This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain how (...) they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

Research in formal theoretical semantics has recently expanded its scope to include gestural communication, focusing in particular on gestures that contribute to the content of an accompanying utterance, e.g., size gestures (LARGE, WIDE), pointing gestures, and gestures that depict objects (TELESCOPE) or actions (SLAP). At the same time, fruitful inquiries at the intersection of primatology and linguistics have given rise to the hypothesis that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (=imperative) (...) class='Hi'>gestures. Directive gestures such as STOP or COME-CLOSER, pose non-trivial issues for a semantic analysis: we inherit the challenges that pertain to the analysis of imperative utterances (Come closer!), while adding a further challenge that stems from the underspecified mapping between a directive body movement and its potential counterparts in human language. We begin by outlining the problem and surveying the nascent state-of-the-art with regards to a formal semantics of directive gestures. Particular attention is given to the multifunctionality of directive gestures, which typically have different effects in different contexts; for example, a non-human ape gesture may communicate "Stop that" in some contexts and "Move away" in others, with similar patterns found in humans. We show that this multifunctionality can be derived from a single, rich abstract lexical entry, "Not…!", a candidate for a universal building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes. "Not…!", which incorporates negation/rejection, temporal reference and presuppositionality is more explanatory in comparison to a minimal alternative. This chapter lays out the hypothesis space, addressing the foundational question of how to explain attested gestural overlap between human and non-human great apes. We conclude the chapter by reviewing potential expansions of the analysis to the pragmatic gestures of humans, which are thus placed on the primate gestural meaning continuum and connected to the directive gestures we share with our non-human relatives in the great ape family. (shrink)

What is the form of that which can hold, size, and measure what is happening? Are there some gestures that can, in some sense, size what is occurring in absolute fragility? We trace forms that, suddenly, sometimes, can grasp in a vanishing present what cannot be grasped by any other means. Certain art practices can sustain and give shelter, for a while, to an echo of that multiple and unending past. These practices inexist. These inexistences compose artistic configurations, of (...) which the artworks referred to in this book are outstanding examples. The axiomatic declaration of the inexistence of art operates as an act of flight, a subtraction. Undomiciled artistic practices are multiple, infinite, and emancipatory. From these practices, we can find the sub-stance for an infrapolitical anarchitecture that works in constructing a future yet to be imagined. Another world is possible, of course. We must continue to whisper that other worlds are possible because we are already participants in that memory to come. On Gestural Apparatuses works as a mechanism of delay that aims to indicate an operative movement within artistic thinking. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are (...) ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36). (shrink)

Douglas Yacek’s recent book The Transformative Classroom proposes a useful aspirational model of transformative education. In this critical commentary, I review this model and suggest that while it succeeds in overcoming some ethical shortcomings of other dominant models of transformative education, I would like to suggest that focusing on more subtle transformative gestures could have the benefit of being less dependent of the teacher’s intention to transform and of being less constrained by the expectation that transformation should take place (...) primarily in the classroom. When transformation is conceived as an educational fiction, it may be conceived as a retroactive experience constructed around memories of the teacher’s transformative gestures, thereby adding to Yacek’s aspirational model by allowing for transformation to continue beyond the walls of the classroom. (shrink)

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. (...) The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic. (shrink)

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that (...) higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)

Stories evoke emotions in their hearers. Do they evoke emotions in their tellers as well? Tellers can tell stories from the inside as if they were characters in the world of the tale or they can tell stories from the outside as if they were perceiving the taleworld from elsewhere. From the outside, the teller can represent the emotion a character feels; from the inside, the teller can express the emotion the character feels. In either instance, tellers can be moved (...) by the story they tell. When they are, they can experience their emotions as a suffusion of sensation that springs forth in their bodies. The body’s experience of its sensation can appear in the gestures that accompany the telling. On the occasion presented here, the teller represents her emotion in metaphorical gestures that figure her body as the container of a fluid substance that threatens to overflow its boundaries. Her gestures disclose and elaborate this metaphoricity while at the same time disclosing and elaborating the sensations that motivate the metaphor. (shrink)

