Abstract

This part-performance, part-presentation was given as a contribution to the closed colloquium 'Extending Gesture', organised by The University of Edinburgh. The call asked for creative and/or performance-based responses to Vilém Flusser's text 'Gesture', translation by Nancy Roth), in which he poses Gesture, as ‘a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation'. Each invited colloquium participant, was given an hour in which to tease out the implications of Flusser's remarks on gesture, in terms of their own creative practice and/or concerns. My own presentation addressed 'The Gesture of Paradox', and included elements of print, dance and voice as ways of exploring difference in language, rather than emphasising language as identity. These observations included engaging with the 'impermissibility' of poetic expression as emblematic of the tension between disciplined and un-disciplined forms of language. By working through these ‘undisciplined’ gestures, in both the written form, and as practice-based work in print/voice/dance, this work engages a larger question in relation to language/gesture, and the human interface which language is. [Un]disciplined gestures point towards an [un]common sense, one which would explode the mythical ‘common’ which orients sense in relation to the same, rather than the different. It would open a space for the truly differing, rather than the different as not-something else, and it would make nonsense an attribute of, rather than a negation of, sense. Paradox would no longer be the insoluble, the unwelcome, the trivialized epiphenomenon, but evidence of true difference at work, and of multiplicity. The gestures/traces of language seen in the sensual surfaces of undifferentiated marks and sounds, would ‘name’ meaning differently. I see this as another way of talking about the ‘human’ in language, and the ways in which language frames our experience and understanding. These questions extend all the way into new technologies of language recognition/Artificial Intelligence.