spatial-sequential
a willed accession to the state of human pre-speech, a return to, or beauty.� (42)
renogotiation of, the past, except that what is involved in such a move is not
a literal 'return' to the past or a regression in the sense of a move back along
a linear ascent, but a reconfiguration of the present/future by altering its
genesis, its supposedly necessary relation to that past. The result would be
an alteration in the condition for the posibility of being human, a quasi- or
neo-primitiveness in which humans partook of the characteristics of
(presentday) children; a cultural neoteny whereby the adults of species come
to resemble the young of their evolutionary forebears.

To say more about saying nothing, is to leap out of the semiotic mode
governing the present account and consider gesture in its a-signifying
instrumental and experiential modes. Particularly, the experiential, the mode
of immersion, participation. Nowhere, within contemporary culture, is the
experiential gesture more vital, uncompromising and powerful than in the
planet-wide phenomenon of techno music.

Techno is an algorithm designed for generating gesture in the mode of

experience: to dance to techno, to be immersed in its beat, is to both link and
dissolve the relation of the individual self to the socially present other, to
seek the plural, the simultaneous and the co-occurrent which drives the
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collective and its numerous realizations -- crowd, herd, pack, group, swarm,
audience, mass, chorus, mob, throng -- articulated with such obsessive
comprehension and brilliance by Elias Canetti.(21) Techno combines the a-
signifying groove of music with dance, oceanic immersion and ecstatic
participation with a silence in the face of words that is deafening, effacing
logos, nullifying all attempts at reason, ideation, speech or language. Not to
be understood as music for listening, techno is digital software for moving,
dancing, gesturing, experiencing, for getting the body inside and outside the
groove of the digital machine. The rave is the contemporary site of
Dionysus. But that's another story.

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21. Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1984)

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