This paper explores how Wundt’s and Bühler’s respective conceptions of gestural expression have implications for how each conceives of what, in broad terms, may be understood as a ‘grammar of gestures’: that is, the rules for the formation and performance of gestures with and without speech. Unlike previous scholarship that has looked at the relationship of Wundt and Bühler, the aim here will be to give particular attention to the relevance of their respective accounts for current philosophical and (...) linguistic research on gesture. Building off of Bühler, we can offer an alternative to the psychologistic and solipsistic model of gestural expression that can be found in Wundt and that seems to be resurgent today in work by McNeil and others. Via Bühler’s notions of diacrisis and of the underlying functions that guide human communication, we propose an understanding of the relationship between gestures and speech that aims to render accurately both the highly contextualised and the highly structured conditions of their mutual employment. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

I agree with Vaesen that it is a mistake to discard tool use as a hallmark of human cognition. I contend, nonetheless, that tools are not simply external markers of a distinctive human mental architecture. Rather, they actively and meaningfully participate in the process by which hominin brains and bodies make up their sapient minds.

Tomasello and colleagues have offered various arguments to explain why apes find the comprehension of pointing difficult. They have argued that: (i) apes fail to understand communicative intentions; (ii) they fail to understand informative, cooperative communication, and (iii) they fail to track the common ground that pointing comprehension requires. In the course of a review of the literature on apes' production and comprehension of pointing, I reject (i) and (ii), and offer a qualified defence of (iii). Drawing on work on (...) expressive communication, I sketch an account of a mechanism by which ape gestural communication may proceed: the showing of expressive and naturally meaningful embodied behaviours. Such gestures are easily interpretable because they present rich evidence for a speaker's message. By contrast, pointing typically provides poor evidence for a speaker’s message, which must therefore be inferred from considerations in the interlocutors' common ground. This makes pointing comprehension comparatively difficult. (shrink)

Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these (...) deep-rooted abilities for what I term “self-originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism. (shrink)

Frege held that the bare demonstrative ‘that’ is incomplete, and that it is the word together with a gesture that serves as the designating expression, and likewise that it is the word ‘yesterday’ together with the time of utterance that designates the relevant day. David Kaplan’s original theory of indexicals holds that Frege’s supplementation thesis is correct about demonstratives but incorrect about ‘yesterday’. Kaplan’s account of demonstratives deviates from Frege’s in treating supplemented demonstratives as directly referential, hence rigid. It is (...) argued here that the gesture or other demonstration that accompanies an utterance of ‘that’ is not part of the designating expression but instead part of the utterance context. (shrink)

This paper pursues the idea that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (imperative) gestures and their meanings. We investigate gestures that are multifunctional, in that they have different effects in different contexts, focusing on non-human ape gestures that communicate “Stop that” in some contexts, and “Move away” in others. What may superficially appear to be lexical ambiguity can be derived from a single abstract lexical entry, “Not X!”, concluded to be a candidate (...) for a universal building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes, reflections of which may also be found in the pragmatic gestures in humans. (shrink)

By examining the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy from 1901 to 1914, this essay reveals that he possessed a more robust philosophy of gestures than has been accounted for. This study is executed in two stages. First, I explore how Husserl analyzed gestures through the lens of his semiotics in the 1901 Logical Investigations. Although he there presents a simple account of gestures as kinds of indicative signs, he does uncover rich insights about the role that gestures (...) play in communication. Second, I examine how Husserl augmented his theory of gestures in his 1914 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. Husserl describes some gestures as signals, which are experienced as intersubjective communication, as having a temporally diachronic structure, and as possessing an obliging tendency. Husserl also contrasts gestures to language by showing how language habitually leaves traces on us. (shrink)

A complex, polyvalent phenomenon, the kiss, once embedded in a literary text, is first and foremost a cipher to be decoded. Texts effectively expose its many-sidedness: not merely its potentially seductive power or ostensible expression of affection, but, no less compellingly, its risky demeanors, its capacity to establish dominance, to terrorize, to subdue, to belittle, to ingratiate, even to infuriate. Variously bestowed, retracted, avowed, disavowed, meaningful, meaningless, the kiss can become, as it does in the work so named by Kate (...) Chopin, a multi-layered form of contrivance, the incarnation of tempting, albeit ultimately invidious, non-realities. Though, perhaps, not manifest at first blush, a careful reading reveals that each occasion marked by the “joining of lips” yields an odd sequence of awkward and oft deleterious, consequences: motion is superseded by motive, candor by disingenuousness—all in an unending slew of backward and forward slippages. Thus is engendered the metaphorization of an altered reality—structured all but exclusively upon the relentless deceits it proffers. Jubilation and despair come and go, as though wholly inter-changeable; acceptance and rejection, promulgation and rescission are converted into mere variants of the same gestures of ambivalence, if not of travesty. One might thus conclude that the kiss adopts significance worthy of note only as a metonym for and of factitiousness, vacuity and thinly-veiled distortion. Chopin’s script adeptly explores the multifarious comportments and consequences of the kiss: an act fashioned as a “weapon” of dubious value, as a tactical strategy, as a play-act borne of ulterior objectives and, which, as such, deftly prostitutes itself, willingly, nefariously. In the given context, the kiss-act lays bare the heroine’s ostensible “liberation” to be more imagined than real. Her would-be triumph over gendered subjugation exists, if at all, as but an ill-conceived romantic daydream—destined to slake gradually into a woeful destiny of loneliness and imprisonment. Chopin’s brief narration center-stages betrayal, challenges authenticity and valorizes consummate illegitimacy. -/- . (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

The central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger to its gesture. Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani (...) Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice. (shrink)

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used in analyzing (...) various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

Enactivist approaches claim that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. An ongoing challenge for these approaches is the problem of accounting for normativity while avoiding overly reductionist outcomes. This article examines a few proposed solutions, including agent-environment dynamics, participatory sense-making, radical enactivism, the skillful intentionality framework, and enactivist cultural psychology. It argues that good examples of enacted normativity are gestures of appreciation/disapproval performed in the aesthetic domain. Both Wittgenstein and Dewey explore this (...) issue and their ideas could be productively worked upon in an enactive account. (shrink)

Orang-utans played a communication game in two studies testing their ability to produce and comprehend requestive pointing. While the ‘communicator’ could see but not obtain hidden food, the ‘donor’ could release the food to the communicator, but could not see its location for herself. They could coordinate successfully if the communicator pointed to the food, and if the donor comprehended his communicative goal and responded pro-socially. In Study 1, one orang-utan pointed regularly and accurately for peers. However, they responded only (...) rarely. In Study 2, a human experimenter played the communicator’s role in three conditions, testing the apes’ comprehension of points of different heights and different degrees of ostension. There was no effect of condition. However, across conditions one donor performed well individually, and as a group orang-utans’ comprehension performance tended towards significance. We explain this on the grounds that comprehension required inferences that they found difficult – but not impossible. The finding has valuable implications for our thinking about the development of pointing in phylogeny. (shrink)

Departing from the intention to explore Frank Gehry’s drawings serving to their own designer to grasp ideas during the process of their genesis, the article examines Frank Gehry’s concern about the revelation of the first gestural drawings and all the sketches and working models concerning the evolution of his projects, and his intention to capture the successive transformation and progressive concretisation of architectural concepts. The article also compares Gehry’s design process with that of Enric Miralles, Alvar Aalto, Bernard Tschumi, and (...) Le Corbusier. It sheds light on Miralles, Aalto, Le Corbusier and Gehry’s interest in a holistic understanding of all the parts of an architectural project, which is expressed through their tendency to draw the different sketches concerning the same project on the same sheet of paper. At the core of Gehry’s design approach is the osmosis of function and morphology. This aspect of his design vision could be compared to Alvar Aalto’s design process. At the core of the article are the distinction between communication drawings and conceptual drawings, and Gehry’s concern about achieving an osmosis between function and morphology. The article also investigates Gehry’s use of uninterrupted self-twisting line in his sketches, exploring his intention to enhance a straightforward relationship between the gesture and the decision-making regarding the form of the building. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance (...) studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. Thus, the term (...) “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 239-259, December 2019: -/- When people speak or write of “embodied” in one form or another, as in embodied mind, embodied cognition, embodied language, embodied self, and so on, they implicitly look past if not outright deny the realities of evolution. Animate life evolves on the basis of different morphologies. Animals with differing morphologies establish not merely different niches but different modes of living, which in the most fundamental sense means establishing (...) distinctive repertoires of movement—different ways of doing everyday things. Certain movements within one species’ repertoire may nevertheless coincide with certain movements within the repertoire of other species, as, for instance, the movement known as presenting, which occurs in multiple primate species in two different contexts: as a sexual invitation and as an aggression deterrent. That certain movements can have the same significance across species does not diminish the distinctiveness of any repertoire but attests to the evolutionary heritage of a species, namely its anchorage in morphology, that is, in bodily templates and possible variations of the same, all of which templates and possible variations translate into distinctive movement possibilities and definitive repertoires of movement. (shrink)

Western Philosophy’s modern period has been very much shaped by a representationalism according to which “concepts” (earlier: “ideas”) assembled into “propositions” constitute the fundamental unit of meaning, thought, belief— and even, in the hands of 20th century philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Jaegwon Kim— action, conceived as performed under a description. What exactly a proposition consists in ontologically is not easy to explain in a manner consonant with prevailing scientific naturalism. But it is clearly a disembodied entity, some kind (...) of abstract object. But in human behaviour, much depends on not just what is done but how it is done (and this ‘how’ will possess a beginning, middle, and end denied to abstract objects). The ‘how’ may be understood as gesture, and Maddalena’s book takes a first pass across how a philosophy that takes this, rather than disembodied meanings, as its foundation might organise itself. The result is a fascinating wealth of germinal ideas, not all of which I have space to discuss here. (shrink)

Several prominent contemporary philosophers, including Jürgen Habermas, John Caputo, and Robert Bernasconi, have at times painted a somewhat negative picture of Gadamer as not only an uncritical traditionalist, but also as one whose philosophical project fails to appreciate difference. Against such claims, I argue that Gadamer’s reflections on art exhibit a genuine appreciation for alterity not unrelated to his hermeneutical approach to the other. Thus, by bringing Gadamer’s reflections on our experience of art into conversation with key aspects of his (...) philosophical hermeneutics, we are able to better assess the viability of Gadamer’s contributions to contemporary discussions of difference and alterity. -/- Sections two through six focus on key concepts in Gadamer’s account of art’s dynamic ontology and our experience of art. Such concepts include the play structure of art, hermeneutic identity, tarrying with a work, and contemporaneity. The opening sections provide not only a discussion of these central themes, but they also (1) draw attention to the various ways in which difference and otherness are integral to Gadamer’s account, and (2) utilize relevant musical examples that prepare the reader for a more focused discussion of a Gadamerian approach to free jazz in section seven. By highlighting how Gadamer’s understanding of art possesses a dialogical play structure, is characterized by identity and difference, requires actively engaged spectators and auditors, and is amenable to what many criticize as an unintelligible musical expression, viz. free jazz, Gadamer’s project is shown as other-affirming and open to ambiguity and dynamism. That is, the essential structures and concepts characterizing Gadamer’s reflections on art are likewise central to his overall hermeneutical project, and hence are not rightly described as un-attuned to difference or other-negating. Rather, Gadamer’s philosophical project upholds difference, since it requires a dialogical interplay between self and other that creates the possibility for a transformative experience. (shrink)

Methodological problems often arise when a special case is confused with the general principle. So you will find affordances only for ‚artifacts’ if you restrict the analysis to ‚artifacts’. The general principle, however, is an ‚invitation character’, which triggers an action. Consequently, an action-theoretical approach known as ‚pragmatic turn’ in cognitive science is recommended. According to this approach, the human being is not a passive-receptive being but actively produces those action effects that open up the world to us. This ‚ideomotor (...) approach’ focuses on the so-called ‚epistemic actions’, which guide our perception as conscious and unconscious cognitions. Due to ‚embodied cognition’ the own body is assigned an indispensable role. The action theoretical approach of ‚enactive cognition’ enables that every form can be consistently processualized. Thus, each ‚Gestalt’ is understood as the process result of interlocking cognitions of ‚forward modelling’ and ‚inverse modelling’. As can be shown, these cognitions are fed by previous experiences of real interaction, which later changes into a mental trial treatment, which is highly automated and can therefore take place unconsciously. It is now central that every object may have such affordances that call for instrumental or epistemic action. In the simplest case, it is the body and the facial expressions of our counterpart that can be understood as a question and provoke an answer/reaction. Thus, emotion is not only to be understood as expression/output according to the scheme ‚input-processing-output’, but acts itself as a provocative act/input. Consequently, artifacts are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for affordances. Rather, they exist in all areas of cognition—from Enactive Cognition to Social Cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two exemplary replies to the challenge of history that played a crucial role in the controversies on the nature and purpose of philosophy during the so-called long 19th century. Nietzsche and Dilthey developed concepts of philosophy in contrast with one another, and in particular regarding their approach to the history of philosophy. While Nietzsche advocates a radical break with the history of philosophy, Dilthey emphasizes the continuity with the philosophical tradition. I shall argue that these (...) conceptual reorientations are linked to specific social images of the philosopher. Nietzsche, on the one hand, presents us a new version of the philosophical recluse. Dilthey, on the other hand, embraces the idea of a philosophical community, thus emphasizing the collective character of philosophical research. My examination of these connections attempts to show that the history of philosophy should also be studied as a social tradition. (shrink)

The place of Glissant’s philosophy of decolonisation in relation to Fanon and Césaire has been theorised by some authors, but the emphasis has not been placed on the fact that Glissant refers to both his predecessors as examples of the absence of a link between the two tactics of resistance – un détour [a tactical diversion] and un retour [a return]. For Glissant, both Césaire and Fanon are still diverters and not properly producers of a new reality, of a real (...) Caribbean territory and history. Thus, following previous analyses by commentators, but departing from them (or adding a new layer, the layer of spatiality that should be combined with a traditional analysis of temporality), this chapter defends the idea that Glissant locates his decolonial thought between Césaire and Fanon: it neither advocates a reconstruction that points to a past located elsewhere (Africa), nor recommends the rejection and replacement of the here/now with a different, unknown spatiality and temporality. For Glissant, the locus of resistance is located in the present and in the possibilities of decolonisation already contained in the Caribbean, although concealed and understated. This chapter begins by showing what is, according to Glissant, the necessary conjunction between the different tactics of resistance, then focuses on some of Césaire’s and Fanon’s texts in order to show why they do not offer this necessary link. The final section comes back to Glissant to analyse the notion of l’antillanité as the possibility of truly focusing on a here/now as a multilayered strategy of resistance. (shrink)

This paper presents gesture as an element of aesthetic experience of musical work. It focuses on specific dialectics of gesture in musical works as that which is visual or highlighted and at the same that which speaks to the listener. The difficulty in describing what constitute musical expressive gesture is there to guide us. The gesture stands in way of recognizing meaning and providing communication but at the same time that, which speaks to the listener is the most secluded, intimate (...) part of musical experience. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between dance and the work of Nelson Goodman, which is found primarily in his early book, Languages of Art. Drawing upon the book’s first main thread, I examine Goodman’s example of a dance gesture as a symbol that exemplifies itself. I argue that self-exemplifying dance gestures are unique in that they are often independent and internally motivated, or “meta-self-exemplifying.” Drawing upon the book’s second main thread, I retrace Goodman’s analysis of dance’s relationship (...) to both notation in general and also Labanotation in particular. My argument is that dance gives the false impression of being notational, or is “meta-notational.”. (shrink)

Despite the popularity that the embodied cognition thesis has gained in recent years, explicit memories of events personally experienced are still conceived as disembodied mental representations. It seems that we can consciously remember our personal past through sensory imagery, through concepts, propositions and language, but not through the body. In this article, I defend the idea that the body constitutes a genuine means of representing past personal experiences. For this purpose, I focus on the analysis of bodily movements associated with (...) the retrieval of a personal memory, which have certain features that make them different from procedural memories, pragmatic actions and common gestures, as well as other forms of embodied memories found in recent literature. I refer to these as “kinetic memories” and analyse their representative nature as well as their adaptive functions. Kinetic memories are bodily movements in which some event or action that took place in the past can be seen, because they are an externalisation of the subject’s inner intention of representing a past personal experience. Kinetic memories represent a past experience sometimes by imitation of a past movement, and other times through embodied symbols and metaphors. Furthermore, although sometimes they present direct pragmatic benefits, such as communicative benefits, they seem to enhance the whole reexperience of the past event and memory recall, which I argue is one important adaptive value. (shrink)

I argue that when we use email, text messaging, or social media websites such as Facebook to interact, rather than communicating face-to-face, we do not experience the best kind of empathy, which is most conducive to experiencing benevolence for others. My arguments rely on drawing interdisciplinary connections between sources: early modern accounts of sympathy, dance theory, philosophy of technology, and neuroscience/psychology. I reflect on theories from these disciplines which, taken together, suggest that to empathize optimally, we must see or hear (...) each other’s bodily gestures, vocal intonations, and facial expressions. (shrink)

In this paper I will investigate Kristeva’s conception of dance in regard to the trope of the borderline. I will begin with her explicit treatments of dance, the earliest of which occurs in Revolution in Poetic Language, in terms of (a) her analogy between poetry and dance as practices erupting on the border of chora and society, (b) her presentation of dance as a phenomenon bordering art and religion in rituals, and (c) her brief remarks on dance gesturality. I will (...) then follow this latter movement to the 1969 essay “Gesturality,” to critically examine where Kristeva situates the powers and limits of gesture (and thereby dance) in relation to language. Next, I will move to the later text, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, where the image of dance figures prominently in what I will term Kristeva’s joyful re-choreographing of Freud’s text Totem and Taboo. I will also see how her treatment of dance links more directly to Kristeva’s feminist concerns, insofar as she understands the process of choreography as a kind of maternal function neglected in most psychoanalytic thought. (shrink)

In his Vermischte Bemerkungen 43, Wittgenstein notices that he was also influenced by Oswald Spengler. The paper deals with the question of in which way Spengler influenced Wittgenstein’s late works and if it really was influence or only a coincidence of ideas. It is put forward that Spengler’s rather unknown philosophy of language influenced Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, especially the concepts of family resemblance, antiessentialism, and language-game (Sprachspiel). A picture of the famous Neapolitan gesture of “negation” which motivated Wittgenstein to (...) give up the picture theory of language is also shown with an example taken from Andrea de Jorio, La mimica degli antichi investigala nel gestire napoletano, Napoli 1832. (shrink)

This paper describes how bodily positions and gestures were used to teach argument diagramming to a student who cannot see. After listening to short argumentative passages with a screen reader, the student had to state the conclusion while touching his belly button. When stating a premise, he had to touch one of his shoulders. Premises lending independent support to a conclusion were thus diagrammed by a V-shaped gesture, each shoulder proposition going straight to the conclusion. Premises lending dependent support (...) were diagrammed by a T-shaped gesture, the shoulder premises meeting at the collar bone before moving down to the belly button. Arguments involving two pairs of entailments were diagrammed by an I-shaped gesture, going from the collar bone to a mid-way conclusion above the abdomen before travelling to the final conclusion at the belly button. The student’s strong performance suggests that placing propositions at different locations on the body and uniting them with gestures can help one discern correct argumentative structures. (shrink)

A number of contemporary philosophers think that the unqualified statement “X is unspeakable” faces the danger of self-referential absurdity: if this statement is true, it must simultaneously be false, given that X is speakable by the predicate word “unspeakable.” This predicament is in this chapter formulated as an argument that I term the “ineffability paradox.” After examining the Buddhist semantic theory of apoha (exclusion) and an apoha solution to the issue, I resort to a few Chinese Buddhist and Hindu philosophical (...) materials to rationally reconstruct a strategy for resolving the paradox. By introducing the mode of expression termed “indication,” together with the relevant notions of superimposition and of gesturing beyond the horizon, I show that expressing the ineffable does not necessarily involve irresoluble contradiction. It is also suggested that philosophers may need to acknowledge the relevance of the notion of ineffability for contemporary philosophizing. (shrink)

This text takes as an excuse the homonymous exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia, to address the history and political gestures in contemporary art. By addressing some curatorial approaches of the exhibition, it explores the cultural functions of the museum as a place of localization of descriptive and communicative processes about culture, and how the exhibition reveals the negative effects of these functions on cultural processes. The text highlights the presence of the artist Jorge Marín, who in his works (...) questions the influence of the notion of progress in the territory. He recovers what has been discarded by history to stage what has been rejected and repudiated. Marín's works are presented as a survival strategy that illuminates other ways of thinking about the territory of culture and questions the concept of history as a fixed representation. In this way, it highlights the importance of addressing history and political gestures in the production of contemporary art, and how the exhibition "El Jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan" and the work of Jorge Marín are examples of how art can question and subvert the hegemonic narratives of history and culture. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and (...) Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one fights to (...) keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event. (shrink)

This chapter examinates the concept of Baroque habits in its various declensions, dwelling in particular on aesthetic habits through the case study of Guarino Guarini’s Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin. In the first part three declensions of Baroque habits, linked together by profound implications, are identified: habits of knowledge, referred to the ideal of Baroque encyclopedism; moral habits, framed in the Baroque practices of government of affects; and aesthetic habits, consisting in regimes of or- dering of sensible experience (...) which finds in the Wunderkammer one of its highest manifestations. In the second part of this chapter, these concepts are applied and further elaborated in the light of one of the greatest results of European Baroque, the Guarinian Chapel. Through the example of the Turinese architecture it is demon- strated how Baroque representative practices perform a gesture of immanentization of the transcendent principle by composition of light and application of geometry. Such “sensible metaphysics” is aimed at both the government of affects and at the creation of a habitable space of experience, where the infinite transcendence of Christian divinity becomes source and object of habits. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—the negotiation and management of ‘‘we-space”—and that some of the expressive actions involved in the negotiation and management of we-space (gesture, touch, facial and whole-body expressions) drive basic (...) processes of interpersonal understanding and thus do genuine social-cognitive work. Social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven and at least partially constituted by environmental (non-neural) scaffolding. Challenging the Theory of Mind paradigm, I draw upon research from gesture studies, developmental psychology, and work on Moebius Syndrome to support this thesis. (shrink)

The processes of computation and automation that produce digitized objects have displaced the concept of an image once conceived through optical devices such as a photographic plate or a camera mirror that were invented to accommodate the human eye. Computational images exist as information within networks mediated by machines. They are increasingly less about what art history understands as representation or photography considers indexing and more an operational product of data processing. Through genealogical, theoretical, and practice-based investigation, this dissertation project (...) traces a lineage of computation through images from early cybernetics to contemporary machine learning under algorithmic capitalist conditions of political economy. Objects include mundane examples such as smartphone cameras to sublime examples such as the imaging of black holes. It articulates new conditions and forms of perception and surveillance that result from contemporary technological development in computation. The project builds on theorists of computational media such as Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jussi Parikka, Shane Denson, and Alexander Galloway to examine the interplay between perception, computation, and epistemology. Further theoretical contribution builds on the work of Luciana Parisi and Jacques Ranciére’s articulation of aesthetics, and Michel Foucault’s gesture towards a heterotopia. Finally, it draws from Donna Haraway’s metaphors of the cyborg and sympoiesis to frame the capacity of art to transfigure the limitations of digital network culture into new possibilities for being. Here, it curates practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Morehshin Allahyari, and Pierre Huyghe. (shrink)

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of (...) emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule (...) have divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures. (shrink)

In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...) there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful. (shrink)